Ex-FDNY Boss: Queens Judge ‘Wrongly’ Pit FDNY vs. DOT in Bike Lane Ruling

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The former head of the FDNY slammed a Queens judge for pitting the Fire Department against the safe streets movement when she ruled last week that the Department of Transportation must halt a life-saving protected bike lane project in Astoria.

Former Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh called the proposed stretch of 31st Street as “among the most dangerous corridors in Queens” and, as such, “demands immediate change” and not, as Judge Cheree Buggs’s ordered up, just the opposite on the grounds that FDNY raised some concerns about a protected bike lane under elevated train tracks.

“Using FDNY as a procedural obstruction not only misrepresents FDNY’s lifesaving mission, but it wrongly lays the blame for overdue critical safety upgrades at their feet,” Kavanagh said in a statement issued through Transportation Alternatives a half hour before a rally on behalf of the scrubbed bike lane. “New Yorkers demand safe streets and it is clear that DOT and FDNY worked in this case to provide them. I urge the city to appeal this ruling immediately.”

Kavanagh’s comments were read at Tuesday night’s rally to condemn Buggs’s decision last week to remove a bike lane that wasn’t even finished yet. Buggs’s ruling was soundly trashed not just by the former head of the FDNY but by legal experts who said she overreached.

Over the last five years, nearly 200 people have been injured along the corridor, and one has been killed. Without the protected bike lane, FDNY vehicles would have to fight fires across parked cars. But the Fire Department can use the bike lane as an emergency lane, the DOT said.

Kavanagh suggested she was confident that the design had met “a strict standard of emergency access” because DOT and the FDNY consult on street safety matters.

It’s not the first time Kavanagh has championed road safety, even against the mandarins of the hidebound fire world.

This fall at the Vision Zero Cities conference, Kavanagh challenged the $2.6-billion agency to fight for street safety even as it fights fires.

“Eighty-six percent of what FDNY does is medical emergencies, 2 percent is structural fires. But every street based decision is made around the potential of structural fires,” Kavanagh, who served as Mayor Adams’s commissioner between October 2022 and July 2025, said at the time. “That shows how the decisions we have are not set up to prioritize safer streets.”

Her central point was that the Fire Department is just as crucial to the future of Vision Zero as the city Department of Transportation: “The Fire Department needs to be equally responsible as DOT for pedestrian deaths,” she said.