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Somewhat related, Not Just Bikes / Jason Slaughter talked about how large fire trucks create the need for wide roads, which enables normal car drivers to go at

by nayuki 2y ago

Somewhat related, Not Just Bikes / Jason Slaughter talked about how large fire trucks create the need for wide roads, which enables normal car drivers to go at dangerously high speeds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ (27m24s) [2024-08-11]

jonpurdy 2y ago
It's absolutely nuts to me that US cities (like in Sunset in SF with 50 foot wide roads) accommodate giant fire trucks in addition to both sides having street parking (and driveways and garages!) instead of having narrower roads with smaller trucks (like in Netherlands and Japan, which were discussed in that video). NJB also has a video※ about Japan's tiny streets (relative to USA) that elaborates on how a single factory (street width) can improve so much about a place. ※ - https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U
- Spooky23 2y ago
  That’s mostly myth. San Francisco’s plan was built wide to accommodate streetcars and to reduce the spread of fire. The city was razed by fire after the 1906 earthquake, with several reasons (including a lunatic army contingent that built “firebreaks” by blowing up buildings and the fire chief getting killed in a freak accident early on) contributing. There’s a great book called “San Francisco is burning” worth reading. My dad was a fire chief for decades in a city department. They only cared about street width in central business districts or other areas where certain types of aerial ladders were required for rescue companies. If they can’t get a ladder up, they need more firemen to respond to certain calls. Cities are insured and firemen DNGAF if they smash up cars on narrow streets, I suspect they find it fun.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    On the other hand San Francisco has these giant articulated aerial ladder trucks. European trucks reach the same ladder heights on much smaller trucks by having more telescoping segments on the ladder. I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of it is a feedback loop: wide streets mean fire trucks can be big, big fire trucks mean streets have to be big (even if only the streets the fire department cares about)
  - dboreham 2y ago
    Edinburgh's new town (designed 1776) has some very wide streets. When cars were invented they became handy because two cars could be parked nose to nose across the middle of the street plus the usual curb parking on both sides, still leaving room for four lanes of traffic. Traffic calming and pavement|sidewalk widening measures in recent years have reduced this to one vehicle across the middle, curb parking and one lane each way.
- reneherse 2y ago
  Check out the Village Homes subdivision in Davis, CA. It was designed with narrow streets and off street parking so that trees could more effectively shade the pavement. Also, the paved streets alternate with bike and walking paths between rows of houses. One result of the shaded streets and increased greenery is ambient summer temperature that is noticably cooler compared to other nearby neighborhoods. The original planners worked with the local FD to make sure their trucks could turn around in the cul de sacs. https://maps.apple.com/?address=Village%20Homes,%20Davis,%20CA,%20United%20States&auid=10746652270401562085&ll=38.550601,-121.780216&lsp=7618&q=Village%20Homes&t=h https://maps.apple.com/?address=Village%20Homes,%20Davis,%20...
marcosdumay 2y ago
Just to point, and as the video say, it's not the trucks that create the need. Just because your city have some large trucks to send where hydrants are rare, it doesn't mean you need to design the entire city so they can fit.
Spooky23 2y ago
They open with the sharp increase in pedestrian deaths and zero in on fire trucks. Weird. Firetrucks haven’t changed since 2010. Pickup truck expansion, embracing poor driver controls and visibility, and the abandonment of traffic enforcement has. I think a shuffle of fire department equipment may be warranted as EMS has overtaken fire calls, but accommodation of these things is one of a list of many factors.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  The percentage of the population smoking weed has also roughly doubled in that time, as another likely contributing factor
  - fc417fc802 2y ago
    Have you ever actually ridden with someone under the influence? In contrast to alcohol (or caffeine, among other things) they're generally much less prone to road rage, much less prone to hurried or reckless behavior, and often somewhat paranoid. At least in my personal experience they're more likely to drive under the speed limit than over it. I strongly suspect that it increases road safety on the whole.
    - HideousKojima 2y ago
      It appears to be less dangerous than driving drunk, but still quite a bit worse than driving sober: https://instituteofliving.org/health-wellness/news/newsroom-detail?articleId=38108&publicid=472 https://instituteofliving.org/health-wellness/news/newsroom-...
      - fc417fc802 2y ago
        I would accuse that article of serious problems due to potentially very misleading statistics. The entire claim comes down to a single unsubstantiated quote. > The odds of being involved in a motor vehicle crash when driving ‘stoned’ are approximately double those of sober driving, but significantly less than the 10 to 15 times increase when driving with a blood alcohol concentration of approximately 0.1, That statistic doesn't account for conditional probability. At any given time of day, the set of people consuming recreational drugs have a significantly different distribution of group membership than the inverse of that set. I am reasonably confident that it constitutes a fatal flaw in this case. > during the pandemic, fatally injured and non-fatally injured drivers “have demonstrated significantly higher overall drug prevalence.” That doesn't tell us anything since what we would need is the numbers relative to trips without incident normalized for historical driving behavior of the individuals queried. (I realize that would be a nearly impossible dataset to obtain. That doesn't make the presented statement correct though.)
