The Fire Department vs. Traffic Safety Advocates
Street safety advocates are butting heads with fire officials. Swift fire response does not have to come at the cost of lives on the roadway. They can work together.
This article and every article on my Substack do not represent my employer or any public commissions I serve on.
12/02 UPDATE: Berkeley City Council passed the 26-foot rule but will refer the rule to a committee to discuss potential changes, adjustments and feedback in April 2026. This is a good outcome for both the Fire Department and Traffic Safety advocates and I’m certain all parties will eventually agree on a safe regulation.
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People in mobility advocacy and traffic safety have known this issue for a very long time, and it’s never been popular to say publicly. Nobody wants to bad mouth the fire department. Nobody, myself included, questions the hard work of firefighters, from the volunteers, to the emergency service responders (EMT), to the marshals and chiefs, who save lives every day through rescue and preventative measures. This is just a disagreement on the application of a specific regulation, and does not call into question anyone’s fitness for office, the need for fire departments, or any department’s skill overall.
But this topic needs to be out in the open, because there’s been a hidden conflict going in city halls across the nation between resolving the escalating issue of traffic mortality and fire officials trying to keep streets as wide and open as possible for swift fire response time. Our fire codes regarding street designs is increasingly contradictory to public safety, and enforcement is too arbitrary.
This conflict came to a head in Berkeley, California this week. Our street festivals that have existed for generations in the same places were, out of the blue, canceled by the leadership of our fire department (although by which officials is unclear). One fair, (Telegraph) on a small, one-way street that will be eventually pedestrianized, and the other (Juneteeth) on an 80-foot wide, 6-lane stroad. For months, no explanation was given to the public as to why. Instead, unclear explanations were finally given by city staff, claiming: “unprecedented amount of [high density] housing” warranted wider streets and no street festivals on small streets as part of a “renewed focus” on the state fire code.
Putting aside that dense cities around the world in high-income nations have the liveliest street festivals, this rule was being applied to quadrants of Berkeley largely unchanged with new housing. Moreover, our downtown farmer’s market adjacent to a park had to cut the market in half and maintain a 26-foot wide clear space. A bewildered public and city council asked why this was happening. The fire department, through city officials, argued that Appendix D of the state fire code — requiring streets with a building taller than 3 stories to have at least a 26-foot street width of through traffic — mandated this change.
First, Appendix D in the state fire code is an optional code meant to be tailored for jurisdictions’ unique features. A street clearance of that sort exists so that fire trucks can use apparatuses to reach taller buildings and so that space is clear for emergency vehicles to get through streets. The intent is logical, but the U.S. fire code encourages sprawl by discouraging tall buildings and mandating wide roadways in front of each house. Thus, the state code was made optional to give flexibility intended for prewar cities not designed this way. Why was our fire department enforcing this rule for the first time and unilaterally, without any review by our fire and safety commissioners?
(12/02 edit: It’s been revealed that the city of Berkeley actually adopted this optional rule 17 years ago but the fire department hadn’t enforced it until a renewed interest in standards by recent leadership. Most people including existing councilmembers were unaware of this history. Therefore, primary blame for this rule would fall upon the bygone council and not the fire department).
As one of the festival organizers put it:
How has this been OK for 42 years, and now all of the sudden it’s not?
Second, if the 26-foot rule was consistently enforced, Berkeley would have to remove at least half of its street parking. Our average road widths and current vehicle sizes does not leave 26 feet of through traffic on residential streets. Our high fire risk hillside is lousy with cars parked on the sidewalk, making it impractical for fire engines to navigate quickly in emergencies, yet the fire department was not prohibiting street parking. It’s eminently easier to move tents and festival equipment out of the way for a fire engine than it is to move a parked car.
The festival saga elicited a high amount of press attention and public backlash, and thanks to a negotiation organized by our council members, fire officials are approving at least one street fair. But this is the only fire department intervention that received significant press attention. In the past couple of years, our firefighter union has been supporting Berkeley’s plans to reduce traffic deaths and make alternatives to driving safer, yet without documentation, some fire officials have been vetoing and altering the city’s bike, pedestrian and scooter mobility infrastructure projects.
In a less publicized example, Berkeley used to erect roundabouts with planters at intersections to make drivers slow down on streets rife with speeding, stop sign violators, or adjacent to bike ways. These are popular and beautiful, and in 2024, Berkeley voters and the Firefighters Union supported the installation of more. But fire officials allegedly altered the roundabout changes to make them mountable by autos. No rationale was ever given, but what I’ve been told is that the officials felt engines needed to swiftly drive over roundabouts, making the infrastructure completely ineffective at its goal.
A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.
To be clear, our fire department and EMT affiliates do an outstanding job and are underpaid. My heavy reluctance to criticize this particular code enforcement is out of a deep admiration for the department’s work overall, which continues to keep fire deaths low. I’m not criticizing rank-and-file firefighters and my town has a great fire chief. Not only did our Firefighter Union endorse the pro-traffic safety measure in Berkeley, our department is the first department in the nation to initiate a “Street Trauma Prevention” program. Meaning that the fire department will begin examining and studying street designs that prevent auto accidents and pedestrian deaths.
