On Fire Departments
Long untouchable, fire departments are causing death and homelessness in American cities by advocating for bad policies
Firefighters hold a special place in American culture. Rushing bravely into danger, leading Memorial Day parades, saving stuck cats, and—lately—doing their best to stop American cities from enacting policies to make roads safer and housing more affordable.
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.
To understand how things ended up this way, let’s look at the challenges facing American cities. We’ll start with car crashes.
Mayhem on the Streets
After a multi-decade decline, vehicular deaths have risen dramatically across the United States since 2018. The US now not only has a higher road accident death rate than its western European peers but also Russia, long a standard-bearer for dangerous highways. In 2022, approximately 43,000 people died on US roads while another 2.3 million were injured, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars in medical bills and lost productivity.
The pain is felt acutely by pedestrians, whose death rates are now at a 40-year high after bottoming in 2009. Once again, the US in the outlier here—pedestrian deaths in Europe continued to decline over the past decade, casting doubt on the notion that smartphones and pedestrian distraction alone are to blame.
Fortunately, the solutions to these crises are fairly well-known. Excessive speed, for instance, is a factor in about a third of fatal collisions. Interventions to decrease speed—narrowing roadways and replacing intersections with roundabouts, for instance—are well established and deployed at scale in Europe. And American cities that have gotten serious about these engineering changes have seen meaningful results. Hoboken, New Jersey, for example, hasn’t had a roadway death in seven years.
In the aggregate, street safety advocates refer to these engineering interventions as designing for “people, not cars.” In other words, a city should be just as comfortable to walk or bike as it is to drive—if not more so. If pedestrians and bicyclists are at constant risk of being mowed down by drivers, people are more likely to choose to drive to their destination, adding more cars to the road and making the problem worse. The only way out of this spiral, advocates argue, is to implement fundamental street design changes to protect walkers and bikers.
The benefits of this kind of design aren’t limited to safety: they bring us closer to the kind of urban design many of us crave. The most in-demand neighborhoods in our most in-demand cities feature a mix of uses—sidewalk cafes, housing, schools, workspaces, and more—on a human scale, with narrower streets and minimal setbacks. Places like Beacon Hill in Boston, the West Village of Manhattan, and Georgetown, DC see extraordinary demand and eye-watering rents.
One reason demand outstrips supply in these dense, walkable communities is because we can no longer build them. They’re illegal, verboten due to a patchwork of regulations mandating wide streets, deep setbacks, abundant parking, and separation of uses. Furthermore, a number of building code mandates—such as multi-stair egress requirements—make it hard to design small buildings, pushing developers to build bulky 5-over-1s with interior corridors.
While housing advocates push for code reforms to make this kind of building possible, they haven’t had much luck to date. Piecemeal reforms—such as allowing multi-unit structures or reducing parking requirements—have yet to be strung together in a way that would make building a new Beacon Hill or West Village possible.
Unfortunately, one powerful lobby has made a habit of fighting urbanist reforms wherever they crop up, battling against everything from bus lanes and bike lanes to more walkable, human-scale streets: fire departments.
So… why?
On Fire Deaths
Before we continue, it’s worth spending a moment discussing structure fires in the United States. The US has done a tremendous job bringing fire deaths down massively over the past century, with the US now experiencing fewer than 3,000 home structure fire deaths per year.
Improvements in fire safety have been primarily driven by adoption of fire suppression and life safety technology such as:
Sprinklers. While fire sprinklers have been around since the 19th century, their adoption accelerated after 1992’s Federal Fire Safety Act mandated them in new multifamily structures.
Non-combustible and fire-rated materials. In the second half of the 20th century, the use of fire-rated materials became more common in new construction, making it harder for fire to spread through buildings.
Alarms and warning systems. Concerted efforts starting in the late 1970s dramatically increased usage of home smoke alarms, bringing the percentage of homes with alarms up from 22% in 1977 to 92% in 1995.
Despite the progress, the US still lags many of its international peers on fire safety, with a higher fire death rate per capita than any major western European or east Asian nation. Digging further into fire data provides some color on the US’s relatively poor performance. Most US fire deaths occur in old, wood-frame single-family buildings, a typology that’s much more common in the US than other countries.
