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Comment by istinetz | Hacker News Reader

Everyone in the comments is raising the (valid) fire safety argument; however, I'd like to point out that this is a non-obvious trade-off.

How many house fires are there? How many of them are in tall buildings? How many of them would block just one stair, and not two?

Yes, there is a probability that an extra stair will save your life; however, this is a very tiny probability, against a certainty of extra living space, for everyone, every day.

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The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that

I hate the space argument because its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue - make the building 1 floor taller, or don't cram your residents just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.

Given the popularity of wood construction (5-1s are most of what gets build afaict), I think the main limiter is how big you're allowed to build wood buildings.

> The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that

Why wouldn't you be able to compare statistics from the US to any other country that doesn't have that rule?

There are alot of factors: building codes, materials, age, likely ignition sources . Probably not impossible, but difficult to find a meaningful way to compare.

I'm also guessing that fire reporting doesn't include the level of detail you would need. For example, a fire in which firefighters were able to tackle from two sides would be quickly extinguished, where as the same fire with 1-sided access might have become a disaster. But thats a what-if, only learned the hard way.

Because countries that don't have that rule also don't have a bunch of other important fire safety rules.

Citation needed? What other important fire safety rules are "missing" in e.g. (from TFA) South Korea, China, Sweden, Italy, or Germany?

We can compare fatality rates from fires between countries with dual exits and those without:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_building_or_structure_...

We can also see if mass casualty fires in buildings stopped happening after the regulation change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Theatre_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

https://www.nytimes.com/1860/02/03/archives/calamitous-fire-...

My counter argument would be regulations for new buildings take a long time to be widely applied, I think you would need to judge every single fire on a case by case basis, not region or by period.

And there are a ton of other variables. Construction materials, fire response, suppression and alarm systems, the purpose of the building, etc.

> just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.

You realize that this would mean the three residents would have to pay more for their unit, right? It isn’t just developers “milking” condo buyers or tenants. It has to do with efficiency.

People pay more for units all the time for various reasons - location, orientation, superstition, etc. I’m sure they’ll add “not suffocating to death during a fire” to the list.

I wouldn’t want to pay 33% more for that extra increment of safety. I drive a car, after all.

The premium that you pay extra for the safety equipment in your car is likely more than 33%.

We would have many new cars for 4-digit prices if not for the large number of safety systems required on cars.

Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you, though, and carry along a vast amount of stored energy. Buildings are designed to stand still and generally not be flammable. The expected value calculations are seemingly quite a bit different.

> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you

And buildings in North America are often framed out of the same material that they burn in their fireplaces.

Both present inherent dangers. Both have widespread safety regulations for this reason.

Vehicle accidents are the 2nd leading cause of accidental death in the US and fires are 6th. And this is the result of many decades of both being highly regulated.

And I still find it surreal that people in world's richest country live in wooden houses.

People still die in scary numbers there no matter the regulations.

Cars can't be made safer anymore. 60Mphs frontal collisions have single digit percentage survivability chance because physics.

Homes can be made much safer by building them differently.

Wood tends to get a lot of criticism on the internet as a building material, but it has advantages as well.

Cars can absolutely be made safer. They certainly haven’t stopped getting safer yet.

No amount of safety system will save you in a 60mph crash.

1. People survive crashes at highway speeds in the US literally every day, at 60mph and above.

2. 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle. The way with which a vehicle’s momentum at 60mph is dissipated makes a critical difference to the crash energy imparted on the occupants. Road design has greatly improved this in recent decades.

3. Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes.

> Active crash prevention/mitigation systems can prevent 60mph accidents from happening or improve their outcomes.

Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash

> 60mph is a speed not a force imparted on a vehicle.

The force imparted on you in a 60mph crash by the seatbelt will be lethal no matter how much deceleration space you have. You got at 27 meters per second, and you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.

> Yes, but that doesn't count as surviving the crash

It counts as making cars safer which was the above claim I am supporting.

> you only have at a maximum 1 meter to decelerate. And if you crash into a heavier, faster vehicle, it's even worse.

Most vehicle crashes are not head-on incidents.

Improvements in road design have affected the proportion of crashes that are head-on. Recent improvements in active safety features may decrease this further: eg. lane departure mitigation.

In many real-world accidents, vehicles have dozens or hundreds of meters to decelerate.

> And I still find it surreal that people in world's richest country live in wooden houses.

A lot of those people live in seismically active areas. While modern masonry construction is certainly safer than traditional masonry, in general wood is far less dangerous than stone or brick in an earthquake.

And steel, or reinforced concrete are safer than both.

Where in the world are single-family homes typically made of steel or reinforced concrete?

Note: not apartments. Houses.

Quite a lot in Russia, China, and Middle East from my personal experience.

Those aren't exactly the locations that come to mind when you think of "luxury housing". I mean, I don't think people are living in those houses by choice, do you?

