Surely, we can do better.

Why do we design streets almost exclusively for massive vehicles, rather than for vehicles and people to interact safely?

Another question – how long would it take to redesign Charlottesville and Albemarle planning to accommodate more reasonable streetscapes designed for humans first?

Rick Randolph in 2016 told #Albemarle Fire Chief the larger and larger fire engines are the dinosaurs and need to shrink

Rick Randolph tells #Albemarle Fire Chief the larger and larger fire engines are the dinosaurs and need to shrink

— Neil Williamson (@NeilSWilliamson) October 11, 2016

How Fire Chiefs and Traffic Engineers Make Places Less Safe

(make sure to read the whole thing)

Of all the urbanism specialists with tunnel vision, fire chiefs, fire marshals, and traffic engineers are probably the most dangerous. And by “dangerous,” I don’t just mean that they’re a threat to good urbanism; they also get people killed, which is exactly the opposite of what they are commissioned to do. A classic example of their silo thinking is playing out right now in Celebration, Florida, where the proposed measures of eliminating on-street parking spaces and eliminating street trees will almost certainly leave Celebration a less safe place than it is today.

MORE DRIVING = MORE CRASHES AND MORE DEATHS AND INJURIES.

Let’s look at things from both a common-sense perspective and a data-driven perspective. Getting rid of street trees does some really bad things for safety: First, it eliminates the first line of defense for those who are walking or biking on the sidewalk (when the streets are too dangerous for biking). A car crashing into a tree at 35 miles per hour will deploy the airbags, but the driver and passengers will likely walk away with little more than bruises. But a car traveling 35 miles per hour that crashes into someone who is biking or walking will likely kill them. Higher speed = more deaths and injuries.

People adjust their driving according to the conditions around them. On a tree-lined street, people tend to drive slower because they don’t want to hit a tree if they lose control of their car and run off the road. Lower speed = fewer deaths and injuries.

…

On-street parking is equally essential to safety, and for even more reasons. As a matter of fact, on-street parking and street trees top the list of things cities should increase on streets if they’re interested in increasing the safety of their citizens. To be clear, the prime benefit of these two elements is getting people out of their cars because they prefer to walk to their daily needs. The two extremes are places where everyone drives (suburbia) and places where everyone walks (European towns and villages). Where everyone drives, there are huge numbers of deaths per year because of crashes. In most places where everyone walks, nobody has ever died due to running into someone else.

…

Fire deaths per million citizens:

USA: 12.4
France: 9.8
UK: 7.6
Spain: 5.2
Italy: 4.2

So US fire deaths are over 20% higher than the highest of the Western European countries selected and almost triple the deaths in Italy. I wasn’t cherry-picking; I chose the most populous countries in Europe nearest the US. Germany, for example, is substantially lower than Italy.

So the wealthiest country in the sample with the most modern buildings performed worst on fire deaths? Meanwhile, the other countries have buildings hundreds of years older, serviced by cobbled-together electricity and built on streets so narrow that many of them would be considered alleys in the US performed substantially better? How can this be? I’ll post later on the details of fire risk and urban form, but unless the Europeans are fantastically smarter than Americans and have much better reaction time, how else do you explain this huge discrepancy other than as a product of urban form? I suspect the primary cause of this difference that is costing over a thousand American lives per year is the difference in urban form.

Related stories

• San Francisco introduces “Vision Zero” fire trucks
• It’s Time to Redesign the Big Old Red Fire Truck
• The Right Gear for the Job

Fire truck picture thanks to flickr