Emergency Response and Street Design

Summary

In recent years, new urbanists and firefighters have discovered both common interests and shared challenges in neighborhood street design.

Wider streets lead to higher traffic speeds and greater chances for fatal collisions. Depending on their context, they damage, if not destroy outright, any sense of an inviting, walkable place. And as communities sprawl outward, as homes move further and further from firehouses, firefighters and other emergency responders find it increasingly costly and difficult to maintain acceptable emergency response times. When street networks are designed as poorly connected mazes of cul-de-sacs, response distances increase and response times suffer.

To meet these challenges, new urbanists and firefighters are finding that building compact neighborhoods with highly connected street networks can provide a solution that keeps homes close to fire stations and out of high-hazard areas. But there are also occasions when the desire for narrow streets and calmer neighborhood traffic collides with the need for fast access and ample working room for fire equipment.

The Congress for the New Urbanism and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched a multi-year effort in 2007 to solve this problem through better street connectivity and design, and building construction techniques like sprinklers.

On April 1-2, 2008, a Smart Growth Streets and Emergency Response Workshop was held in Austin, Texas, just before CNU XVI. Two dozen civil and traffic engineers, fire marshals, and planners spent two days educating one another and working collaboratively to find mutually acceptable street design solutions.

Among their key conclusions:

• Mutual education is sorely needed; new urbanists and fire marshals should talk to each other early and often during a project to help ensure that terms like "traditional neighborhood development" and "transit-oriented development" are clear and specific at the project level, and appropriate to the context in which the project will be built.
• New urbanists and fire marshals should work together to ensure they A) understand each other's priorities and responsibilities, and B) reflect those priorities and responsibilities in project designs.
• Street connectivity should be increased to decrease Vehicle Miles Traveled and the rate of traffic fatalities per mile, and give emergency responders more flexibility for response routes. Connectivity and street networks were also hot topics at CNU’s 2008 Transportation Summit in Charlotte, N.C., held Nov. 6-8.
• Projects should highlight their ability to achieve "community safety" through performance-based measures.
• The Transect should be applied so buildings, streets, and projects don’t go where they shouldn’t be; also, the Transect could help guide fire equipment purchases, response techniques, and expectations about proximity to fire stations and resultant response times.
• Additional research should be done to re-confirm the 1997 Swift-Painter-Goldstein study, "Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency," on a broader scale.

A smaller working group met Oct. 4, 2008, in Denver, Co., to discuss approaches to the International Fire Code and crafting language that would empower local fire code officials to allow narrower streets under specific conditions.

Patrick Siegman, with the planning firm Nelson\Nygaard, conducted a brief review of the work done in Austin, touched on the impossibility of a “one size fits all” solution, and compared the advantages and disadvantages of both narrow and wide streets. Any code that the working group develops should be offered as an alternative to, and not a replacement of the existing code.

Peter Swift, owner of Swift & Associates, discussed urban context issues related to narrower streets, noting that this conversation really centers on suburban, general urban, and urban center areas of the typical rural-to-urban Transect, and two key distance measurements: street and building-to-building width. The chance of an injury accident increases 25 percent with every additional two feet of street width, Swift said, adding that traffic can be slowed by giving drivers a sense of good spatial enclosure.

Carl Wren, chief engineer with the Austin Fire Department, presented an overview of the complex process that must be undertaken to amend the fire code. Proposed changes must be backed up by solid, scientific data.

More information about the Emergency Response & Street Design Initiative will be posted as it becomes available.

Resources

• The city of Charlotte, N.C., examined how connected street networks improve emergency response times while also saving tax dollars. Its study was presented at the Transportation Summit 2008 by Danny Pleasant. View this study here.
• Presentations from, and a summary report of the October 2008 working group meeting are available here.
• Presentations from and a summary report of the April 2008 Smart Growth Streets and Emergency Response Workshop are available here.
• An annotated bibliography and collection of articles and studies that helped form the informational skeleton for that workshop can be found at the website of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Urban & Environmental Solutions, which is a partner with CNU in this project. This collection includes the Swift-Painter-Goldstein study and excerpts from a study done by the city of Raleigh, N.C., in 2000, showing a fire station in the most connected neighborhood can cover three times more structures than a fire station in the least connected neighborhood.

Contact

For more information, or if you know of other studies that address street network connectivity, or the relationship between street width and traffic speed, please contact Jon Davis or Heather Smith.

The traditional connected street grid allows many ways to get to an emergency, which gives emergency responders shorter response times. (Photo from “Over Washington, D.C.” via David A. Sargent.)

The typical suburban pod development restricts emergency responders to only one or two ways into a subdivision, and few access options once inside. (Lower left photo courtesy of David A. Sargent; others courtesy of City of Ventura, Calif., via David A. Sargent.)

Fire engines can’t negotiate this turn in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood quickly in an emergency. They’ll lose precious minutes backing up and inching forward because of a too-tight turning radius. (Photo courtesy of the Austin Fire Dept.)

One FDNY engine can’t get around another whose stabilizing jacks are deployed. Fortunately, the city’s connected street grid means fire companies have other, quick ways of getting to the scene. (Photo courtesy of the Austin Fire Dept.)

Large diameter hoses running between hydrants and fire engines can't turn easily in narrow spaces. (Photo courtesy of the Austin Fire Dept.)