How life-safety and narrow streets go together

In the drama of bike advocacy versus fire safety the Baltimore Fire Department lost and important round when the Baltimore City Council last week repealed a section of the National Fire Code which requires 20' clear street width and which had been used to block various Baltimore City bicycle safety projects.

Baltimore fire companies in action

Should residents begin to worry that bicycle advocates are really getting out of hand? That somehow bicycle safety trumped the safety of the general public which relies on fire trucks and ambulances to come in a pinch to safe lives?

The answer is a clear no. Old school binary thinking which pitches road safety and fire safety against each other is deeply flawed. To really understand the relationship between safe roads and safe homes one has to employ a dynamic view of safety which sees safety as the result of a complex network of conditions and not simply a numerical affair where a certain number of feet of lane width is a goal in itself. The old school approach which goes like "Either you are either for bike safety or you are for fire-safety", must be replaced with a dynamic view which sees the multiple connections between what the fire department does and road design.  In other words, the overall goal of saving lives has a lot to do with road design, but not only in the sense that fire trucks should be able to get to a fire as fast as possible. If road standards that make fire trucks faster in turn become deadly because everyone else goes faster as well. the goal of saving lives has not been met. This becomes even more evident when one considers that fire-fighting entails only about 5% of all emergency calls for fire departments. A much larger percentage deals with the aftermath of road hazards themselves, i.e. traffic crashes and other medical emergencies. The duties of Baltimore's professional firefighters can be seen on the BCFD website:

Maryland Avenue design of protected bike lanes and a single drive lane

We also provide the City of Baltimore with emergency medical services, fire suppression, basic and technical rescue, emergency communications, disaster preparedness planning and response, hazardous materials mitigation, community fire risk reduction, community recruitment, community outreach, public education, and marine fire rescue programs.

The lingo of Engine, Truck, Squad, Rescue, and Fireboat, Airflex and Hazmat companies can be confusing, so can be their dispatch patterns and the multitude of incidents that cause firefighters to rush to a scene. This renders the fixation on large fire fighting apparatus, its ladders and outriggers a bit out of place. But still, why would the fire code ask for 20' wide lanes for fire apparatus, if  this wouldn't be necessary? Can anyone seriously place the needs of bicyclists against the needs of something as elemental as fire-fighting? For a better sense of what the code requires: It asks for two full standard 10' lanes. A firetruck itself is about 9' wide (including mirrors).

The answer to these questions all go back to understanding complexity.  The width requirement of 20' for fire-lanes is anchored in the International Fire Code (IFC), a model code which States or local jurisdictions can adopt or modify. The code also gives the fire officials a right to review street design. As a result, recent Baltimore "complete street" modifications have been hung up for quite some time with no resolution in sight. Fire response times are regulated by the National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA)Section 1710, the "Standard for Organization and Deployment
of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments".

To break the stalemate the Baltimore City Council voted last week to rescind the 20' lane width requirement in the adaptation of the code as it applies to Baltimore City. The fate of the bill now depends on the Mayor.

Large tower truck

The IFC 20' requirement was created not to redesign  cities with narrow streets and alleys but to give guidance for access lanes that were specifically built for fire-fighting apparatus, especially in the rear of larger structures in new developments where there are no alleys or where there is no street grid. Even though the code requirement stems from a suburban setting, the fire department expanded the requirement to all public streets, essentially stating that the roadways for access need to comply with the same rules as the lanes for fire fighting. This is not entirely without logic if one considers any point of a public street a potential operating area in the case of fire.

When confronted with the fact that very narrow roads have been part of the Baltimore fabric for hundreds of years, the fire officials easily concede this, but they don't want to create additional non-compliant conditions. This sounds reasonable enough if one employs the either-or mode of thinking.  It sounds less reasonable if one considers that lots of Baltimore Streets don't comply with the 20' rule, because of parked cars, a condition that could theoretically be changed by prohibiting curbside parking on one or both sides of narrow streets. One also has to consider that fire-fighting has worked in all those non-compliant conditions without anyone ever calling for compliance of the 20' rule or calling the substandard conditions life threatening. Lastly, the insistence on wide unimpeded lanes and wide turning radii has shaped suburbia and road design of almost any subdivision until very recently. Today we know that these suburban streets with their wide lanes and fast speeds are the most dangerous to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Baltimore house fire fought from a cross street

The call for a "road diet"didn't start with the concept of protected bike-lanes. Those battles have been raging for decades in the suburbs between engineers who are used to wide streets, rounded corners at intersections and cul de sacs turn-arounds with radii which allow a truck to turn around without having to back-up, all conditions perfect for fire-truck but bad for safety because they are conducive to speeding for everybody in or on a vehicle.

