Long untouchable, fire departments are causing death and homelessness in American cities by advocating for bad policies

I do some advocacy work in my city and surrounding areas related to safe streets and the reduction of pedestrian/cyclist traffic fatalities. One problem that organizations I volunteer for run into is opposition to useful street improvements from fire departments. It's important to find safety solutions to pedestrian issues that don't impede emergency services, but a lot of the resistance we experience is based on misconceptions and factually incorrect statements.

NIMBY-types who oppose literally any instance of traffic calming or other safety improvement (things like bicycle lane protections, reductions in lane width, installation of sidewalk bollards, raised crosswalks/intersections, speed humps, etc) sometimes speak on behalf of fire departments to reinforce the status quo. Usually, these remarks are based on false premises. And usually, in my experience, these remarks are not made completely in good faith: these people are at least partially trying to find a socially acceptable excuse to oppose the improvements. Unfortunately, even elected officials will sometimes make this kind of uninformed statement.

The critical thing to remember is that emergency vehicles like fire trucks are still vehicles, and they actually kill a significant number of people while speeding every year. (Such fatalities are well-documented.) It's important to balance access to life-saving vehicles with... the ability of those vehicles to kill/seriously injure people. Currently, our society erroneously "balances" this by ignoring the statistically bigger issue -- traffic fatalities -- and effectively giving fire departments an unscientific blank cheque when it comes to street upgrades. And this is very hard for politicians and activists to oppose: the general public has an extremely visceral reaction to the idea of acute emergencies like a fire, while they have absolutely no reaction to blunt emergencies, like a series of pedestrian fatalities over a period of time. There is an idea that firefighters are heroes -- and they are -- but they're not heroes when they run someone over -- which firefighters also do when they wrongly insist that streets need to be wider and less safe than they really do.

Culturally, we are very used to traffic fatalities, which feel localized and insignificant, but a fire feels scary and uncontrollable. Part of this is a false perception of agency: people believe that they have a lot more control over being hit by a car than they do over their house burning down. In every traffic fatality, there is an element of blame placed on the victim (typically wrongly, but blame is still placed), and also individual blame placed on the perpetrator (typically rightly). The issue is that people take this to mean (consciously or subconsciously) that it's kind of your fault if you die in a car crash, or at least we shouldn't care so much, and obviously they wouldn't have been in that situation because they're not stupid. In contrast, a fire is perceived as a force of nature. It's pretty socially acceptable to blame a pedestrian for crossing the street outside of a crosswalk and getting hit by an oversized pickup truck, but it's not socially acceptable to blame someone for burning their house down because they accidentally left the gas on. Even though those things are, in many cases, just as much the fault of some system (engineers designing terrible car-centric street layouts; landlords not fixing old sprinklers), agency and therefore blame are placed on victims of traffic collisions but not fires. This encourages people to take the issue of fires inherently and universally more seriously than issues like traffic collisions, which is not a scientific conclusion based on how many people actually die in either case and why they die. By extension, this encourages people to take the subjective opinions of firefighters more seriously than the hard data provided by Vision Zero activists.

The bigger issue is that people falsely believe that Complete Streets, Vision Zero, etc-style safety improvements like adding bus/bike lanes, adding congestion pricing in city centers, and so on are incompatible with efficient emergency responses. I see how one could think that, but it is actually not true. They are not incompatible. Safer and less car-dependent streets improve safety in other ways. The more we get cars off the road (including by slowing them down and by comparison making public transit/cycling more appealing alternatives), the more flexibility emergency services have to get around quickly AND safely.

This article talks about a few examples of things that fire departments say in opposition to street improvements that actually end up getting more people killed than they save. It isn't just specific opposition to specific projects ("the vehicle has X turning radius and we need a bit more space at this intersection") -- that kind of thing can make sense. Unfortunately, fire departments are often political units which categorically oppose all Complete Streets legislation such as adding dedicated bike and bus lanes. This example has the negative effect of increasing traffic (more cars = more traffic, 100% of the time, by definition) and therefore slowing down emergency response times. Having more people in cars also just tends to be more unsafe for Vulnerable Road Users like pedestrians. But really, their political opposition to urbanism is not rooted in real life-saving policy. The pejorative term that urbanist activists would use is that many firefighters are "car-brained." Their perspective is not necessarily based in actual firefighting science, but rather in the status quo; and firefighting agencies are politically savvy mechanisms through which these people can influence policy that probably personally benefits them (e.g. being able to drive more -- firefighters are not the kinds of people who ride bikes places. They drive. I don't have a scientific study for that one, but anecdotally I have never found that statement to be false.), or that for whatever reason they are politically inclined to support. I won't speculate any more, but the point is that these positions are not scientific.

For all the good they do, fire departments have increasingly emerged as a primary force preventing cities from embracing walkability, safer streets, transit, and affordable housing. To list a few examples from the past month:

• The LA firefighters’ union, UFLAC, was among the most vocal opponents of Measure HLA, a ballot referendum aiming to reduce LA’s car dependence by investing in bike and bus lanes. (The measure passed anyway, 65 to 35).

• New York firefighters have loudly opposed New York’s congestion pricing plan, which plans to generate additional funding for transit by charging a $15 fee to vehicles entering lower Manhattan.

• Fire departments pressured Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs to veto the bipartisan Starter Homes Act, which would’ve legalized smaller, more affordable homes on smaller lots.

• Fire departments continue leading opposition to bringing the US’s building code in line with that of European and Asian peer countries, despite those countries’ lower fire death rates.

The author talks about a few specific policies that fire departments tend to oppose, erroneously:

Narrower lanes—particularly on urban streets—have been repeatedly shown to lead to reduced speeds and safer roads. On wider streets, drivers feel comfortable going much faster regardless of the posted speed limit. Narrower lanes keep drivers alert and discourage distracted driving, saving the lives of car occupants and pedestrians alike.

Nevertheless, fire departments are consistently the most vocal opponents of any proposed road diets, including sidewalks, bus lanes, and bike lanes. This is despite the fact that fire departments spend more time responding to car crashes than fires, and car crashes get exponentially deadlier as speed increases.

And it really is nonsensical:

Ironically, a number of the street safety improvements proposed would actually make fire departments’ lives easier. In Europe and Asia, fire trucks can use bus and even bike lanes to bypass traffic. But in American cities—especially my own NYC—it’s all too common to see fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles stuck in bumper-to-bumper jams behind private cars. Congestion pricing, which firefighters vocally oppose, would reduce the traffic that the FDNY has claimed is causing slower response times.

The author argues that part of the issue is that fire departments have a "narrow safety mandate": they care about fire safety and basically nothing else. They don't appreciate the damage that they do in terms of traffic fatalities while attempting to reduce fire deaths because it's outside of their mandate.

They conclude that while it's valuable to get fire departments' input on matters pertinent to their ability to complete their duties, it's "absurd" to do so when those departments are not incentivized to care about public safety in a broader sense. Because currently, taking firefighters' word as gospel -- at the expense of hard, empirical data -- is a net negative for our society.