4 ms·
Don't forget about street widths being determined by the ability to turn around fire equipment.
by twiddling 3y ago
Don't forget about street widths being determined by the ability to turn around fire equipment.
- bombcar 3y agoIf it makes you feel any better the oldest streets around here are wider than newer ones, because they had to be able to turn a wagon with a team of horses.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThat sounds like what they did in Salt Lake City.
- trgn 3y agoThis was the seed that destroyed the American city. Roads were humongous 100 years before car was invented. It was fine, a buffer for the smoke and filth of the industrial city, but still multipurpose, accessible. Once cars started driving on these huge expanses, it turned every city street in a highway; dangerous, polluted, noisy, pushing out other uses, ...
- actionfromafar 3y agoHm.. couldn't a fire engine be driven in reverse? It could have an emergency driver's wheel in the back. I have seen crane trucks driven with a joystick from outside the vehicle, so it doesn't seem impossible.
- alistairSH 3y agoOr it could just be smaller like in the rest of the world.
- elliotto 3y agoHaving streets unable to be accessible by fire response vehicles doesn't seem like a good idea. What would be the alternative here? (genuine question, I'm not from the US)
- akavi 3y agoSmaller fire trucks.
- Paul-Craft 3y agoHow do you plan to make the fires smaller as well?
- beejiu 3y agoCopy paste from Europe, where they are about half the size?
- neuronexmachina 3y agoSome possible reasons for why American fire trucks tend to be larger: * more frequently sent to rural homes, where there might not be an available hydrant, so they need to transport all the water they're likely to need * same for wildfires * American homes more likely to be wood+drywall
- sokoloff 3y agoWhy "wood+drywall" rather than just "wood"? Drywall is non-combustible and used as the main component in many fire-rated wall assemblies.
- akavi 3y agoI would simply have small firetrucks in urban areas, and large fire trucks in rural areas.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe more rural you get, the more likely it is that the fire trucks have been purchased secondhand from urban fire departments that can afford to buy new equipment prior to the existing equipment literally falling apart (I've got an extended family member that runs the fire service for an entire county in a western US state, and often see him when he stops at my house while driving new-to-them equipment from the east coast). You've also got a lot of volunteer departments where each firefighter keeps their equipment in their own personal vehicle. Why firetrucks in the US are so large is a good question. In the spirit of Chesterton's Fence, I'd assume that there is a good reason until proven otherwise.
- keenmaster 3y agoWe can make them turn 360 degrees like the electric G-Wagon. If upgrading the fleet of firefighting trucks to do so costs less than the value brought by tighter spacing of homes, it’s worth it.
- eru 3y agoWell, you can learn from other parts of the world, instead of coming up with solutions from scratch. (But yes, if nothing else your solution would probably work.) If you time your upgrade to the fire engines with when you naturally would want to renew them anyway, then it doesn't really cost much extra.
- m463 3y agolooks like building heights haven't been held back...