os2warpman 2y ago
Not Just Bikes is wrong about several things: The video states at 1:37: "Baltimore was supposed to install 10 miles of new bike lanes downtown, but the fire department said that would make the streets too small for its trucks and aggressively fought against the plan." This is false. The residents of Potomac Street (the visual example given in the video) aggressively lobbied against the bike lanes because they would take away parking spots. The residents involved the Fire Marshalls. The Fire Marshalls noted that the street would be 19 feet wide and the fire code called for 20 foot streets and, enforcing the law, they said the project needed to be paused until an exemption was granted. Then the exemption was granted. Then the bike lanes got built. Here they are, right here, clear as day: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hKNb82Ef6sWL4uUw5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hKNb82Ef6sWL4uUw5 I even aligned the streeview image to extremely close to the exact position the video showed at the timestamp where the narrator said "was supposed to install". I knew they were wrong about Baltimore because while I am not a BFD employee I am a both a volunteer firefighter in an exurb of Baltimore and a cyclist, so I followed the development of bike lanes in the area very closely. I figured that if the video was wrong about Baltimore, they probably just googled "fire department oppose bike paths" and used the article titles as references so I looked up the Peekskill story. The narrator states at 2:12, explicitly including the Peekskill Esther Place pedestrian mall, "all of this potential progress WAS LOST". "Was lost" implying it is gone. Kaput. Erased. Esther Place still exists. Here is a city council meeting bill from two months ago explicitly extending the road closure: https://www.cityofpeekskillny.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/1392?fileID=9066 https://www.cityofpeekskillny.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item... Also, there is no evidence of the fire department raising any objections to it except for a strongtowns.org blog post, and the youtube channel and the website appear to be the same entity. So now I'm like "is the entire video bullshit"? edit: I must be trippin because I know that European cities with narrow medieval streets have smaller fire trucks, but the dimensions for the Scania P460, a common euro-spec fire truck and MAN TGM (a fire truck used by a Dutch volunteer fire company youtube channel I follow) and a Pierce Saber (a normal, typical US-spec fire truck) are damn near identical except for a custom variation in length with US trucks being about 5 feet longer-- hardly a radical difference. Consider at front and rear axle loads, not how your eyes perceive their sizes.
- artimaeis 2y ago
ungreased0675 2y ago
I’m American, but currently in one of those European places with delightfully narrow roads. In my opinion, it’s more dangerous because people drive just as fast, with less margin for error. Having experienced both, I think “narrow roads are safer” is an anti-car meme from people who wouldn’t mind if driving was as miserable as possible.
- wahern 2y ago
  It feels more dangerous, but that sense of danger is what improves safety. It's when people, especially drivers, feel comfortable that accidents increase; they let their guard down. The US has dramatically higher rates of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities and injuries than Western European countries, both per capita and per kilometers walked and cycled, and that's presumably with those countries having more narrow roads.[1] See, e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227927/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227927/ Japan falls somewhere between the US and EU. But since the elderly are at far higher risk of both injury and especially fatalities, the larger elderly demographic might have something to do with it. That sense of danger is it's own legitimate issue, though, and as someone with two small kids I'm definitely a proponent of separating pedestrian and cyclist traffic from cars, and even cyclists from pedestrians.[2] [1] The lived density in the US isn't that different from Europe. There's plenty of analysis showing that. But I haven't seen rigorous data and analysis comparing road layouts, traffic patterns, and their association with pedestrian and cyclist accidents rates writ large (as opposed to local studies), thus the conjecture. [2] Cyclists in the US are incredibly aggressive. I've never been hit by a car, but I've been hit twice by cyclists while crossing the street, and nearly a third by one going so fast I definitely could have been killed. (It does happen--cyclists killing pedestrians, albeit usually the elderly.) Two of those three incidents the cyclist was going the wrong way down a one-way, and while ever since the first crash I habitually look both ways crossing a one-way, the third incident happened just as I was turning my head to look in the reverse direction while stepping off the curb--they were flying down the (flat) road the wrong way while also hugging the curb. (FWIW, I was crossing at a busy crosswalk downtown, not jaywalking.) While drivers are liable to be negligent, cyclists of all ages seem much more often to be wantonly reckless.
  - 2y ago

by nayuki 2y ago

jonpurdy 2y ago

It's absolutely nuts to me that US cities (like in Sunset in SF with 50 foot wide roads) accommodate giant fire trucks in addition to both sides having street parking (and driveways and garages!) instead of having narrower roads with smaller trucks (like in Netherlands and Japan, which were discussed in that video). NJB also has a video※ about Japan's tiny streets (relative to USA) that elaborates on how a single factory (street width) can improve so much about a place. ※ - https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U