The rather inconsistent enforcement of the 26-foot space feels like our fire department’s internal struggle within leadership to transition from a department singularly concerned with making roadways wider, to a proactive department preventing health emergency calls as well as fires. Although fire deaths continue to decline in the U.S., traffic deaths are reaching record highs.
I live right by a fire station. Engines and ambulances come blaring down my street with sirens on an almost daily basis. The vast majority of the obstacles slowing response times are automobiles and street parking. High car traffic on urban streets, both flanked by on-street parking, slows engines down dramatically and requires unsafe maneuvers by motorists and the engine’s driver. If a smaller percentage of the population had to depend on automobiles to get around the city, streets would be more readily available for firetrucks to use.
If I had safe cyclist infrastructure on my street so that I could use my bike or my elderly neighbor could use his mobility scooter without risk of being run over, we would have zero impact on response times. But since such infrastructure was opposed by officials several years ago, I’m now forced to use a car. So when the fire engine comes blaring down the hill, all I can do with my fat automobile is try to go a few feet to a side lined with parked cars, and I, along with hundreds of others, contribute to slower response times.
Not only do cars slow fire and emergency response down, but car crashes are often the cause of fires. According to the National Fire Protection Association, 16% of fire department responses were about vehicle fires, with car crash fires killing more people than non-residential and apartment fires.
[Vehicle fires] are estimated to have caused more civilian deaths than non-residential structure fires and residential apartment fires. Only structure fire incidents in one- and two-family homes had higher death rates per fire than vehicle fires.
Fire departments across the United States are vetoing or butting heads with street safety measures. The San Francisco Fire Department fought against the city’s Slow Streets program where pedestrians and slow speed vehicles mingled on crowded streets. Oakland’s Fire Department also tried to enforce a 26-foot rule several years ago, foreclosing traffic safety measures on high injury streets in a city notorious for vehicular violence. Whereas Berkeley’s progressive firefighter union backed safer road design, Los Angeles’ was completely against and made that clear.
I suspect some U.S. fire leadership usually have few words for traffic congestion and parked autos causing the overwhelming majority of slowdown in response is because the fire officials drive themselves. Which is fine but like many people, if you’re not thinking about other modes of transportation, issues like these are not obvious.
Fire departments are also frequently solicited by salespeople trying to get them to buy ever more massive and inflexible equipment that appeals to the American desire for large vehicles. (I should note San Francisco & Berkeley’s FD is actually opting for smaller sizes). Like American building practices as a whole, fire vehicles in Europe, Asia and Australia are more standardized and efficient, while in the U.S. we depend on expensive customization from a couple of manufacturers who are not producing compact models and selling ever bigger trucks.
American justification for such large engines is that they carry a larger amount of water, which is crucial for the initial response to fire before tankers and neighboring departments respond. This is a good point, particularly for rural fire departments where hydrants are not in abundance. But hydrants are not lacking in most urban environments. In suburban areas, this may depend as typical American houses are combustible wood-frame buildings without sprinklers, but new subdivisions usually have more hydrants.
Vehicle size is not as simple as hydrant access or any one issue, and there’s a lot of levels from vendors to regulations that make our fire engines the largest in the world. But in the rest of the high-income, developed world, which boasts lower or equal fire deaths than the U.S., the fire vehicles are usually smaller. Smaller engines are more flexible to navigate through cities, thus the fire code accommodates the city rather than the city being built around the code. American officials and firefighter enthusiasts argue that the younger age and abundant land of the USA warrant larger vehicles. But similar countries like Australia do not boast large fire vehicles, either.
U.S. local governments should send fire department staff, especially leadership drafting local fire codes, on educational vacations to cities in Europe and Asia for collaborative experiences with foreign fire departments to compare and contrast operations. Such trips would encourage institutional change in departments, showing them alternatives in vehicles, traffic design and code that might be compatible with American skill in fighting fires back home.
For street safety activists, we should work with fire departments to adopt “retractable bollards” from Europe. This relatively new invention is becoming the norm in European city centers. Being able to retract bollards on streets by remote control so that areas for pedestrians and cyclists can be automatically converted to use by emergency vehicles and fire would address the genuine concerns of fire officials about permanent traffic calming obstacles. American firefighters are skilled at fighting fires and responding, hence our low fire injury rate. Fire department’s concerns are not frivolous.
All city councils should refer to civilian fire and disaster committees to work with our fire departments to craft street design standards that can accommodate sustainable population growth and quickly fight fires. If Austin, Texas could get traffic safety advocates and fire officials to work together, the rest of urban America can too.
It is likely that street safety infrastructure and non-automotive activities on the street have to change and adjust for fire safety. It’s not so much the rules but the process that needs to be clear, the enforcement of the code consistent, and agreed upon by fire officials and local government experts in a documented manner. I thank firefighters and emergency service responders, who in their often overworked and underpaid roles, not only protect people from fires but also help people injured and dying in traffic accidents as well.
The video below is a demonstration of a retractable traffic bollard: