Comment on Anon lives on a budget
stray@pawb.social 4 days agoI agree with you in general, but 2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access. Some regulations are based on the prevalence and nature of natural disasters in a given area.
I’m also not sure about your 20 meters figure because I can’t find that there is a federal minimum. 20 feet is the minimum for fire trucks though.
PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides “we need to carry water and I don’t know what a fire hydrant is”) is “we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck”, which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.
My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because “it’s the only way to build densely”, ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It’s an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.
My 20 metres figure isn’t a hard number, it’s my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2
parkingvehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.stray@pawb.social 4 days ago
Fire hydrants provide water, but you need to run the water through a pump to increase the pressure, and a fire truck acts as that pump. It also allows for the attachment of multiple hoses so that water can be sprayed in multiple locations.
And if all the roads are very narrow, how are you going to get a moving truck or other delivery vehicle in? What about a plumber’s van? What about a small personal vehicle? Two meters isn’t wide enough for any of those, especially not with outdoor seating. Six meters gives space for service vehicles to coexist with pedestrians, cyclists, and seating.
I don’t agree with not having tall buildings either though. If the majority of housing is dense apartments above ground-floor businesses then there’s much more open space left for nature preserves, parks, and gardens. I mean, they don’t need to be skyscrapers, just 3-10 stories maybe. You can also save a lot of space with row houses.