Fire Safety and Safe Streets: Understanding Conflicts between Safe Streets Improvements and Emergency Response
Project Description
In this project we propose to address the following questions related to conflicts between fire departments and safe streets efforts: When and why do fire safety and street safety goals come into conflict? What institutional arrangements, design processes, and other practices are emerging to reconcile these conflicts to improve overall community safety? How might best practices for avoiding conflict and finding synergies be replicated from city to city?
The project includes four main components: 1) assembling a national Community Advisory Committee of 8-12 members from across a range of relevant areas of expertise; 2) a review of existing scholarly and gray literatures on conflicts between bike and pedestrian safety and emergency response; 3) construction of a national database of conflicts between street safety upgrades and emergency response demands from 2010 to 2024; 4) development of 3 to 5 in-depth case studies of street safety / emergency response conflicts drawing on stakeholder interviews, local media, project documentation, and public meeting records. Deliverables include: the conflict database, a research paper, and a public report.
Outputs
Conflict database: database of conflicts between street safety interventions and emergency response demands across the US in the years 2010-2024.
Research paper: one peer-reviewed research paper summarizing findings, identifying areas of common areas of conflict and tradeoffs as well as strategies for overcoming conflict.
Public report: one public-facing white paper summarizing key findings for a wider audience.
Outcomes / Impacts
Our hope is that, by identifying patterns of conflict and methods for overcoming those conflicts, we will enable advocates, planners, and emergency response officials to institute better co-design processes to avoid conflicts and to resolve them effectively when they do arise.
Dates
06/01/2024 to 05/31/2025
Universities
University of California at Berkeley
Principal Investigator
Zachary Lamb
University of California at Berkeley
ORCID: 0000-0001-6701-3728
Research Project Funding
Federal: $86,736
Contract Number
69A3552348336
Project Number
24UCB02
Research Priority
Promoting Safety