It’s Time to Redesign the Big Old Red Fire Truck

Anyone who lives in a city has watched large, boxy fire trucks and fire engines—measuring 24-to-50 feet long and seven-to-nine feet wide—struggle to squeeze through traffic. It’s no wonder firefighters in places like San Francisco, where the government has been pushing to improve safety by narrowing streets, call for the wider roads. It’s a safer design, they argue, as slim lanes mean firefighters have to “drive into oncoming traffic” to reach their rescue destination.

But the problem with wider urban streets, as Jeff Speck has argued, is that they encourage faster driving and can lead to deadlier collisions. And science backs up his argument: a 2015 study of intersections in Toronto and Tokyo found that lower crash rates were linked to lanes measuring 10- to 10.5-feet wide rather than to 12-feet-wide lanes. As Scott Wiener, a member of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, wrote in 2014: “[Prioritizing] fire truck access in a way that makes streets less safe for pedestrians and other users—and which undermines neighborhood fabric with high-volume, fast-moving traffic—isn’t the right solution.”