On the other hand, only 12% of all fire deaths—470 in 2022—occurred in apartments. When apartments do catch on fire, their occupants are more likely to survive than those in single family homes, as apartments are more likely to have interventions like sprinklers, non-combustible materials, and working fire alarms.
Of the fires taking place in apartment buildings, the vast majority (91%) occur in buildings without working sprinkler systems. While I wasn’t able to find crosstabs on fire death by sprinkler presence, it’s likely the death rate is also far lower in sprinklered buildings—so no more than 47 fire deaths in sprinklered buildings in 2022 with the real number likely far below that.
The fact that it’s quite rare to die in an apartment fire in the developed world today is a tremendous accomplishment, and fire departments deserve their fair share of the accolades due to having advocated for interventions that work such as sprinklers and regular alarm inspections in multifamily structures.
Rather than scale down fire departments in response to having dramatically fewer fires, cities instead decided to reinvent fire departments as a general emergency response force. Of the 27 million calls that fire departments responded to in 2020, only 3.9% were fire-related. EMS, medical assists like overdoses, and false alarms were far more prevalent, especially in urban centers. Responses to car crashes made up 5.6% of all calls, significantly more than fires. And fire departments are also asked to advise on local regulations that may impact fire safety, a scope that has expanded to include any aspect of building code, land use, transportation, and more.
And in most cases, they’ve become staunch defenders of the status quo.
The Fire Marshal Has Concerns
While there are many aspects of land use and building code that fire departments across the country defend, I’ll focus here on one in particular: lane widths.
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.
Each time road widths are studied, the results are clear. Take this CNU article discussing a hotly-debated road narrowing, for instance:
A study in Longmont, Colorado, looked at both fire and automobile injury accidents over an eight-year period. The narrower the street, the safest it proved to be overall. It turns out that the narrow streets, which don't meet 20-foot-clear requirements, have few injury accidents—regardless of all other conditions on the street, including volume of traffic. Fire injuries were very rare during this time period—much less common than automobile injuries—and there was no correlation with street width.
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.
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.
Affordable housing priorities are also increasingly at odds with fire departments. For instance, housing advocates are pushing for US building code to be brought in line with international standards by allowing single-stair point access block apartments up to six stories in height (from the current three). Doing so would allow multifamily buildings to be built more affordably and efficiently, unlocking apartment layouts that can more easily access light and air. Fire departments, naturally, are in opposition.
While there’s at least a fire safety argument to be made here—two stairs are better than one, right?—there’s no data to back up that claim, and cities that allow single-stair buildings up to six stories tend to have lower fire death rates than US cities where such structures are illegal. After all, the vast, vast majority of fire deaths occur in older, wood-frame single-family homes, not sprinklered multifamily buildings regardless of egress.
So… why?
Fire departments standing in the way of good urban design isn’t a new phenomenon; now-Senator Scott Wiener of California described the battle lines plainly ten years ago. So why are firefighters such a reactionary force when it comes to changes to the build world—even when those changes would make their jobs easier?
A Narrow Safety Mandate
Despite playing a broader role in emergency response, fire departments tend to see their advisory role as solely scoped to limiting fires and fire deaths. Preventing car crashes, for example, isn’t something fire departments have historically seen as their responsibility. And while firefighters are on the front lines of contending with the problems that come from homelessness—fires and EMS calls from encampments, for instance—addressing the root causes of homelessness has been well beyond their scope.
But as fire deaths dwindle and car crash deaths and homelessness surge, there’s reason to believe this traditional narrow mandate is misguided.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that interventions to reduce vehicle speed—road diets and re-allocation of roadway space away from cars—do have a negative impact on fire response times. (The evidence does not support that point, but let’s assume it did for a moment.) If our sole goal is to save as many lives as possible, we should be willing to accept some increase in fire deaths in exchange for a larger decrease in car crash deaths. Given we have approximately 16 times as many car crash deaths as structure fire deaths, it would require an 80% increase in fire deaths to equal a 5% decrease in car crash deaths. As speed plays a tremendous role in the deadliness of car crashes, it is likely we could achieve that kind of life-saving outcome with relatively modest engineering changes. And once again, it’s not clear at all that those interventions would cause any change in response times or fire deaths.
While I don’t know what the right balance is here, it’s a reasonable discussion to have; saving lives in the aggregate should be the goal. It’s absurd that fire departments are asked to opine on road design without being given a broader mandate on the safety of those roads.
