Excerpt from the Queens Chronicle:

The union that represents New York City’s 8,500 rank-and-file firefighters is expressing serious reservations about plans to run a pair of curbside bike lanes underneath a stretch of elevated subway tracks on 31st Street in Astoria.

Firefighter Michael Schreiber, an active-duty member assigned in Astoria, is the elected health and safety officer for Uniformed Firefighters Association Local 94.

“Guys in my company are telling me, ‘This thing is terrible,’” Schreiber, who is with Ladder Co. 116, told the Chronicle in an interview last week.

He said his concerns stem from the present proposal to push parking spaces out from the curb to accommodate protected bike lanes and move parking spaces farther into the roadway between the massive steel support beams for the tracks that carry the N/W line. He hopes the Bravest won’t also be pushed back.

Schreiber said it is hard enough trying to raise an aerial ladder when elevated tracks are involved.

“If you Google it, you can probably find pictures of how we have to back in or go sideways, to get the aerial into a position to reach high enough to be useful. It you’re pushing an aerial out past a bike lane you’re going to reduce the ability of getting that aerial higher, just because you’re going to be underneath the train.”

Schreiber said he is an avid cyclist.

“I like bike lanes,” he said. But he also said fires can be unforgiving of even small miscalculations, particularly if an aerial can’t get quite close enough to a building, or get out quite far enough from underneath the tracks.

“The angle for a ladder is about 70 degrees optimum,” he said. “Can we get close enough to the building? If not, you’re just not going to able to get elevated or raise it beyond maybe the second floor. Now, we have portable ladders that can reach the third floor, but higher than that ... It’s going to be a rope rescue, which is a highly dangerous, inadvisable last resort.”

Schreiber also acknowledged that driving a rig down a bike lane is an option, but one with a caveat.

“We can go down a bike lane. We can go down the wrong way if we’re given the right of way,” he said. “What does that mean? It means you have the right of way — until you have an accident. Then you don’t have the right of way.”

Schreiber said a better solution wouldn’t force a rig driver, known as the chauffeur in FDNY vernacular, to have to make those decisions.

THE DOT PLAN FOR 31ST STREET WILL:

Create immediate public safety issues by:
Limiting FDNY and first responder access to 31 Street.
Placing bicycle lanes directly in highly active commercial & industrial loading areas.
Not including mandated ADA compliance.
Inviting illegal uses by unregulated mopeds and e-scooters.
 

Create conflicts with seniors, children, and pedestrians by placing active bicycle lanes in the following areas:
Pickup and drop off zones at St. Demetrios School.
Across sidewalks at Broadway and 30th Avenue.
Pickup and drop off zones at the upcoming senior center at 32-11 31 Street.
 

Cause small business losses by:
Restricting access to crucial loading bays for 24+ small businesses.
Removing space for pickup and deliveries of goods to/from 75+ small businesses.
Disrupting day-to-day small business operations along 31st Street.
Restrict loading zones to the space in between elevated train pillars.
(Astoria has lost over 50 small businesses since 2023).
 

Create added traffic congestion by:
Bottle-necking 31st Street to just 11 feet wide in each direction.
Intentionally creating slower traffic patterns.
Placing parking spaces in between elevated N/W train pillars.
Removing at least 85 parking spaces and enforcing a parking ban on most of 31st Street from 7am to 7pm Mo-Sat.

Ignore community concerns by:
Reviving an already canceled plan from 2020.
Disregarding 4,000+ verified community petition signatures in opposition.
Foregoing DOT-identified alternative streets and suggestions from the 31st Street BA.
Dismissing opposition of 50+ small business owners on 31st Street.