FOCUS
Narrow escape Roger Brereton points to Singapore’s new age
fire appliances, remodelled to negotiate its narrow streets, as fine examples of flexible modern design Singapore’s redesign has been developed
box shape. Designed for narrow urban streets, the vehicles look more like a rugged SUV than a traditional truck. But what does this unique redesign tell us about forthcoming changes for the wider emergency vehicle industry?
I Singapore’s cutting edge remodel1 of the
traditional fi re appliance design still has enough space to fit five people and a completely integrated compressed air foam pump system. So does this launch mark the end of the conventional fire appliance for the rest of the world? Probably not. But it does show that emergency vehicles can break conventions and still be fully functional. City streets are getting slimmer – much
to the dismay of emergency vehicle drivers. Anyone who lives in a city will have witnessed large fire appliances struggling to squeeze through traffic on narrow streets, and as a result potentially losing valuable seconds in a high stakes call out.
36 APRIL 2020
www.frmjournal.com
N SINGAPORE, the country’s civil defence force has launched a radical line of new age fi re appliances to replace the conventional
to solve this problem. Back in 2014, US fi refi ghters called for wider roads to be built2
in San
Francisco, California. The government publicly opposed this, arguing for narrower, safer streets. While this may seem counterintuitive, they argued that wider urban streets encourage faster driving and lead to deadlier collisions. Interestingly, research backs up this argument. A study by civil engineer Dewan Karim on intersections in Toronto and Tokyo3
found that
lower crash rates were linked to lanes measuring 10 to 10.5ft in width, compared to 12ft wide lanes.
Narrower roads get the thumbs up from
governments, leaving vehicle manufacturers reconsidering emergency vehicle design. After all, a fire appliance normally measures between 7 to 9ft wide, and on a 10ft wide road that will leave very little room for error. What’s more, it is not just road width that is causing issues: higher volumes of traffic and excessive on road parking can also cause problems for emergency vehicles when navigating domestic roads.
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