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By Root 544 0

fire departments are allowed to usurp the role of town planner, they generally commit two errors. First, they put more weight on fire rescue than on the prevention of injury in general; they try to minimize emergency response time, without considering that the resulting wide streets lead to an increased number of traffic accidents, since people drive faster on them. Fire departments have yet to acknowledge that fire safety is but a small part of a much larger picture that others refer to as life safety. The biggest threat to life safety is not fires but car accidents, by a tremendous margin. Since the vast majority of fire department emergencies involve car accidents, it is surprising that fire chiefs have not begun to reconsider response time in this light; if they did, narrow streets would logically become the norm in residential areas. In the meantime, the wider streets that fire departments require are indeed quite effective at providing them with quick access to the accidents they help cause.

The second mistake fire departments make is purchasing oversized trucks, vehicles that have trouble maneuvering through anything but the widest of streets. Sometimes these trucks are required by outdated union regulations, but more often they are simply the result of a town’s desire to have the most effective machinery it can afford.ak Unfortunately, a part of a truck’s effectiveness is its ability to reach the fire in the first place. Once purchased, the truck turns from servant to master, making all but the most wasteful and unpleasant street spaces impossible. When a giant truck is the design template, there is no choice but to build streets that are too wide to support pedestrian life.

Citizens who find themselves pitted against fire departments in road-width battles should focus their arguments on the issue of fire safety versus life safety and arm themselves with the statistical evidence. A recent study in Longmont, Colorado, compared fire and traffic injuries in residential neighborhoods served by both narrow and wide roads. Over eight years, the study found no increased fire injury risk from narrow streets, primarily because there were no fire injuries. One serious fire and several smaller fires resulted in property damage only. Meanwhile, in the same eight years, there were 227 automotive accidents resulting in injuries, 10 of them fatal. These accidents correlated most closely to street width, with new thirty-six-foot-wide streets being about four times as dangerous as traditional twenty-four-foot-wide streets.al

A city sees the light: Portland, Oregon, promotes its new (old) street standards

One community that has seen beyond the false safety promised by wide streets is Portland, Oregon, whose fire chief helped to initiate a new public program called “Skinny Streets.” This program recommends that new local streets in residential areas, with parking on one side, should be only twenty feet wide. These humane streets have their critics, the usual cabal of fearmongers, who would like to enforce standards ten feet wider. They insist that the numbers don’t add up—how can two cars pass each other and a parked car in a mere twenty feet of pavement? Of course, the founders of the Skinny Streets program have reason for confidence, since they derived their measurements from Portland’s existing streets, which continue to work perfectly well in the city’s most valuable neighborhoods. The Portland firemen have accepted their new standards, admittedly without much enthusiasm.

Narrow streets are necessary but not sufficient to ensure a thriving pedestrian life. Curb radius, the amount a roadway flares at an intersection, has a significant impact as well. The image on the right shows what intersections used to look like: the arc of the curb has a radius of only three or four feet. As a result, this twenty-foot-wide street has a crossing that is also twenty feet wide. The modern standard, however, specifies a curb radius of twenty-five feet or more, which means that the actual crossing distance of a twenty-foot-wide street jumps