Staten Island judge strikes down city's Victory Boulevard bus lanes, calling them too narrow to be safe

A Staten Island judge has thrown out the city's plan for new curbside bus lanes on Victory Boulevard, ruling Tuesday that the Department of Transportation squeezed the lanes onto a road too narrow to hold them safely, the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com reported.

Richmond County Supreme Court Justice Orlando Marrazzo Jr. found the DOT's decision "arbitrary and capricious" and an abuse of discretion, according to the Advance. The order immediately bars the agency from continuing, implementing or enforcing the bus-lane plan on that part of Victory Boulevard and annuls the decision that authorized it. In his decision, the judge wrote that the agency had "shoehorned" a bus lane onto the roadway and called it "counterproductively dangerous," the Advance reported.

Why the judge ruled against the lanes

The ruling turned on width. The DOT's Street Design Manual recommends curbside bus lanes at least 11 feet wide and says buses and trucks need lanes 11 to 12 feet wide, but the Victory Boulevard lanes were designed at 10.5 feet, the Advance reported. At an August hearing, the DOT's director of bus priority, Nolan Levenson, acknowledged the lanes fell short of the guideline while calling it guidance rather than a rule, and said contractors had at first painted some sections about 9.5 feet wide before crews repainted them, the Advance reported then.

The case was brought by Victory Boulevard resident Kevin Squires, who argued the plan would eliminate nearly 200 parking spaces. Borough President Vito Fossella, who opposed the project, testified, as did representatives of Notre Dame Academy and Wagner College and the borough's emergency management director.

What the plan was

The DOT and the MTA pitched the project as a way to speed up buses heading to and from the St. George ferry terminal. In a 2025 presentation to Community Board 1, the DOT said Victory Boulevard carries more than 25,000 daily riders on 16 bus routes and saw 619 injuries in five years, including 60 people severely injured, and that bus riders make up 48% of road users north of Jersey Street. The plan called for:

• painting the existing bus lanes between Bay Street and Forest Avenue red and extending their hours to 6 to 9 a.m. toward the ferry and 3 to 7 p.m. away from it;
• new curbside bus lanes, with parking banned during those hours, from Forest Avenue to near Eddy Street in Grymes Hill, alongside Silver Lake Park, and from Seneca Avenue to Little Clove Road by Clove Lakes Park;
• rubber speed bumps at some turns. The DOT's own presentation flagged the stretch between Notre Dame and Eddy Street as too narrow for a bus lane.

The two new curbside segments are the part that drew opposition. The broader corridor project, listed on the city's bus projects page, runs from Bay Street to Wild Avenue in Travis.

A long fight in court

Marrazzo first paused the project in early July. About two weeks later, an appellate court in Brooklyn lifted that order at the city's request, allowing work to start, and the lanes were painted over the summer. Unlike that temporary order, Tuesday's decision annuls the DOT's approval itself. The city can still appeal, as it did successfully in July.