From where we sit at 153 Main Street in the Village of East Hampton, the editorial desks have a good view of the Buell Lane intersection, which was recently the subject of consideration in Village Hall. The problem is this: When East Hampton is crowded, all manner of motorized foolishness is occasioned there. Vehicles try to make an injudicious left turn from Buell Lane, Main Street drivers try to plow along in whatever direction they are headed, and others, from Dunemere, dart onto James Lane or try to cross the intersection to head west on Main Street. Many is the time we have looked up from our work at the sound of screeching tires and metal crashing into metal.

    A consultant hired by the village looked into the options and came up with three possibilities: traffic lights, a roundabout, or permanently eliminating access from Dunemere Lane. None of these found much favor among the village board’s trustees.

    Speaking wisely, Barbara Borsack, one of them, said she favored a seasonal solution, not something that “we would have to live with for 12 months.” During the busy time of year, the village has put up warning cones to force vehicles from Dunemere Lane north onto Main Street, merging near Pondview Lane, or south onto James Lane. This seemed to work. As we gaze out our windows at the trickle of traffic going past on a sunny fall weekday, this course — of restraint before drastic solutions — seems best.

    At the urging of residents of Soundview Drive and Captain Kidd’s Path in Montauk, the Town of East Hampton has agreed to a Montauk Inlet dredging project that is expected to provide some relief to the chronic erosion there. But in backing the Army Corps of Engineers’ $26 million plan, the town and affected homeowners may, in the long run, be leaving the waterfront neighborhood in harm’s way.

    The Army Corps proposes excavating the inlet to a depth of 17 feet and pumping the dredged sand in front of the properties along Block Island Sound to the west of the inlet. This is the less costly of two options. In a more ambitious proposal, the corps would have installed jetties, or groins, at existing bulkheads in front of the properties at a cost of $41 million. There is virtually no beach in the area, and the catch for homeowners would be that any beach created with taxpayer money must be accessible to the public.

    For the town, opting for an $800,000 share of the modest approach, rather than $1.5 million for the more complicated plan, makes fiscal sense. But it may not prove the best choice for the property owners. With predictions of sea level’s continuing rise, the less expensive plan may not provide the protection they would wish.

   Aside from the Hamptons International Film Festival, which drew crowds to East Hampton Village last weekend, the South Fork has had plenty of other events in the last few weeks — and their popularity is raising questions about official oversight, or really the lack thereof.

    The Montauk Chamber of Commerce also held its fall festival last weekend, and in previous weeks we saw the Hamptons Marathon, a couple of triathlons in Montauk, and Sag Harbor’s HarborFest and outdoor music concerts. Each contributed to a busy-seeming beginning of the season, good for shopkeepers and hotels and inns, but perhaps less so for those inconvenienced by runners and bikers clogging otherwise quiet roads.

    In particular, a marathon and half marathon on Sept. 29, a Saturday, irked some Springs residents. Runners, too, were flabbergasted at having to get around cars and trucks, which were forced to slow to a crawl by the masses of people. Curse words were exchanged in one incident we heard about. The marathon, which collected at least $300,000 in registration fees this year, gives a portion of its yearly profit to charity, notably Project MOST, an after-school program for Springs and East Hampton grade-school students. Surprising perhaps to those who were inconvenienced by the race, the East Hampton Town Board waived all the usual fees it could otherwise have assessed the marathon organizers — including $20,000 in police overtime.

     In Montauk, questions came up at the most recent citizens advisory committee about whether the town was being compensated adequately by the organizers of triathlons, who charge as much as $98 per competitor; 526 were listed as finishing on Sept. 30. Police overtime and other fees associated with this race, however, did not appear to have been waived.

    A suggestion made over a year ago that the Town of East Hampton should do more to scrutinize races and other crowd-inducing events before handing out permits has been ignored. It may be time to reassess the minimal supervision and to consider the views of affected residents before next year’s approvals are granted and more expenses left for taxpayers to cover.

