The Oakland Fire Department is mandated by state law to adopt an updated fire code every three years — and the latest one is supposed to be in place by January 1. The code is extensive, because it governs everything from building evacuation requirements to how the city designs its roads so that firefighters can quickly respond in an emergency. This time around, the city’s Transportation Department and safe street advocates are again pushing for changes that will allow for more traffic-calming road designs. 

Two key issues are at the core of the debate between fire protection and safe streets: One, the width of the streets. Two, traffic-slowing infrastructure such as speed bumps, bulbouts, and wide protected bike lanes. 

As reported by The Oaklandside during the last code rewrite, the Fire Department prefers to keep roads in Oakland wide enough to accommodate their big fire trucks as they speed to a site and set up to respond. That setup includes outriggers and ladders that make the fire rig as big as 19 feet wide. 

Yet, as safe streets advocates have consistently pointed out, wide streets encourage speeding by drivers and lead to dozens of deaths and major injuries each year in Oakland. 

At last week’s meeting of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission’s policy committee, a representative of the Fire Department, Javan Smith, said that the department will recommend that fire code officials approve two main sections for the city that are optional in California, Section 503 and Appendix D, which would require:

20 feet of unobstructed road width, exclusive of shoulders (Section 503) on streets with buildings lower than 30 feet

A minimum of 26 feet of unobstructed width, not including shoulders, for roads abutting tall buildings, above 30 feet

26 feet of unobstructed width near  hydrants, excluding shoulders

Those provisions would also give the fire marshal the ability to approve road clearance to enable trucks to turn and to approve all traffic-calming devices for all of Oakland’s streets.

Together, these recommendations would make standards in Oakland stricter than they have been for the last three years. In 2022, the Oakland City Council approved a fire code without Section 503 and Appendix D because of worries about traffic violence. That year was one of the city’s most lethal, with 35 people dying from collisions. 

Kevin Dalley, who co-chairs the BPAC policy committee, said the recommendations would place Oakland’s code more in line with the international fire code when it comes to road width minimums and road access. This is the case, he said, even though fire staff have increasingly participated in open, collaborative conversations with the Transportation Department and safe streets advocates on road design. 

“The easiest way to be in accordance with the state is to make no changes” to the city code, Dalley told us. That’s part of what the committee will likely recommend to the larger BPAC body and to the City Council. “There is amazing progress in the fire marshal’s understanding of the risks of wide streets,” Dalley continued. “I hope that the fire code can reflect this progress.”

Smith also said at last week’s meeting that the conversations between OakDOT and OFD have been productive, allowing the city to design roads safely on a case-by-case basis. 

“On Broadway, from about 7th Street to 19th Street, there are high-rises above and BART beneath and our position is we need 26 feet of width there,” he told the committee. “High-rise building response requires many apparatus — outriggers, multiple vehicles. Also BART access points. We’ll insist on 26 feet there. Below 6th Street, maybe less — 22 feet could be fine. Above 19th, it comes down; there is no more BART concern — so not expecting 26 feet of width there.”

OFD has sometimes rejected proposed changes to roads if it believes they would negatively impact its life-saving and property-saving operations. 

Oakland safe streets advocates, such as Traffic Violence Rapid Response, claim some of those rejected infrastructure updates could have saved lives. 

In 2022, the death on 14th Street of cyclist Dmitry Putilov, a deaf man and a father of two, came about in the aftermath of a decision by OFD to slow down plans to narrow the road, which could have made it faster and easier for Putilov to cross the street. His death prompted the City Council to expedite a new road redesign with wide protected bike lanes. That redesign, which will narrow the roadway, is still in construction, next to City Hall.

Any changes to the fire code will take effect in the new year. Over the next month, OFD will draft amendments to the code and present them to the BPAC. Then, the City Council’s Public Works and Transportation Committee will discuss the proposed code changes, including those affecting transit. BPAC is likely to send the committee’s recommendation to the City Council for a vote. If the council doesn’t approve the code changes by December 31, California’s fire code would temporarily take effect. 

The next public meeting where the fire code will be discussed is BPAC’s monthly meeting, scheduled to take place at City Hall on Thursday, November 20, at 6 p.m.

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