Spooky23 2y ago
That’s mostly myth. San Francisco’s plan was built wide to accommodate streetcars and to reduce the spread of fire. The city was razed by fire after the 1906 earthquake, with several reasons (including a lunatic army contingent that built “firebreaks” by blowing up buildings and the fire chief getting killed in a freak accident early on) contributing. There’s a great book called “San Francisco is burning” worth reading. My dad was a fire chief for decades in a city department. They only cared about street width in central business districts or other areas where certain types of aerial ladders were required for rescue companies. If they can’t get a ladder up, they need more firemen to respond to certain calls. Cities are insured and firemen DNGAF if they smash up cars on narrow streets, I suspect they find it fun.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  On the other hand San Francisco has these giant articulated aerial ladder trucks. European trucks reach the same ladder heights on much smaller trucks by having more telescoping segments on the ladder. I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of it is a feedback loop: wide streets mean fire trucks can be big, big fire trucks mean streets have to be big (even if only the streets the fire department cares about)
- dboreham 2y ago
  Edinburgh's new town (designed 1776) has some very wide streets. When cars were invented they became handy because two cars could be parked nose to nose across the middle of the street plus the usual curb parking on both sides, still leaving room for four lanes of traffic. Traffic calming and pavement|sidewalk widening measures in recent years have reduced this to one vehicle across the middle, curb parking and one lane each way.
reneherse 2y ago
Check out the Village Homes subdivision in Davis, CA. It was designed with narrow streets and off street parking so that trees could more effectively shade the pavement. Also, the paved streets alternate with bike and walking paths between rows of houses. One result of the shaded streets and increased greenery is ambient summer temperature that is noticably cooler compared to other nearby neighborhoods. The original planners worked with the local FD to make sure their trucks could turn around in the cul de sacs. https://maps.apple.com/?address=Village%20Homes,%20Davis,%20CA,%20United%20States&auid=10746652270401562085&ll=38.550601,-121.780216&lsp=7618&q=Village%20Homes&t=h https://maps.apple.com/?address=Village%20Homes,%20Davis,%20...

marcosdumay 2y ago

Just to point, and as the video say, it's not the trucks that create the need. Just because your city have some large trucks to send where hydrants are rare, it doesn't mean you need to design the entire city so they can fit.

Spooky23 2y ago

They open with the sharp increase in pedestrian deaths and zero in on fire trucks. Weird. Firetrucks haven’t changed since 2010. Pickup truck expansion, embracing poor driver controls and visibility, and the abandonment of traffic enforcement has. I think a shuffle of fire department equipment may be warranted as EMS has overtaken fire calls, but accommodation of these things is one of a list of many factors.

HideousKojima 2y ago
The percentage of the population smoking weed has also roughly doubled in that time, as another likely contributing factor
- fc417fc802 2y ago
  Have you ever actually ridden with someone under the influence? In contrast to alcohol (or caffeine, among other things) they're generally much less prone to road rage, much less prone to hurried or reckless behavior, and often somewhat paranoid. At least in my personal experience they're more likely to drive under the speed limit than over it. I strongly suspect that it increases road safety on the whole.
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    It appears to be less dangerous than driving drunk, but still quite a bit worse than driving sober: https://instituteofliving.org/health-wellness/news/newsroom-detail?articleId=38108&publicid=472 https://instituteofliving.org/health-wellness/news/newsroom-...
    - fc417fc802 2y ago
      I would accuse that article of serious problems due to potentially very misleading statistics. The entire claim comes down to a single unsubstantiated quote. > The odds of being involved in a motor vehicle crash when driving ‘stoned’ are approximately double those of sober driving, but significantly less than the 10 to 15 times increase when driving with a blood alcohol concentration of approximately 0.1, That statistic doesn't account for conditional probability. At any given time of day, the set of people consuming recreational drugs have a significantly different distribution of group membership than the inverse of that set. I am reasonably confident that it constitutes a fatal flaw in this case. > during the pandemic, fatally injured and non-fatally injured drivers “have demonstrated significantly higher overall drug prevalence.” That doesn't tell us anything since what we would need is the numbers relative to trips without incident normalized for historical driving behavior of the individuals queried. (I realize that would be a nearly impossible dataset to obtain. That doesn't make the presented statement correct though.)