    With the support of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, the Montauk Highway in Wainscott is fast on its way to being further commercialized. Already, this “gateway” to our beautiful town is a visual hodgepodge of ill-thought buildings — and an increasing four-season traffic nightmare.

    In the last year the board approved a major expansion of the use of the former Plitt Ford property, without taking time for a clear-eyed and honest review of its implications. Now, the board is sounding satisfied with the conversion of the onetime Star Room nightclub to a car wash.

    Just ask anyone who has had to contend with the tie-ups — going both east and west — in Wainscott if more commercial development is a good idea. We suspect the number who would say yes would be close to zero. The plan includes adding an exit from the car wash onto East Gate Road, a residential street. By strictly constraining what can happen on the Star Room site, the town could reduce the damage done in its flawed and hasty analysis of the Plitt Ford plan.

    Traffic is one reason why the initial, reflexive support given the preliminary car wash proposal by Diana Weir, the board’s vice chairwoman, is disappointing. At a September planning board meeting, Ms. Weir said the car wash would be a “good use” of the site. Mind you, this was before any study of the proposal or even a formal application had been made. That she would offer so prejudicial an opinion in the absence of any supporting material or opportunity for rebuttal sharply calls into question her fitness for the post.

    Car washes are hardly the kind of economic opportunity East Hampton officials should be backing anyway. The industry depends on unskilled, usually immigrant workers who receive rock-bottom wages and sometimes work in deplorable and unsafe conditions. According to a 2008 investigation done by New York State, underpayment of workers is endemic. An advocacy group trying to help car-wash workers has said that, statewide, at least two-thirds were not paid minimum wage, most never received required overtime pay, and almost none got employer-provided health insurance. Individual carwasheros, as they are sometimes called, have spoken out about the noxious chemicals used and say they are often required to provide their own gloves and other safety gear.

    As to environmental concerns, though in their early pitch, the developers of the car wash said their facility would be built to the most modern standards and would not harm groundwater or the Georgica Pond watershed. That claim, and others painting this plan as completely benign, remain to be evaluated.

    As this review is going on, the East Hampton Town Board should step in and take an in-depth look at the Montauk Highway in Wainscott and ask itself what the future may have in store. A starting point would be the 2005 comprehensive plan, which said new vehicular accesses, commercial sprawl, and development along the highway should be limited. Not much time remains.

    At the doctor’s office the other day filling out a questionnaire, I hesitated when asked anent religious preference if I were an atheist.

    I put a couple of question marks after the word, and was thinking how to elaborate, when Mary scratched out “atheist” and put in “agnostic.”

    Now, today, I find in looking at Newsday that I have some company: “For the first time in its history the United States does not have a Protestant majority. . . . About 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation.”

    Further, “one-third of adults under age 30 have no religious affiliation, compared to 9 percent of people 65 and older.” I suppose that’s because we hear footsteps.

    But to be godless, as it were, is not to say one can’t marvel at the creation, or to say that one can’t be eternally caught up in the wonder of it, or to say, further, that the unaffiliated are somehow unmoored and therefore cannot live ethical lives.

    (Lately, I have found myself unmoored, at sea, but that is because I finally consigned an antique word processor to the trash heap. It’s just me and my laptop now, and I feel so alone in the universe.)

    Back to religion, while the value to society of the high communal purpose that churches provide their communicants is obvious, it is no less obvious that historically religious beliefs have worked, and are working, much mischief and are causing much pain.

    I know too that religion can be consolatory, but that’s not to say we cannot live well and bravely unconsoled. In fact, as Gore Vidal once said, simply knowing that this is it ought to spur us on all the more to make the best of things.

   Pity the poor New York voter confronted with Tuesday’s ballot and a top of the ticket that really was not in play here. New York has been a reliably “blue” state, going for the Democratic presidential candidate most of the time since the Great Depression, and in an unbroken streak since 1988.

