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Comment by twiddling | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget about street widths being determined by the ability to turn around fire equipment.

If it makes you feel any better the oldest streets around here are wider than newer ones, because they had to be able to turn a wagon with a team of horses.

That sounds like what they did in Salt Lake City.

This was the seed that destroyed the American city. Roads were humongous 100 years before car was invented. It was fine, a buffer for the smoke and filth of the industrial city, but still multipurpose, accessible. Once cars started driving on these huge expanses, it turned every city street in a highway; dangerous, polluted, noisy, pushing out other uses, ...

Having streets unable to be accessible by fire response vehicles doesn't seem like a good idea. What would be the alternative here? (genuine question, I'm not from the US)

Smaller fire trucks.

How do you plan to make the fires smaller as well?

Copy paste from Europe, where they are about half the size?

Some possible reasons for why American fire trucks tend to be larger:

* more frequently sent to rural homes, where there might not be an available hydrant, so they need to transport all the water they're likely to need

* same for wildfires

* American homes more likely to be wood+drywall

Why "wood+drywall" rather than just "wood"?

Drywall is non-combustible and used as the main component in many fire-rated wall assemblies.

I would simply have small firetrucks in urban areas, and large fire trucks in rural areas.

The more rural you get, the more likely it is that the fire trucks have been purchased secondhand from urban fire departments that can afford to buy new equipment prior to the existing equipment literally falling apart (I've got an extended family member that runs the fire service for an entire county in a western US state, and often see him when he stops at my house while driving new-to-them equipment from the east coast).

You've also got a lot of volunteer departments where each firefighter keeps their equipment in their own personal vehicle.

Why firetrucks in the US are so large is a good question. In the spirit of Chesterton's Fence, I'd assume that there is a good reason until proven otherwise.

That's utterly impossible. It's the same reason America can't have public transit: since it doesn't make economic sense in small remote towns of 200 people, then it can't be done in huge cities. I can't explain the logic, but this really is how most Americans think.

Europe has wildfires and rural areas. How will a large fire truck help you when a wood house is burning? Being grotesquely large doesn't mean they put the fire out faster.

B-b-b-b-but bUY amERiCa

Use two trucks when needed?

This is a really simple fix that the rest of the world does better.

Indeed, this is a thoroughly solved problem thanks to countries like Japan where urban planning typically allows meandering networks of narrow, pedestrian-friendly streets.

This article has some nice points of comparison between typical American firetrucks and a Japanese firetruck: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Meet-Kiri-the-tiny...

And yet, European cities exist and are fine without wide streets.

Keep in mind that Europeans tend to build with stone / bricks, and Americans tend to build with wood.

Lots of safety regulations stem from that divide. Wood is a bit more flammable.

(I'm not saying the difference in safety regulations still make sense today. I'm talking about one of the historical origins of the divide.)

In the north of Europe it is mostly wood

Houses are still less likely to be build from wood than in the US.

apartment buildings are made from prefabricated concrete elements though

Hm.. couldn't a fire engine be driven in reverse? It could have an emergency driver's wheel in the back. I have seen crane trucks driven with a joystick from outside the vehicle, so it doesn't seem impossible.

Or it could just be smaller like in the rest of the world.

We can make them turn 360 degrees like the electric G-Wagon. If upgrading the fleet of firefighting trucks to do so costs less than the value brought by tighter spacing of homes, it’s worth it.

Well, you can learn from other parts of the world, instead of coming up with solutions from scratch. (But yes, if nothing else your solution would probably work.)

If you time your upgrade to the fire engines with when you naturally would want to renew them anyway, then it doesn't really cost much extra.

looks like building heights haven't been held back...

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