The insight that smaller streets are actually safer has led to the principles of "New Urbanism" which demand direct, redundant street grids of less width and lower speeds. New urbanist designs are now common practice in new developments all over the country and are what consumers want. In short, fire chiefs have long lost the battles for the biggest trucks and the widest streets even in new subdivisions which are designed from the ground up. There is no need to now revive the abandoned old suburban standards in the cities, of all places. After all, "New Urbanism" used historic cities as its precedent for design.

The issue boiled over in 2014 in San Francisco when the fire chief and a member of the city’s governing body, the board of supervisors, disagreed over optimal street width. The supervisors want narrower streets to slow traffic and decrease crashes; the fire chief wants wider streets to accommodate the department’s fire apparatus. The supervisors suggested the fire department look at smaller rigs. (Efficient Government, 3/16)

Enter NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, an organization founded in 1996 by a former NYC Transportation Commissioner,  ostensibly to tame the influence of car-centric standards as they were promoted for decades by organizations such as AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. It is NACTO which also approached the issue how emergency services can co-exist with and smaller, friendlier and safer streets . One of NACTO's principles is this:

Design for the most vulnerable street user rather than the largest possible vehicle. While designs must account for the challenges that larger vehicles, especially emergency vehicles, may face, these infrequent challenges must not dominate the safety or comfort of a site for the majority of daily users. NACTO

NACTO tries to resolve the inherent conflict by differentiating between a "design vehicle" and a "control vehicle" such a a large transit vehicle or a fire truck, postulating that those less frequent vehicles should be allowed to use adjacent lanes to turn and maneuver, something has long been common practice in tight historic European cities in Italy, Spain or Portugal or the Netherlands.

The design vehicle is a frequent user of a given street and dictates the minimum required turning radius; a control vehicle is an infrequent large user. The design vehicle can turn using one incoming and one receiving lane; the control vehicle can turn using multiple lane spaces.

But those principles don't explain how apparatus would be put into position, how doors can be opened, hoses connected, ladders extended or those "outriggers" be placed that prevent ladder trucks from tipping over when the ladders (or hydraulic towers) are extended. To demonstrate how difficult those operations would be in a street with a protected bike lane, Baltimore fire fighters resorted to placing a big ladder truck on Maryland Avenue and video-tape the entering and exiting of the trucks and placing the stabilizers. The problem was, that the equipment was stationed right in front of Baltimore bike activist Liz Cornish's address which looked like spite to some. The video also didn't convince Council President Jack Young who viewed and it and found that it only showed that the operations were quite possible. Indeed, although Maryland Avenue leaves only a 11' drive lane with cars parked along a dual bike-lane on the left and other cars parked on the right along the curb, the cars don't form a continuous wall. Even if all parking spots are filled, the spaces between cars can be used for stabilizers, for opening cabin doors or for connecting hoses. Parking is already forbidden at fire hydrants, at driveways, at bus stops and near corners, all providing staging opportunities in an emergency.

European fire truck:Faster, nimbler and more agile

Games like the BCFD video charade don't help to address the possible conflict between safe streets (fewer crashes between cars, cars and pedestrians or cars and bikes) and saving lives from fast emergency response times. They can only be resolved with common sense and in recognition that both sides have good arguments and that tipping the one or the other doesn't have always the epceted outcome.

A tight grid of narrow roads can actually beat wide suburban routes if one considers that the windy roads usually mean longer distances to the destination. Suburban streets also have no redundancy, i.e. alternative routes, one blockage (such as a fallen tree) can end a trip of even an emergency responder. In a grid any obstacle can be bypassed on another route.

Solutions recognizing and reflecting these complexities are more difficult and require creativity and thought. It isn't sufficient to simply throw a few numbers around. Streets that protect users, residents and function for a wide range of users and conditions are better characterized by qualitative instead of quantitative statements. Emergency equipment along with cars and trucks have become bigger and bigger, a non sustainable journey. Just as Baltimore City uses extra small trash trucks so they fit into the narrow urban alleys, it is time that BCFD relinquishes the widely held notion that the biggest trucks are also the best trucks.

Baltimore has enough problems to solve. Animosity between fire fighters and street safety advocates should not distract the Mayor and the Council from their major tasks. Eeven though, Baltimore like to think everything is unique here, a dense historic street- grid, protected bikelanes and streets which are considerably narrower than 20' are not limited to the City of Baltimore. Unfortunately, Baltimore's statistics for fires fatalities, medical emergencies and car and pedestrian fatalities aren't very good.  Eliminating the root causes for the emergencies will always a better strategy than just a most efficient response.

If narrow streets are safer, efficient emergency response better adjust to them.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Related article on this blog:
Do protected bike lanes really kill fire access?

On  the topic:
Are American Fire Trucks Too Big?