From charging wealthy drivers hundreds of dollars to cross the Shinnecock Canal to levying hefty taxes on New Yorkers arriving by helicopter, East End residents and their local officials are taking a cue from the city and floating congestion-pricing schemes to convince more New Yorkers to ditch their cars before heading to the beach.

“There’s too many cars on the road, too many people who don’t know how to drive, and the feeling here is, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to keep some of them away?'” the editor of the East Hampton Star, David Rattray, said in an interview yesterday.

Hamptons business owners say the heavy traffic flow is damaging their livelihoods, and weekend beachgoers say they have become more inclined this summer to avoid driving into town to dine out.

“The traffic is beyond disgusting,” the co-owner of Vered Gallery in East Hampton, Janet Lehr, said. “We see our clients from Southampton to Westhampton and Quogue in the winter, but they just don’t come during the summer months, and I don’t blame them.”

Desperate times are forcing some officials to call for desperate measures.

“My suggestion is that we simply figure out a way to extend the island into the Atlantic Ocean,” the village administrator of East Hampton, Larry Cantwell, said. “Then those who really want a rural community could keep moving east.”

In an editorial last week in his paper, Mr. Rattray supported instituting a toll on the Shinnecock Canal and funneling the fees collected into mass transit improvements for the South Fork.

“Here an $8 charge like the one Mayor Bloomberg proposed wouldn’t make a difference because everyone could afford it,” Mr. Rattray said. “You’d have to make the charge similar to the price of a helicopter flight to discourage people from driving,” which could come to about $800 one way. The canal bridge is a chokepoint for traffic entering Southampton from the Sunrise and Montauk Highways. The canal toll would ease traffic in Southampton, but would be less effective in untying traffic snarls on the roads of destinations such as Quogue and Westhampton Beach.

For some elected officials, the annual summer griping over traffic, which becomes a roar as the season kicks into full gear, can sound like a broken record.

“As long as people have been coming to the Hamptons for the summer time, it’s been a love-hate relationship with the second homeowners,” a Republican Assemblyman of Sag Harbor, Fred Thiele, said.

The real solution to the East End’s traffic problems, Mr. Thiele said, would be to transfer the burden of incoming summer weekenders away from the roads and onto the under-utilized Long Island Rail Road tracks, where no more than five trains pass a day.

“If the Long Island Rail Road had any entrepreneurial spirit at all, they would have taken advantage of the underutilized tracks,” Mr. Thiele said. Private sector businesses, such as the Hampton Jitney, have filled a void left by insufficient train service, he said.

Local groups are also lobbying for an independent transportation authority that would serve the East End villages exclusively and run frequent rail shuttle service on the train tracks to Montauk from Quogue.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority could afford to pay for the shuttle, according to a nonprofit group that has been pushing the issue, Five Town Rural Transit.

While frustrated residents talk of congestion pricing and shuttle trains, the only traffic-reducing scheme on the ground is costly, and labor-intensive: In Southampton, police officers set up cones every summer morning at 5 a.m. to mark one westbound traffic lane to run in the eastbound direction of the rush hour flow.

Some skeptics, however, doubt that providing public transportation would be enough to get summer residents to change. “People want their cars is the bottom line,” the executive director of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, Marina Van, said. “We already have buses, but people just don’t want to take them.”