Northern State Parkway

The Northern State Parkway (also known as The Northern State) is a 28.88-mile (46.48 km) long limited-access state parkway on Long Island in the U.S. state of New York. The western terminus is at the Queens–Nassau County line, where the parkway continues westward into New York City as the Grand Central Parkway. The eastern terminus is at New York State Route 347 (NY 347) and NY 454 in Hauppauge. The parkway is designated New York State Route 908G, an unsigned reference route. As its name implies, the parkway services communities along the northern half of the island.

In western Nassau County the parkway sports six lanes, three eastbound and three westbound, narrowing to four lanes total in central Nassau at the Wantagh Parkway (exit 33) and through its twelve miles (19 km) or so in western Suffolk County, where it ends. It was constructed in stages throughout the 1930s and again post-World War II in the late 1940s/early 1950s until it reached its current terminus in Hauppauge in 1965. The Northern State Parkway is an eastern extension of the Grand Central Parkway. It was part of master planner Robert Moses' extensive road-building campaign and was built as a sister road to the Southern State Parkway. In recent years its design has quickly become dated due to an increase in commuter traffic using the roadway, and numerous improvements have been made (including the widening from four to six lanes in Central Nassau west to the Nassau-Queens line where it becomes the Grand Central) or are still on paper.

Like its siblings in the State Parkway system on Long Island, the Hudson Valley, and in New York City, commercial truck traffic is banned from the parkway due to low overpasses. The Long Island Expressway (designated Interstate 495, abbreviated LIE) was built later on by Moses to handle truck traffic traveling between New York City and Long Island's famed East End. The LIE runs directly alongside the Northern State in some parts of Nassau County.