A straightforward way to improve the lives of Americans is to reduce the size of the fire trucks used in urban areas. This would allow for narrower roads and more traffic calming measures to be put into place without blocking essential fire truck access.
American roads are notably wider than their European counterparts, with the standard American road measuring in at 3.7m (or 12ft) wide, compared European roads mostly sitting between 2.5m to 3.25m (or 8ft 2in to 10ft 8in). Wider roads make traffic accidents more fatal by increasing the speed at which drivers feel comfortable and make driving larger cars more comfortable, which is also more dangerous to other road users. Cities across the US are working to make their roads safer by reducing the number of lanes, there’s a strict limit of how narrow a lane can be because the road must accommodate a fire truck in the case of an emergency.
We should consider the trade off of making fire trucks less effective for safer roads because fire deaths have decreased in the past century by 2/3rds while traffic deaths have more than doubled in that same time frame.
While the current size of fire trucks makes sense for more rural areas, I propose cities start working on a fleet of smaller trucks, like those in Australia or Japan. Australian urban fire trucks sit in the range of 24-30ft compared to American fire trucks of 35-40ft, or we could go even smaller like the Japanese fire trucks which get as small as 12ft long. This change to smaller truck sizes would allow for narrower roads and less pedestrian fatalities.
A straightforward way to improve the lives of Americans is to reduce the size of the fire trucks used in urban areas. This would allow for narrower roads and more traffic calming measures to be put into place without blocking essential fire truck access.
American roads are notably wider than their European counterparts, with the standard American road measuring in at 3.7m (or 12ft) wide, compared European roads mostly sitting between 2.5m to 3.25m (or 8ft 2in to 10ft 8in). Wider roads make traffic accidents more fatal by increasing the speed at which drivers feel comfortable and make driving larger cars more comfortable, which is also more dangerous to other road users. Cities across the US are working to make their roads safer by reducing the number of lanes, there’s a strict limit of how narrow a lane can be because the road must accommodate a fire truck in the case of an emergency.
We should consider the trade off of making fire trucks less effective for safer roads because fire deaths have decreased in the past century by 2/3rds while traffic deaths have more than doubled in that same time frame.
While the current size of fire trucks makes sense for more rural areas, I propose cities start working on a fleet of smaller trucks, like those in Australia or Japan. Australian urban fire trucks sit in the range of 24-30ft compared to American fire trucks of 35-40ft, or we could go even smaller like the Japanese fire trucks which get as small as 12ft long. This change to smaller truck sizes would allow for narrower roads and less pedestrian fatalities.
Written for Quiethaven at LessOnline 2025