Framing the debate on streets and public safety

A CNU task force initiative confronts fire officials’ aversion to narrow streets. The dilemma is one familiar to most new urbanist designers and developers. Narrow and safe residential streets are an essential part of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, but again and again compromises have to be struck with fire officials who argue that narrow streets impede emergency vehicle access and endanger the public. Members of CNU’s Development and Project Implementation Task Force (a merging of the Development, Implementation, and Inner City Task Forces) are now seeking to reframe the debate by drawing fire chiefs’ attention to the other side of the public safety issue — wide streets encourage speeding and increase the risk of traffic accident injuries and fatalities. “It’s a very technical issue, but it has at the heart of it an emotional basis,” says John Anderson, a planning consultant with Anderson Lamb & Associates in Chico, California, and a leader of the task force initiative. Anderson has worked with fire officials in his own community, who have suggested that they would accept 24-foot streets with parking on both sides if all residences have sprinkler systems installed. Sprinklers are a slippery slope This solution might make sense in an upper market project in a community where residential sprinklers are already common and available for a reasonable price, Anderson says. In a project positioning itself at the lower end of the market, however, sprinkler installation becomes “an additional tariff on something we shouldn’t have to do,” he says. “We should not hold up residential sprinklers as the holy grail, the technical fix that lets us overcome people’s reluctance to have rational streets.” Moreover, installation of sprinklers does not guarantee that fire officials won’t still demand wider streets, Anderson warns. “It’s a slippery slope.” In the coming year, task force members will advance the safe street agenda on fire officials’ home turf — at national and regional conferences of organizations such as the National Fire Protection Association, which writes the fire codes that are enforced by local fire departments. Data on the greater safety of narrow streets may prove persuasive, but most fire departments already deal successfully with narrow streets in pre-World War II neighborhoods, Anderson says. The debate should also be broadened to include the fact that a growing number of wide streets are retrofitted with stop signs and speed bumps in response to residents’ complaints about speeding cars. This in turn degrades the response time for fire trucks and ambulances. “What we need is a network of streets that lets them get to the call as quickly as possible,” Anderson says. “There is a middle ground to be found, and we need to understand the whole system to do that.” Initiative leaders welcome input from new urbanist practitioners on local successes and failures in the fire safety arena. Contact Anderson at (530) 893-8982 or rjohn@andersonlamb.com.