    This means that those who voted for the Republican or one of the minor-party presidential choices were to an arguable degree disenfranchised. Doing away with the Electoral College, in which all of a state’s votes are apportioned in a winner-take-all format, could correct this inequality. Consider that only nine so-called swing states actually decided the 2012 presidential election — not one of them our own New York.

    One line of thinking about abolishing the Electoral College goes like this: It would end the potential injustice inherent in a candidate’s winning the popular vote but losing the election. It would give the country’s more populous urban areas more clout and would probably increase voter turnout by energizing voters in the largest states. And it would for the first time embody the democratic ideal of one person, one vote, in the most important single contest in the land.

    For New Yorkers, doing away with the archaic system with its roots in a post-Colonial era in which only landed white men could vote, would be a step forward. It would also give the candidates incentives to do more than swing through seeking donations, as both the Obama and Romney campaigns did this summer, while not bothering to slow down long enough to hear what the people of this great state — particularly those in counties that had gone “red” in recent elections — had to say.

    California’s Legislature has passed a law that would award its Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote — provided enough other states followed suit. New York should throw its muscle — and its 16.7-million residents of voting age — behind this movement.

   For the first time in a long while, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who has been a fixture on the political scene for a generation, has a challenger with a real shot.

    Southampton Councilwoman Bridget Fleming was a government neophyte when she emerged to win a Southampton Town Board seat in 2010. Her background is in law. She was a Manhattan assistant district attorney and has cited her record in prosecuting cases of fraud. As a member of the town board, she has worked on improving financial controls, an interest she said she would bring to Albany. As a resident of Noyac, she is attuned to the South Fork, pushing for more underground utility lines, supporting local agriculture, and aiding water-quality programs, among other efforts. She has a small law office in Sag Harbor, specializing in matrimonial and family matters.

    Like Ms. Fleming, Mr. LaValle is a lawyer, though with 36 years in the $79,000 Senate job, it would be accurate to call him a professional politician. Before he first won election to state office in 1976, he taught high school social studies. His involvement in education did not end when he went to the capital; he has been on the Senate Higher Education Committee for many years and active in efforts to consolidate school districts.

    Listening to Ms. Fleming, we have been struck by a certain uneven quality. On some of the nitty-gritty, she can stumble or say a lot without really saying anything. She is, however, fluent and strong on such issues as wasteful government spending, campaign finance, and Wall Street abuses. She also scores points by taking on the $140,000 Mr. LaValle used of taxpayer money to send out early election-year mailers, as well as the more than $500,000 he spent on his office.

    At this point in his career, Mr. LaValle is more than comfortable in the role, and this shows. His apparent ease can be a negative; one might say he is at best a casual Bonacker, who only shows up in East Hampton when there is a photo-op or when he is seeking re-election. That in and of itself is not a reason to support his opponent. What tips the balance against him is his 2011 vote against New York’s historic same-sex marriage bill and his strong backing by an anti-abortion group. Though his positions on these fundamental issues of human rights may come from deep personal conviction, the times have moved beyond him.

    The First Senatorial District is huge, extending from Brookhaven to Montauk Point and Fisher’s Island. Mr. LaValle’s opponent may not be a perfect candidate, but he is someone whose views are no longer in line with the people he represents. First District voters should thank him for the work he has done on their behalf over the decades, but go with Ms. Fleming, a better choice for these times.

   The contest between Randy Altschuler, a wealthy St. James businessman, and Representative Tim Bishop went from just plain bad in 2010 to downright disgusting this year. From the Democratic side, accusations were made — then and in recent weeks — that Mr. Altschuler’s career as an outsourcing executive was bad for America. The Republicans countered — backed by millions in unregulated super-PAC money — that a routine constituent service effort by Mr. Bishop’s office was an inappropriate quid pro quo.

