Tag: nyc

Dismantling fire departments

Fires have become much rarer, there are too many firefighters. Which is why you see them responding to medical emergencies. Like all organizations, they fight downsizing.

City records show that major fires are becoming vanishingly rare. In 1975, there were 417 of them. Last year, there were 40. That’s a decline of more than 90%. A city that was once a tinderbox of wooden houses has become a much less vulnerable place.

The number of professional firefighters in Boston has dropped only slightly, from around 1600 in the 1980s to just over 1400 today

2014-06-27: Can Fire Stations do health duties?

A new firehouse clinic in California shows how an abundant but under-used public resource—fire stations—can be made even more useful for a community.

We have too many firefighters now due to improved building codes, but like any organization, they resist being shrunk to the correct size. That’s why you often see 3 trucks being dispatched to save a kitten.

2022-10-06: Why do Fire Departments still exist?

According to the 2021 statistics of the FDNY, they attended 1213750 incidents. That’s a lot of fires. But when you take those incidents apart, it emerges that ‘Fire Incidents’ make up less than 25% of calls. Even then, the 290643 ‘Fire Incidents’ cover things from actual fires to malicious false calls, with structural fires being 10639 – the vast majority are more medical incidents. In much of America, the fire departments often take up the role that ambulance services would in Europe. 65% of ambulances in New York are run by the fire department, with the remainder from hospitals.

After Bloomberg

For the past 12 years, New York City residents have lived in a reality-distortion field created by a man who spent $260m of his own money to get elected 3 times, and who expresses disdain for interest groups, which he can afford to ignore. Bars and businesses have carped about his smoking ban. Public-employee unions have denounced him as a robber baron. Anti-poverty organizers have assailed his budget cuts. Civil-liberties groups, the Times editorial page, and most Democratic candidates for mayor criticize him for allowing police officers to engage in racial profiling; last week, a federal judge ruled that the city’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional. But the job of mayor is to “say no.” “Everybody would like to have everything at no cost. That’s normal. That’s not the real world. It’s easy to say yes. It’s not easy to say no when people scream at you at a parade, give you the finger, criticize you in the paper.”

i don’t get why there are confused people campaigning on behalf of the losers now running for nyc mayor. none of them are in the least bit inspiring, and seem to be competing solely on the basis of who can roll back all the hard-won progress of the last few years the fastest.

For better and occasionally for worse, the rarefied experience Bloomberg brought to the job defined his tenure. Most obviously that began with his billions, which allowed him to self-finance his campaigns and remain largely unbeholden to the city’s clamoring interest groups. Freed from the obligations of retail politics, he could staff his government with top talent rather than people holding political chits. With a few conspicuous exceptions, he hired people of passion and competence. He invited them to experiment, a rare thing in the risk-averse culture of government, but he held them accountable with obsessive attention to metrics. His City Hall, like his eponymous company, was built on the power of information. The great urban contraption that is New York City government has probably never been so well run.

NYC 2030

i’m a fan of nyc’s plan for 2030, the sort of large-scale, long-term thinking cities ought to be invested in, but which is very rare in practice, even though most of society’s wealth is produced in cities. it’s fun to contrast this to Hyperurbanization which is full of eye-opening stuff like

The next 10 years will see the largest transformation of our built environment ever. 50% of what will be the built environment in 2030 doesn’t exist today.