Street traffic forecasters for the Rockland County Planning Department predicted in 1960 that the section of the road between Pearl River and Nanuet would serve 30–40,000 vehicles per day in 1980. Since the road would not be able to sustain that amount, a new bypass between the two locations was opened in the mid-1960s as a realignment of NY 304. The bypass, which extended from Central Avenue in Pearl River to West Nyack Road in Nanuet, handles about 23,000 cars per day as of 2008. The Pearl River–Nanuet bypass was part of a larger plan to build a freeway extending from Pearl River to Haverstraw at Hook Mountain State Park; however, the section of the route north of Nanuet was cancelled as the county's 1980 traffic volume projection for the Nanuet–Haverstraw corridor was not high enough to justify the construction of a new highway.