Open Streets vs. the Fire Department

The Strong Towns Community is where advocates for all sorts of places go to connect with each other, ask and answer questions, and gain the tools, confidence, and allies needed to make their own places stronger and more resilient. Every once in a while, we like to take a frequently-asked, or particularly important, question posed in the Strong Towns Community forum and answer it for our broader audience.

This week, Strong Towns member Owen writes:

I'm working to help a couple of towns [in my area] set up Open Streets as both a means to help downtown businesses during COVID and also help create more outdoors space for people in these towns in general. We have met a lot of resistance from local fire departments and emergency services who claim Open Streets will create delays in their response times to emergencies. Have tried to argue there are other roads they can use and any delays would be minimal, but they push back saying any delay is unacceptable. The police departments argue the opposite as they would like to barricade roads to prevent someone from driving a car through an Open street with outdoor seating. 

Am looking for any data on this topic or any talking points/examples from other towns to help alleviate their concerns. 

It's no secret by now that fire departments are the bane of the existence of many an advocate for safer, livelier, more humane streets. These public-safety officials usually wield significant moral authority and influence over city planning and street engineering decisions. Unfortunately, they tend to wield that influence not in support of a nuanced, holistic understanding of what promotes public safety, but rather with a single-minded obsession with one metric: emergency vehicle response times. The faster the better.

The claim Owen describes that “any delay is unacceptable” suggests that that is what is happening here: officials who see it as their mandate to solve for one variable and one variable only. Unfortunately, this way of thinking about safety is fatally flawed. And now its single-minded simplicity intersects with the added complexity of trying to accommodate the altered needs the pandemic has created.

It's common for fire chiefs to oppose street closures, narrow streets, traffic calming measures, virtually anything that would make a street safer for people outside of a motor vehicle, for one reason: the same measures that slow down cars can also slow down fire trucks—especially enormous ones that are difficult to maneuver through tight spaces and turns.

Unfortunately, the wide streets, generous turning radii, and lack of visual obstructions preferred by single-minded fire departments may improve response times, but they make the streets themselves far less safe, leading to a higher rate of crash injuries and deaths... and also scaring away pedestrian activity, which has its own health and economic consequences.

A guide to designing for emergency response on healthy streets published by NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, in 2013 observes that “There are five traffic fatalities for every one fire-related fatality. There are 167 traffic injuries for every fire-related injury.” Clearly some re-alignment of priorities was already in order for those obsessed with shaving seconds off of response times.

And during the coronavirus pandemic, the public health consequences of not providing adequate space for people to move around safely outdoors are only magnified.

Want to push back against these misguided arguments? Here are some resources to help:

• How Fire Chiefs and Traffic Engineers Make Places Less Safe by Steve Mouzon. This is the definitive article on the subject of fire department preferences clashing with sound, humane urban design principles. It contains a lot of detailed arguments, centered on the example of Celebration, Florida. And it has the statistics you were looking for, lest someone try to tell you that European cities with their narrow, old streets and small fire trucks suffer more fire deaths and injuries than we do. (Hint: they don’t!)

• The Right Gear for the Job by Charles Marohn: American cities have a peculiar habit of relying on far larger fire trucks than we need, as well as sending fire trucks for EMT calls where an ambulance would have been more appropriate. This article debunks the notion that this oversized equipment—and streets kept wide and clear to accommodate it—is actually needed, and links to a detailed piece by Lloyd Alter that cites Beaufort, South Carolina as an example of a city that bucked the trend and actually bought smaller, right-sized vehicles.

• Why Are Fire Officials Hung Up On Street Widths from CNU Public Square discusses a study in Longmont, Colorado that “looked at both fire and automobile injury accidents over an eight-year period. The narrower the street, the safest it proved to be overall. It turns out that the narrow streets, which don't meet 20-foot-clear requirements, have few injury accidents—regardless of all other conditions on the street, including volume of traffic.”

  Substitute “narrow” for “open” here in your mind, as the effect is the same: limiting the speed at which vehicles may pass. (Keep in mind that an open street can—and probably should—allow emergency vehicles by leaving just enough room and using removable bollards to keep ordinary traffic out.)

• Many cities have implemented Open Streets or Slow Streets programs since the pandemic began; it may be worth finding a particular program you admire and learning more about how they addressed this issue. Smart Growth America has a good list of resources that can be a starting point.

• Finally, for fun and for a refreshing reminder of winter in July, check out "Snow plows come in only one size: ginormous." Or do they? by Charles Marohn. Salt Lake City is an example of a place that right-sized its snowplow fleet to better meet its needs. If they can do it with snowplows, your town can do it with fire trucks.

Cover image by Cristian Ceoroiu on Unsplash

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