A car may have plowed into a crowd on Bourbon Street early on Wednesday, the New Orleans Police Department reported, according to ABC News affiliate WGNO.
I was thinking of blocking every street between Canal to the West, Rampart to the North, Esplanade to the East and Decatur to the South. I’ve been to the NOLA French Quarter before and know how busy it gets around event nights. The streets I mentioned surrounding the french quarter are wide enough to bring a massive truck in. The spacing will be wide enough for the mounted police the city employs, or motorbikes where needed, but not enough for cars.
Fire departments need to quit insisting on buying the most massive trucks they can possibly find in every situation. Places outside the US get by just fine with much smaller fire trucks than we use (especially for lower density / low-rise areas). We’ve got to quit turning our residential streets into freeways by building them so wide, and the trucks’ bulk and turning radius needs to stop being an excuse.
If you build high buildings, you need more ladder as a rule of thumb. You can either have more stations, some with smaller gear, or you can economically consolidate.
At this point they’re often doing more harm (in terms of wide streets with channelized intersections making pedestrians less safe from traffic) than good (in terms of providing truck access in the event of a fire), especially for stations serving single-family neighborhoods.
They need to pay the slight extra cost to have different kinds of appropriate equipment for different areas; it’s worth it. It doesn’t happen because the fire department isn’t considering the traffic effects and nobody’s really looking at the big picture.
I wonder how cost-effective doing that would be and also what the damage potential to the street would be? I realize those are callous things to talk about when you’re talking about protecting people’s lives, but unfortunately American cities run on whether or not people think their taxpayer dollars are being spent properly.
They would do far less damage to the roads than the normal traffic rolling over them would over the same period. Damage to the road occurs primarily through point loads. These are distributed area loads that only exert a modest pressure on the ground.
A simple solution to me would be to place concrete blocks like this
Using a truck like this
That’s what my city does when there is a street party.
Not possible. The French quarter is very small with narrow streets which are used daily when there are no events
If a garbage truck or delivery truck can get there, then so can a forklift bringing the blocks in from an adjacent street or staging area.
FFS
I was thinking of blocking every street between Canal to the West, Rampart to the North, Esplanade to the East and Decatur to the South. I’ve been to the NOLA French Quarter before and know how busy it gets around event nights. The streets I mentioned surrounding the french quarter are wide enough to bring a massive truck in. The spacing will be wide enough for the mounted police the city employs, or motorbikes where needed, but not enough for cars.
I hope you also will leave room for fire trucks
Fire departments need to quit insisting on buying the most massive trucks they can possibly find in every situation. Places outside the US get by just fine with much smaller fire trucks than we use (especially for lower density / low-rise areas). We’ve got to quit turning our residential streets into freeways by building them so wide, and the trucks’ bulk and turning radius needs to stop being an excuse.
If you build high buildings, you need more ladder as a rule of thumb. You can either have more stations, some with smaller gear, or you can economically consolidate.
These two fire trucks have pretty much the same ladder length, despite one truck being nearly twice as long:
The wheels are presumably similar sized by the way.
At this point they’re often doing more harm (in terms of wide streets with channelized intersections making pedestrians less safe from traffic) than good (in terms of providing truck access in the event of a fire), especially for stations serving single-family neighborhoods.
They need to pay the slight extra cost to have different kinds of appropriate equipment for different areas; it’s worth it. It doesn’t happen because the fire department isn’t considering the traffic effects and nobody’s really looking at the big picture.
Certainly, an event emergency plan would include one or two service entrances with the blocks placed slightly further apart.
I wonder how cost-effective doing that would be and also what the damage potential to the street would be? I realize those are callous things to talk about when you’re talking about protecting people’s lives, but unfortunately American cities run on whether or not people think their taxpayer dollars are being spent properly.
A minor sized town near me uses these types of blocks regularly to block off the main street for pedestrians.
I’ll also say I’ve seen Philadelphia just park garbage trucks to block off roads.
Now a garbage truck sounds like a good, cost-effective solution.
They’ll need the garbage truck there at the end of the party anyway.
And if you get too drunk and pass out on the sidewalk, you don’t wake up in the police dunk tank. Instead you wake up in the city dump!
They would do far less damage to the roads than the normal traffic rolling over them would over the same period. Damage to the road occurs primarily through point loads. These are distributed area loads that only exert a modest pressure on the ground.