City staff recently told us that we cannot have the Telegraph Holiday Fair or the Juneteenth Festival at their usual locations because of the fire code’s 26-foot rule, which says streets with buildings more than 30 feet high must have at least 26 feet of clear roadway to accommodate emergency vehicles.
This rule has been part of our city fire code for years, but the Berkeley Fire Department has generally ignored it, until it recently started enforcing the rule in an inconsistent and arbitrary way.
Some city staff members have said that state law requires us to move these craft fairs, but this is untrue. The 26-foot rule is in Appendix D of the state fire code, which is optional. Oakland, San Francisco and Emeryville — all with taller buildings than Berkeley — have chosen to not adopt it. It does not work in older cities with narrow streets, like these nearby cities and Berkeley.
Berkeley has an opportunity to replace the 26-foot rule with guidelines that work for our city.
Most likely on Dec. 2, the City Council is expected to have a public hearing on a new fire code, and staff proposes including the optional 26-foot rule. The City Council should refer the 26-foot rule to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and to the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, so they can replace this generic state standard with guidelines designed for Berkeley.
The 26-foot rule is stifling Berkeley.
The 26-foot rule will not let us have street fairs. The city wants to move the Telegraph and Juneteenth Street Fairs to the block of Adeline next to BART, where the buildings are less than 30 feet tall, but soon mid-rise housing will be built in the BART parking lot, and that block will also be off-limit to street fairs. The aggressive application of this rule has already made farmers markets around the city adopt more awkward layouts.
The 26-foot rule will make it almost impossible to create attractive plazas. The city has long talked about pedestrianizing Center Street and Telegraph Avenue near campus, but this rule would leave a 26-foot swath of the pedestrian street lifeless, devoid of seating, plantings and sculptures.
The 26-foot rule, if it were consistently applied, would require the removal of half the parking on most of our residential streets. The typical residential street in Berkeley is about 36 feet wide, and has parked cars on both sides taking about 14 feet, leaving only 22 feet of clear roadway. To blindly follow the 26-foot rule, Berkeley would have to remove parking from one side of residential streets if they have any buildings more than 30 feet high — and given the recent changes in zoning, that may eventually include almost all residential streets.
The 26-foot rule, if it were consistently applied, would force Berkeley to remove the bulb-outs on Telegraph Avenue, where street vendors have sold goods for more than a half century. There are only about 22 feet of clear roadway between these bulb-outs, so if the rule had been in place when the street was redesigned, we would never have been able to build them. If the Fire Department were consistent, it would not only remove the street fair from Telegraph but also make us jack-hammer the bulb-outs on Telegraph and kill the trees that grow in them.
It makes no sense to blindly adopt the 26-foot rule in Berkeley, since our streets are so narrow that this rule does not even let us have parking on both sides of most residential streets.
The Fire Department is focused on its primary commitment to fight fires, and rightly so, but the 26-foot rule has many other implications. The city needs to balance all the issues that are involved.
The City Council should pass the rest of the fire code but should refer the 26-foot rule to the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission and the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission, which can come up with guidelines that accommodate all stakeholders. Austin has developed its own street guidelines that work for the Fire Department and also for other street users, and if they can do it in Texas, we can do it in Berkeley.
Benjamin Fry is a a longtime cyclist and advocate for Safe Streets, raising two children in BUSD. He is a member of Walk Bike Berkeley, Bike East Bay, and ride leader for East Bay Kidical Mass.
Charles Siegel has long been an advocate of safe streets in Berkeley, beginning with the Milvia Slow Street in the 1980s. He is a member of Walk Bike Berkeley.
“*” indicates required fields