When Fire Trucks Block Safer Streets

Firefighters, heroes—and unexpected roadblocks

Firefighters are some of the most trusted people in public life. They do dangerous work, they save lives, and they’re usually the last people anyone wants to criticize.

But if you zoom out and look at how American streets are built, fire departments—specifically their vehicle choices and access regulations—are quietly blocking many of the changes that would save far more lives.

Pedestrian deaths in the U.S. have exploded: between 2010 and 2023, annual deaths from drivers striking people walking rose about 70%, from 4,302 to 7,314, making this the worst period since the early 1980s.¹² A 2022 report from the Governors Highway Safety Association projected at least 7,508 pedestrians killed in 2022 alone—the highest since 1981.³ Meanwhile, other wealthy countries have reduced pedestrian fatalities by almost 30% over roughly the same time.⁴

That gap isn’t about Americans being uniquely bad people; it’s about how we design streets and the vehicles we let dominate them.

The Not Just Bikes video on American fire trucks popularized a blunt version of this argument: our oversized apparatus and the rules written around them force streets to be too wide, too fast, and too hostile to everyone outside a car.⁵ The result: more crashes, more serious injuries, and more calls for the fire department in the first place.

What fire departments actually do (and what they drive)

If you ask most people what firefighters do, they’ll say “fight fires.” But the modern U.S. fire service is mostly a medical and rescue operation that happens to also handle fires.

According to U.S. Fire Administration data for 2020, fire departments responded to nearly 27 million calls. About 64% of those runs were for emergency medical services and rescue, while only 4% were actually fire-related.⁶

In other words: the typical call is much closer to “older adult with chest pain” than “house engulfed in flames”—yet we’re still sending enormous, 40-foot, thousand-gallon fire engines to almost everything.

At the same time, U.S. apparatus have grown ever larger and more specialized. Industry analyses comparing North American and European fire trucks note that European rigs are typically built on standard commercial truck chassis and kept as short and narrow as possible for tight city streets, while American departments tend to spec custom, longer, heavier vehicles with more onboard systems than they strictly need.⁷

That choice has consequences:

• Bigger trucks need wider lanes and turning radii.
• Wider lanes encourage higher speeds and more severe crashes.
• Those crashes generate more calls for the fire department.

It’s a feedback loop—and we’ve hard-coded it into design manuals and fire-access rules.

Wide lanes, fast traffic, and the crash math

Traffic engineers have known for decades that width and speed are deeply linked: wide lanes feel “safe” even at high speeds, which encourages people to drive faster and pay less attention.

A national study led by Johns Hopkins researchers recently quantified this using crash data from seven U.S. cities. For urban streets with speed limits of 30–35 mph, 10-, 11- and 12-foot lanes all had significantly more crashes than 9-foot lanes, even after controlling for traffic volume and street design.⁸

In other words, the “freeway-sized” 12-foot lanes that fire departments often insist on are worse for safety at typical city speeds. Narrower 9-foot lanes are associated with fewer crashes and free up space for bike lanes, wider sidewalks, or planted medians.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a transportation planner:

• You want to narrow lanes to 9–10 feet to slow traffic and carve out protected bike lanes.
• The fire department insists all streets must be wide enough for their largest trucks to drive through and set up stabilizers without blocking traffic.
• Anything that might require those trucks to slow down—raised crosswalks, tighter corners, mini-roundabouts—is treated as a threat, even if it cuts serious crashes by 70–80%.

That last number isn’t exaggerated. U.S. research on converting intersections to modern roundabouts found:

• About 39% fewer total crashes and 76% fewer injury crashes, with around 90% fewer fatal or incapacitating crashes at converted sites.⁹¹⁰
• State DOTs like Mississippi’s report 78–82% reductions in fatal and serious injuries when replacing signals and two-way stops with roundabouts.¹¹

Yet fire departments across North America have campaigned against roundabouts and other traffic-calming features on the grounds that they might slow a ladder truck by a few seconds.

