While cops have done a fantastic job of burning any goodwill they may have had, the same can’t be said about firefighters. They show up, fight fires, save people’s lives and then go back to oiling up their abs for the next calendar shoot or whatever it is they do in their off time. Also, a lot of fire departments have cute dogs that aren’t trained to snitch on you for a little weed. And yet, as the latest video from Not Just Bikes points out, fire departments’ policies also get people killed.
If you haven’t traveled extensively to other countries, it would be understandable for you to assume the firetrucks you see here are as big as they are because they have to be. And since firetrucks are so big, we obviously need to make sure our roads are wide enough to accommodate them, right? After all, you wouldn’t want anyone to die in an emergency because the firefighters couldn’t get to you in time, right? Especially when you consider how painful it is to burn to death, it just makes sense.
The thing is, that’s just not true. Other developed countries use significantly smaller fire trucks and fire engines, and somehow, neither France nor the UK has been reduced to ashes. In fact, both countries have significantly lower fire death rates than the U.S. So their smaller trucks work just fine for fighting fires. American fire departments could easily adopt European-style fire trucks without an issue, but they refuse to, instead insisting our roads be built around their needs instead of the other way around.
Ironically, firefighters in the U.S. don’t do a lot of firefighting. That only accounts for 3.9 percent of their runs, with another 8.0 percent being false alarms. A massive 64.2 percent of their runs are responding to other emergencies such as heart attacks and grandmas slipping in their showers. Do you need thousands of gallons of water to respond to someone having a heart attack? Of course not. And yet, they send their 40-foot-long firetrucks anyway even though one firefighter on a motorcycle could almost definitely get there with a defibrillator.
The wide lanes the fire departments demand result in wide streets that encourage speeding, leading to more crashes and deaths. With their singular focus on eliminating anything that might possibly slow response times — whether it’s roundabouts, bike lanes or sensibly designed streets — they’re actively making our streets more dangerous. Meanwhile, they couldn’t care less about cars, the one thing that legitimately gets in their way all the time. In Europe, smaller fire trucks can hop into protected bike lanes that are designed to be used as travel lanes in the event of an emergency. Meanwhile, an American fire truck stuck in traffic is just stuck in traffic.
This is, of course, a far more complex topic, and Not Just Bikes goes a lot deeper than we have time to summarize for you here, so be sure to watch the full video below.