os2warpman 2y ago

Not Just Bikes is wrong about several things: The video states at 1:37: "Baltimore was supposed to install 10 miles of new bike lanes downtown, but the fire department said that would make the streets too small for its trucks and aggressively fought against the plan." This is false. The residents of Potomac Street (the visual example given in the video) aggressively lobbied against the bike lanes because they would take away parking spots. The residents involved the Fire Marshalls. The Fire Marshalls noted that the street would be 19 feet wide and the fire code called for 20 foot streets and, enforcing the law, they said the project needed to be paused until an exemption was granted. Then the exemption was granted. Then the bike lanes got built. Here they are, right here, clear as day: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hKNb82Ef6sWL4uUw5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/hKNb82Ef6sWL4uUw5 I even aligned the streeview image to extremely close to the exact position the video showed at the timestamp where the narrator said "was supposed to install". I knew they were wrong about Baltimore because while I am not a BFD employee I am a both a volunteer firefighter in an exurb of Baltimore and a cyclist, so I followed the development of bike lanes in the area very closely. I figured that if the video was wrong about Baltimore, they probably just googled "fire department oppose bike paths" and used the article titles as references so I looked up the Peekskill story. The narrator states at 2:12, explicitly including the Peekskill Esther Place pedestrian mall, "all of this potential progress WAS LOST". "Was lost" implying it is gone. Kaput. Erased. Esther Place still exists. Here is a city council meeting bill from two months ago explicitly extending the road closure: https://www.cityofpeekskillny.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/1392?fileID=9066 https://www.cityofpeekskillny.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item... Also, there is no evidence of the fire department raising any objections to it except for a strongtowns.org blog post, and the youtube channel and the website appear to be the same entity. So now I'm like "is the entire video bullshit"? edit: I must be trippin because I know that European cities with narrow medieval streets have smaller fire trucks, but the dimensions for the Scania P460, a common euro-spec fire truck and MAN TGM (a fire truck used by a Dutch volunteer fire company youtube channel I follow) and a Pierce Saber (a normal, typical US-spec fire truck) are damn near identical except for a custom variation in length with US trucks being about 5 feet longer-- hardly a radical difference. Consider at front and rear axle loads, not how your eyes perceive their sizes.

artimaeis 2y ago

ungreased0675 2y ago

I’m American, but currently in one of those European places with delightfully narrow roads. In my opinion, it’s more dangerous because people drive just as fast, with less margin for error. Having experienced both, I think “narrow roads are safer” is an anti-car meme from people who wouldn’t mind if driving was as miserable as possible.

wahern 2y ago
It feels more dangerous, but that sense of danger is what improves safety. It's when people, especially drivers, feel comfortable that accidents increase; they let their guard down. The US has dramatically higher rates of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities and injuries than Western European countries, both per capita and per kilometers walked and cycled, and that's presumably with those countries having more narrow roads.[1] See, e.g., https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227927/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227927/ Japan falls somewhere between the US and EU. But since the elderly are at far higher risk of both injury and especially fatalities, the larger elderly demographic might have something to do with it. That sense of danger is it's own legitimate issue, though, and as someone with two small kids I'm definitely a proponent of separating pedestrian and cyclist traffic from cars, and even cyclists from pedestrians.[2] [1] The lived density in the US isn't that different from Europe. There's plenty of analysis showing that. But I haven't seen rigorous data and analysis comparing road layouts, traffic patterns, and their association with pedestrian and cyclist accidents rates writ large (as opposed to local studies), thus the conjecture. [2] Cyclists in the US are incredibly aggressive. I've never been hit by a car, but I've been hit twice by cyclists while crossing the street, and nearly a third by one going so fast I definitely could have been killed. (It does happen--cyclists killing pedestrians, albeit usually the elderly.) Two of those three incidents the cyclist was going the wrong way down a one-way, and while ever since the first crash I habitually look both ways crossing a one-way, the third incident happened just as I was turning my head to look in the reverse direction while stepping off the curb--they were flying down the (flat) road the wrong way while also hugging the curb. (FWIW, I was crossing at a busy crosswalk downtown, not jaywalking.) While drivers are liable to be negligent, cyclists of all ages seem much more often to be wantonly reckless.
- 2y ago