The trade-off is brutal: “We must protect possible response time for a 4% slice of our calls—even if that means preserving street designs that are clearly killing thousands of people a year.”

Inman Square’s “peanutabout”: when the firehouse sits on the problem

If you want a concrete example of how fire access, messy geometry, and bike safety collide, look at Inman Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hampshire Street and Cambridge Street meet at a skewed angle there, with several side streets feeding in. A local injury-law blog describes the old configuration in blunt terms: dread, confusion, and “unexpected turning vehicles” everywhere.¹² Hampshire Street is one of the busiest bike routes in the state, and between 2008 and 2012 alone, 69 bicycle crashes were reported in Inman Square, with a 27-year-old woman killed by a truck in 2016.¹³¹⁴

Adding to the challenge: the Inman Square firehouse sits right on the intersection, and buses and trucks use the corridor heavily.

Conventional fixes—just “squaring off” the junction into T-intersections—kept running into space constraints and safety trade-offs. So a coalition of local advocates and designers went looking to northern Europe for inspiration.¹⁵

The result was the now-famous concept of a “peanutabout”: essentially two linked mini-roundabouts with a peanut-shaped central island and Dutch-style, sidewalk-level protected bike lanes looping around the outside.¹⁶

Key details matter here:

• The peanutabout concept used raised crosswalks and refuge islands to shorten pedestrian crossings and reduce turning conflicts.
• The bike lanes were continuous and separated, following best practices from Dutch “protected roundabout” design.
• Crucially, the design incorporated mountable curbs and direct access to adjacent streets specifically to accommodate fire trucks, which were known constraints from the start.

The final built project looks different today—it ended up as a reconfigured, two-intersection design rather than the pure peanut—but the same principles carried through:

• Sidewalk-level separated bike lanes,
• Protected signal phases,
• Floating bus stops and shorter crossings,
• And yes, explicit provisions for truck and fire department access baked into the engineering.¹⁷

Inman Square shows that when a city chooses to prioritize safety, it’s absolutely possible to design for both emergency access and low-speed, people-friendly streets—even with a firehouse sitting right on the corner.

But it took years of advocacy and political will to overcome the default stance: “You can’t do that; the trucks won’t fit.”

It’s not the bike lanes slowing fire trucks. It’s the cars.

When American fire departments oppose protected bike lanes or curb extensions, the public story is usually about response time: “If we narrow this road or add a roundabout, we might get stuck on the way to a fire.”

Yet videos from places like Baltimore, often used to show bike lanes “blocking” trucks, tell a different story if you watch carefully: the truck is fighting its way through a clutter of parked and double-parked cars more than anything else. The bike lane paint and plastic posts are rarely the real constraint.¹⁸

That matches what broader research and on-the-ground experience say:

• Wide, multi-lane roads induce more driving and more congestion, which slows everyone, including fire trucks.
• High traffic volumes and dense curbside parking make it hard to position apparatus, even on very wide streets.
• Fire trucks routinely get stuck on freeways and stroads that have no traffic calming, no bike lanes, and no pedestrian priority at all.

In contrast, when cities remove parking, install protected bike lanes, or add transit-only lanes, emergency vehicles often gain new “escape routes” that let them bypass queues altogether. London explicitly allows emergency services to use its cycle superhighways and bus lanes to reach incidents more quickly.¹⁹

The problem is not “bike lanes vs fire trucks.” It’s too many cars, going too fast, in too much space.

Smaller rigs, smarter response

If most calls are medical, and if oversized trucks are hurting street safety, the obvious question is: why are we still sending huge fire engines to everything?

Plenty of places—including within North America—show there’s a better way.