Big Trucks
American fire trucks are big—much bigger than the trucks of our European and Asian counterparts. This makes it challenging for American trucks to navigate narrow streets, tight corners, bulb-outs, and other staples of road diets. Unsurprisingly, this becomes a significant part of the argument for why American cities can’t have those things, and streets should instead be designed to move large vehicles as fast and efficiently as possible.
Of course, this begs the question of why we’re designing our cities around our fire trucks rather than the other way around. Smaller fire trucks perform well in European and Asian cities with tall buildings and lower fire death rates. They’re also more maneuverable, important for urban situations where trucks may be asked to squeeze into and through tight spaces. Smaller trucks would unlock road designs that are demonstrated to save lives and allow us to build urban neighborhoods more in line with what people want.
But this is America, and we love big trucks. The three best-selling vehicles in the US in 2023 were big trucks, a trend that shows no sign of slowing. And like big pickup trucks, big fire trucks are cool and macho. Smaller Japanese fire trucks? Not so much.
While it’s hard to say how much of a role machismo vibes play in driving US fire departments’ need for bigger trucks—and therefore wider roads and less dense cities—in the absence of data demonstrating that larger trucks are needed, vibes tend to win the day. Considering the tremendous number of Americans who die every year in car crashes, it’s a stiff penalty to pay for vibes.
On the cultural note, consider Center for Building’s Stephen Smith’s assessment of firefighters’ recent testimony against Colorado’s single-stair bill:
Firefighters brought up the World Trade Center, nursing homes & dorms to oppose...small single-stair apartment buildings. [It’s] disturbing that the loudest voices in the debate don't know the basics of the building code.
The bill is about R-2 occupancies. The World Trade Center and nursing homes aren't even R occupancies, nevermind R-2. Dorms are, but they're never small enough to meet proposed code requirements for single-stair buildings (and anyway could easily be carved out)
I think I know why they brought them up though: they don’t have any other reference for apartments. They live in suburban and rural area[s] that don’t have any. They are older, upper-income, and culturally conservative, and don’t interact with anybody who lives in a real apartment.
The only interaction they have with non-single-family living is dropping their daughter off at college and visiting their parents in nursing homes (these personal experiences were brought up), or seeing images from 9/11 on TV. So that’s where their minds go.
It’s not surprising there’s a cultural gulf between firefighters—particularly the senior firefighters directing policy—and the urban residents of the cities they serve. New York’s congestion pricing likely suffers from a similar problem, with suburban-dwelling senior firefighters opposing a left-coded “urbanist” policy despite it likely making their actual jobs easier by reducing traffic. (For what it’s worth, I think the NYFD’s request for an exemption is reasonable, although I also understand why the MTA refuses to open that particular Pandora’s Box.)
Politicizing the Fire Department is Bad
On March 5th, 2024, Los Angeles voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly passed Measure HLA. The referendum forces the City to reallocate space away from cars and toward pedestrians, bicyclists, and buses every time a road is repaved.
The measure passed by a wide margin—over 25 points—despite the firefighters union’s all-out effort to stop it. All in, the union spent “over $100,000” opposing HLA, claiming it would lead to longer emergency response times as well as tried-and-true, not-fire-related arguments against street safety improvements such as reductions in street parking hurting small businesses.
But the electorate wasn’t buying it this time, fed up with a status quo of gridlock and death. As pedestrian deaths rise and the US increasingly finds itself an outlier on traffic violence, cities face increasing pressure from voters to fix the streets before more children, grandparents, teenagers, and entire families die.
And voters are increasingly seeing fire departments’ arguments against these improvements as what they are: lies.
When fire departments lie to the public—for whatever cultural or political reason—they lose the trust of the communities they serve. That’s a problem, because fire departments do a lot of good advocating for interventions that do save lives like smoke detectors, fire suppression systems, and better materials.
It’s critical that fire departments don’t lose the public’s ear by being the voice of sprawl and midcentury urban planning. This will demand a broader safety mandate that pushes fire safety leaders to think about how to prevent crashes in the first place, not just respond to them as quickly as possible. It’ll also require a forward-looking approach toward how we want to build cities in the future, not simply defending the way we built them in the past.
—Brad Hargreaves