Steel and concrete are ugly and cold. Wood is warm. Even brick and stone are more humane.

Wood is one of the better materials if there is a fire. While it burns (a negative), it burns slow and gives plenty of warning before it fails. Most other building materials fail suddenly in a fire. Engineered wood has the same issues)

> Cars are designed to intentionally accelerate you to speeds that easily kill you

It's not the speed that kills you, it's the impact. Multifloor buildings are designed to help you live and work at a height that can kill you, and to prevent air entering and escaping which can kill you.

If you can assume that the risk of fire or collapse isn't worth mitigating against, why not assume that a car will never hit anything?

The risk of fire and collapse is mitigated to a large degree already. People are arguing about the relative utility of further mitigations. At least in the US, folk mostly build interior walls with sheetrock and their exterior walls with cement based composites. Bedrooms are legally required to have smoke detectors. Electrical and gas runs are supposed to be installed "to code". Tall buildings require engineering to make appropriately strong structures. Buildings don't completely burn down or collapse very often, especially compared to the frequency of serious car crashes.

He could pay a bit extra to reduce his commute from 30 minutes to 29 minutes. That would already be a reduction of death risk higher than the second staircase in the building.

It does not guarantee that you won't encounter a deadly fire. It just adds one extra escape route for this extremely rare event. You could also add an escape slide for each apartment.

Pay more related to the average cost. The point is to lower the average cost by providing more units.

Obviously thats the outcome, but thats not anyone's problem except the developer, and buyers know the price going into their purchase.

For example, if I can cram 14 windowless apartments into the same floor, is it really unfair that that 4 tenants would have to pay more than the 14?

The amount of available space isn't the only benefit of using only one staircase. It also means the units can face outward in multiple directions and there's a more central common area.

A lot of regulations are designed to make new construction as expensive as possible and limit usable floor space as much as possible.

No one should be surprised that fire safety laws are going to the extreme for safety at a large cost to floor space.

Citation needed.

Government agencies dont allow authoritative sources to remark on their incompetence. See the last 2 years as a citation of that.

You were allowed to remark on it here, you just didn't.

Municipalities in USA are adopting code for residential new construction to require sprinklers. Big cost that most people won't do anything to stop it because it is only for really big houses (for now). In fifteen years people will wonder why new housing is so expensive and every size house has sprinklers which the homeowner must hire someone to maintain. And pay for sprinkler inspection report prior to resale.

On a totally different note, I can't find any cheap or affordable new cars. Am looking for basic wheels without finicky gadgets like backup cameras and tire pressure monitors and lane departure warnings. Something simple and without high insurance costs to cover all those gadgets I don't need.

I wonder why things (house, car) seem unaffordable and contain gadgets which are difficult to fix and which increase insurance costs. What happened America?

Well for one, they have been required equipment for years - tire pressure sensors and backup cameras in general. So you’d need to go quite far back.

And the still working quite far back vehicles are pretty valuable because they have stood the test of time and don’t have all the buzzword crap, so folks don’t want to part with them.

The old cheap ones also got fed into a grinder (essentially) for cash for clunkers.

I would install fire sprinklers in my house, but there isn't a simple form based code. When I install outlets there are a few rules (were to install them, how many on a circuit, and many other details easy to look up in a wiring for dummies book), plumbing has similar rules. For fire sprinklers I need to go back go engineering and calculate all the details, not only is that a lot of work, I'm not certified to do them so the inspector won't pass my work unless I hire one of the few (and thus expensive ) engineers who are qualified.

If fire advocates really cared they would figure out the rules to follow and that would make it much cheaper for everyone.

For what it’s worth, I used to think the same as you regarding cars, but since many of those features are required now you can’t find a new car without them. So I had to get them, and turns out, they’re pretty useful.

My house had sprinklers and it was not a big deal. There was one special valve they said you should change every five years. But that’s the only maintenance anyone ever told me. No one had to check them before the sale.

It's not the two egress per se, it's about not having cul-de-sac that fire could isolate from the exits.

A circular shape with one exit it's much harder to be stuck into by a single ignition point.

That's still a cul-de-sac, just one with a loop.

Money is just a resource and allocating this resource toward staircases may save fewer lives than allocating it in some other way.

"its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue"

You need to go back and read the article more closely. It's a HUGE quality of life issue; mainly US building codes restrict apartments to one side of the building which has all kinds of implications - cross airflow, alignment of rooms with the sun - and the ability to have more variety of sizes of units to better meet needs that currently go unmet, especially with families.

I mean if you look at the article the majority of it is all about quality of life - not only for the apartments, but greater/more effective use of the stairwells and common areas.

You are free to ignore fire safety rules in your own private house, built far away from everyone else's private homes (and anything flammable). History shows that fire can be disasterous.

In fact, every additional staircase adds a potentially useful escape route, so how many will be enough?

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