Norway's capital is known for its green policies and widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Why does the city still struggle with air pollution?

• Scope: comment response, information, personal take
• Tone: neutral, but the rant is a rant
• Opinion: yes
• Sarcasm/humor: none

Preface: I'm not a firefighter, but I have firefighter urbanist friends who have offered valuable perspectives on this stuff. Opinions are my own, and yes firefighters are heroes, but know that fire companies are not deeply considering any negative impact they have on society!

People inclined to drive everywhere in urban areas love to complain (sometimes in good faith, usually in bad faith) "but how will fire trucks get around?" This is a good question and easily answered. The answer is retractable bollards (physical locks or electronic controls), which aren't particularly expensive. Retractable bollards can easily be placed in ways that avoid utility impacts; they have basically no drainage impacts; they're just made of metal; and you only need a few of them to make an entire area car-free. Emergency services need electronically controlled pneumatic ones, which requires some wiring and waterproofing, but the price is still not innately high for a municipal government; they spend way more on unnecessary road resurfacing every year. They can be configured to enter a "retracted" state if the power goes out.

Since all emergency vehicle delays are due to CARS, a fire truck driving down an otherwise pedestrianized street is no problem. In cities with wide enough bike lanes, emergency vehicles have faster response times using them. This is because it's 100x easier for a cyclist to get out of the way than a car.

The other answer is that the belief that firetrucks have to be huge vehicles is fundamentally wrong. American fire trucks in particular are egregiously large; European counterparts happen to be much smaller and do at least as good a job at fighting fires (or better). Fire hydrants are everywhere, and more could be built—to put out a fire you only technically need a water source and hose, which municipalities could easily keep in a small shed near a fire hydrant, like a utility box, which could be more easily activated more quickly by an ultra-fast response team than bringing it on a huge vehicle. If for some reason that's impossible, it's easy to transport a hose on a high-capacity narrow-body electric delivery vehicle, even a beefy e-bike (like those Amazon uses in NYC bike lanes). They resemble large golf carts or motorcycles optimized for storage space. These vehicles are faster than fire trucks, safer than fire trucks (emergency vehicles kill and injure lots of people every year by their absurd weight and socially acceptable but objectively dangerous speeding habits), can store long enough hoses for such use, etc. Firemen themselves can easily take any number of narrow-body vehicles to get their persons to a site. Obviously some equipment needs to live on an inevitably larger and slower truck, like a 7-story ladder... or does it? If you're mainly transporting the ladder and not every other piece of equipment, does the truck really have to be 10ft wide? And why does a pumper have to be 9.5ft wide? (It doesn't!) In general, why does the biggest vehicle in the fleet have to be the priority? Virtually all high-rise buildings, including all modern buildings, are designed such that fires are passively contained and allow for easy evacuation (and therefore have significant leeway for response times)... so if the small vehicles get there first to begin to address the fire, and the giant vehicle gets there later (because it's huge and naturally slow) to speed up the job, that's actually better than just sending the giant and slow vehicle, which would get there late no matter what. Sprinkler systems are mandatory in new construction and frequently retrofitted to old buildings during renovations. Ladders can't reach most floors in high-rises, so firefighters are going INSIDE anyway; while certainly useful, giant ladders are like 5% of the strategy. Firefighters have robust standpipe and interior rescue procedures for this reason. Additionally, most neighborhoods in most cities don't actually need such oversized equipment in the first place. No need for such a big ladder on a 2-story rowhome. In addition to being significantly easier to pilot, getting stuck in way less traffic (and therefore having faster response times), requiring much simpler and safer infrastructure, narrow-body emergency vehicles themselves are much cheaper than the gargantuan trucks. The way it currently works, the engine will ALWAYS get there before the truck company (ladder), but the engine company could get there faster with a smaller fleet of vehicles capable of using narrower streets and better evading traffic! And the ladder truck probably doesn't need to be as wide as most American ladder trucks are. Most of that width is not the ladder object itself, but the truck just being wide to support other equipment that other vehicles should be providing. Even a truck with a really beefy ladder and rotational base could get through more corridors if it were narrower. They have extendible horizontal stabilizers anyway so the vehicle doesn't need to be so wide for that reason. Not all fire stations have ladders because not all calls require ladders. Emergency vehicle access, in general, would be streamlined by better identification of the vehicles and equipment necessary to get the job done rather than going for a SLOW-GIGANTIC-EVERYTHING-VEHICLE that has all the stuff and uses almost none of it. 95% of fire station calls are NOT for fires at all, but they still send out an entire engine or ladder. Terrible and wasteful practice!

But it's a moot point because firetrucks aren't ever blocked by pneumatic bollards to begin with. FIRETRUCKS ARE BLOCKED BY CARS! (So pointlessly huge vehicles with enormous ladders and every fire suppression device known to humankind can STILL get by just fine, and even firemen responding to a call from home, rather than the station, can be granted pneumatic bollard control access from their ideally state-provided vehicles.) All fire trucks should be smaller mostly for safety reasons, and to discourage cities from making oversized lanes (which encourage speeding, increase pedestrian crossing distances unnecessarily, and cause more fatalities). Small vehicles are simply more maneuverable in general, and response times will always be faster if they are small enough to use narrower lanes like bike lanes. But even with current fire truck widths, we don't need to allow cars absolutely everywhere.

If you had a large enough car-free zone, that zone could INCLUDE a fire station with all its huge equipment exclusively or mostly used within that zone. So they don't necessarily have to interact with bollards... at all!

People claim they need to park their car on their block, but that's not true either. Civilized places have underground parking, vehicle access to which can be restricted to arterials or other places where cars are begrudgingly allowed; pedestrian access to such garages can be more common. But frankly most parking structures don't need to exist in cities at all. Without devoting so much space and money to cars, it becomes infinitely easier to install truly robust transit, bike, and pedestrian networks within cities. City limits can be surrounded by a ring of park-and-ride garages connected to internal destinations by transit. For trips that truly require a vehicle, which in such a paradigm are exclusively those both outside the city and outside transit-oriented regional corridors (this will be very few places because a transit-oriented development planning structure should cover nearly all commutes for nearly all urban residents), time spent on a truly good transit network connecting to a garage should be negligible compared to time wasted in city motor vehicle traffic, and a net positive when considering the externalities of car use.

With very few exceptions, local deliveries can be handled on narrow-body electric vehicles that fit in bike lanes. This is just a matter of supply logistics. The only places that need truck access are regional delivery centers along arterial roads; local deliveries simply don't require big trucks, so car access is not necessary either. If necessary, very large deliveries on local streets can be done with heavy machinery overnight or early in the morning, which again is not an issue with retractable bollards.

The law already mandates ADA-accessible transit vehicles and stations, and cities are increasingly installing them. (They could do so faster if they weren't wasting billions on unnecessary urban highway expansions.) Dogs should be allowed on designated areas within all trains; with enough trains it's not an issue for capacity. (FYI you can already take your dog on an enclosed cargo bike.) And so on. There should be literally no NEED for cars within a city. And this isn't a pipe dream. It is totally possible. Been to Paris in the last 5 years? They're getting pretty darn close.