1. Right-sized vehicles for the right call

Daytona Beach, Florida, created a Motor Medic program using paramedic motorcycles to push through gridlocked traffic during big events like Bike Week. Their own data show response times dropping from 8–10 minutes to about 2–3 minutes when they use motorcycles instead of standard trucks in heavy congestion.²⁰

European cities deploy:

• Smaller commercial-chassis fire engines that fit on tight streets,²¹
• Ambulances and even paramedics on bikes in dense centers,²²
• And in many places, fire trucks are held back unless there’s actually a fire or a technical rescue problem to solve.

None of this stops them from fighting fires. It just stops them from bringing a 100-foot ladder and 1,000 gallons of water to every fainting spell.

2. Using safer infrastructure as emergency infrastructure

When cities build wide, continuous protected bike lanes and dedicated transit lanes, emergency services can and do use them as “priority corridors”:

• London emergency vehicles have been filmed using the Cycle Superhighway to bypass rush-hour traffic.¹⁹
• In Dutch cities, trams, buses, and emergency vehicles all share transit-priority lanes, while cars are pushed to slower, indirect routes.²³

Designing bike lanes to be comfortably wide, with mountable separators in key locations, can improve fire access and crash safety at the same time. This is exactly the logic behind proposals like the peanutabout and many Dutch-inspired designs.

3. Public AED networks and first-responder systems

If fire departments are worried about getting a defibrillator to a cardiac arrest in time, street design is only part of the puzzle.

The Netherlands has built a dense network of public automated external defibrillators (AEDs), tied into an app-based volunteer system that pages trained citizens to nearby arrests. A 2021 review notes that survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest there is around 23%, one of the highest reported in Europe, and credits widespread AED deployment and early CPR as major factors.²⁴

That’s a system-level solution: you don’t need a 40-foot truck to be the very first response if a neighbor, a shopkeeper, or a passerby can get a defibrillator onto a patient within a couple of minutes.

4. Smarter fire-access design (not just “wider everything”)

International best practice points toward:

• More connected street grids, so trucks can loop around blockages instead of demanding giant cul-de-sacs.²⁵
• Designated pull-out bays or reinforced “emergency pads” every so often, instead of making the entire street double as a fire lane—an approach used in Dutch cities to tuck apparatus off the carriageway when needed.²⁶
• Sprinklers and internal standpipes that let pumper trucks hook up farther away rather than right at a building’s front door.²⁷

All of these allow narrower everyday streets with calmer traffic, while still giving firefighters what they need during the rare moments when a big rig genuinely must be right at the curb.

Firefighters as safe-streets allies, not veto players

None of this is an attack on individual firefighters. The job is dangerous; the calls are real; the dedication is genuine. But if you take community risk seriously, it’s impossible to ignore the numbers:

• Pedestrian deaths up ~70% since 2010 in the U.S., even as peer countries have reduced them.
• Wider, high-speed lanes clearly linked to more severe crashes.
• Roundabouts and traffic calming cutting serious injury and fatal crashes by 70–80% in many contexts.
• And most fire department calls being medical, not fire, even as apparatus and access rules are still optimized around the archetypal building blaze.

If fire departments continue to:

• Oppose lane-narrowing,
• Fight roundabouts,
• Insist on freeway-scale streets through neighborhoods,
• And treat every curb extension as an existential threat,

they are unintentionally helping to preserve the very conditions that keep them so busy with crash and trauma calls.

The alternative is far more interesting:

• Smaller, more agile fleets tailored to what 21st-century calls actually are.
• Safer, narrower streets that dramatically cut the number and severity of crashes.
• Priority corridors—bike and transit lanes—that double as emergency fast lanes.
• Public AED and first-responder systems that get help to patients in minutes without a giant truck.

Cities like Cambridge, with projects like Inman Square, are quietly proving that it’s possible to square this circle: you can design for fire access and for safe, low-speed, people-first streets.

The question is whether fire departments across North America are willing to see themselves not just as guardians of the status quo, but as partners in making sure fewer emergencies happen in the first place.

References