    Mr. Altschuler kicked in $2 million of his own money in the 2010 campaign; this year he hasn’t had to, thanks to $2.5 million in spending on his behalf by outside groups. One particularly unsettling ad, which was paid for by a group co-founded by Karl Rove, even shows Mr. Bishop in what were unmistakably gun sights. Prohibited by federal law from asking that the ad be pulled, Mr. Altschuler kept silent, but he didn’t take the opportunity to denounce the message either.

    Pretty much everything wrong with unregulated campaign spending can be found in this particular race. We would have preferred Mr. Altschuler, who seems like a nice enough guy, to adopt a better tone. This has not always been the case. For example, he has mischaracterized his opponent’s position on immigration reform and repeated mostly inaccurate statements against the Affordable Care Act.

    There was little to recommend Mr. Altschuler when he ran for the office two years ago. Since that time, he has not done more as a candidate than try to ride the Tea Party wave of anger into office, while moderating some of his more extreme positions.

    Mr. Bishop has been a steady advocate for the district in Washington and a frequent presence on the East End. Among specific efforts, he pushed for dredging Lake Montauk, battled to save jobs at the Plum Island disease laboratory, and tried to keep the 106th Rescue Wing at Gabreski Airport in Westhampton. Mr. Bishop is from here and he cares about what we care about. He should be returned to office.

   What difference a hundred miles makes. Hurricane Sandy made its landfall on the New Jersey shore, wiping away whole beachside communities. Damage was massive in the New York Bight, on Staten Island, in Manhattan, the Rockaways, Long Beach, and Fire Island, lessening to the east and north, farther from the storm’s highest winds.

    Our sympathies first are for those who lost family or friends. Locally, we mourn Edith Wright, a Montauk woman whose body was found at Georgica Beach.

    As bad as the damage was along the East End’s waterfronts, and as difficult the loss of power was for many residents and businesses, it could have been far, far worse had Sandy taken only a slightly more northerly path. Everyone, from homeowners to public officials, must keep this fully in mind.

    There will be a time for rebuilding, reconsidering policy, and evaluating official preparations, but for now, it is all about getting through the next few days, neighbor helping neighbor, and just doing what it takes to get life back to normal.

   Representative Tim Bishop’s victory over Randy Altschuler Tuesday despite the astounding amount of super PAC money — $3.4 million — that fell upon the First Congressional District, gives testimony to the voters’ ability to think for themselves. Everywhere you turned in the last few weeks, you saw or heard the attack ads paid for by a seemingly bottomless pool of dollars — radio, television, the Internet.

    These days, with advertisments able to reach into places where Web visitors live, you were likely to see  false and trumped-up allegations of corruption against Mr. Bishop by the National Republican Congressional Committee. Then other baseless claims would pop up while you were watching a how-to video on YouTube, for example. Mr. Bishop was even targeted by gun-sight imagery. Voters weren’t buying it.

    The millions didn’t suffice to oust Mr. Bishop, but they did demean a race between two viable, if very different, candidates. Mr. Altschuler has impressed us as a nice guy and a political moderate, who may have been, if elected, as hands-on as the effective Mr. Bishop. If given the opportunity, even he might have vetoed the most vicious assaults made on his behalf. In the weird world of unregulated spending, there is only one rule: the candidate has no control.

    Attack ads also debased the contest for the White House. A group supporting the president claimed that Mitt Romney, in effect, was responsible for killing a woman who had cancer because her husband lost his health insurance when Mr. Romney’s investment firm closed the man’s plant. On the other side of the coin, an ad on behalf of Mr. Romney howled that Mr. Obama was a racist, prejudiced against whites.

    It would be nice to read Mr. Bishop’s win as a local rejection of unregulated campaign spending. That, of course, is a difficult call to make. What is certain is that the democratic process would be improved if the influence of money was reduced.

    The line of the night, however, came from Representative Bishop, who, savoring his win, declared, “My opponent had the guys with the biggest checks, but I had the guys with the biggest hearts.”