A finance bro and a rocket scientist discuss fire trucks.
Sam Louwrens - Perspective I
Government waste is a hot button issue lately.
In the United States, bureaucrats have an essentially bottomless cash pool to swim in. The consequences of this are systemic inefficiencies, gross overspending, and top-down brute-force solutions to problems that require a more nuanced approach. One interesting example of this: fire trucks.
Remember the Vehicular Arms Race? One of the potential solutions to reducing pedestrian deaths and improving road safety in the US is narrowing road infrastructure and reducing speed limits in urban areas.
If one were to attend city meetings where these sensible policies might be on the agenda, however, they would find a common detractor: Fire Departments. But why is that? Why are Fire Departments routinely lobbying against efforts to build narrower roads or narrow existing road infrastructure?
Enter: American fire trucks.
Most fire trucks are customized by department, though the typical apparatus is a 40-foot behemoth built on a custom chassis, designed to carry at least 1,000 gallons of water, pressurized foam tanks, a 100ft quint ladder, and tools for every disaster imaginable from earthquakes to gas leaks. To accommodate for the sheer size of these vehicles, the Uniform Fire Code requires roadways to be at least 20’ in width.
This is where the problem compounds: these vehicles are grossly over-engineered for their actual use-case scenario. Only 4% of incidents that fire trucks respond to are fire-related. The majority (A staggering 64% of incidents) are EMS-related. Taking into account that the vast majority of EMS incidents are related to cardiac arrest, that means that two-million-dollar vehicles with an 8-man crew are routinely DoorDashing defibrillators to elderly people. Yes, this is unironically the status quo.
The issue appears to stem from bureaucrats prioritizing the wrong metrics for emergency response. In order to improve response time for their gargantuan trucks, Fire Departments built more fire stations and bought more fire trucks. This allowed them to expand their response network and have more trucks readily available to respond to fires in different areas.
When this strategy invariably resulted in fire trucks vastly outnumbering ambulances (in some cases by 2:1, such as in Chicago), they naturally became the most convenient EMS response vehicle for emergency dispatchers. This is despite fire trucks not being designed for transporting passengers or responding to most medical emergencies.
A far simpler and cost-effective solution would be to pivot from custom chassis fire trucks to commercial chassis fire trucks, such as those that are common in Europe. Not only is this the global standard, but response time will improve (due to reduced size & increased mobility), federal money could be saved, and one of the biggest obstacles to redesigning American road infrastructure will be eliminated.
John Schlaerth III - Perspective II
At the beginning of any engineering project, the team and senior leadership develop requirements. This is true in all engineering fields, from rocket science to computer engineering. In the defense industry, requirements flow down to defense contractors from the government, often from technically knowledgeable military officers or government scientists.
Ultimately, requirements must be bounded by feasibility, both technical and financial. A determination of feasibility may stem from mathematical analysis, but a large part of determining requirements is a result of the judgment of the people involved, often based on years of personal experience.
When kicking off a project, it’s important to bring people with in-depth experience and people from a diverse set of relevant backgrounds in order to determine the requirements that “make the most sense.” Failing to include a member of the Operations group (the group that physically machines a part) to the table when discussing mechanical design requirements is one example of a process which likely lands on a suboptimal requirement solution.
Expanding on the issue Sam discussed on the topic of fire fighter infrastructure, it appears that there may be an issue in the requirements process when it comes to the problem of engineering an effective fire-fighting system. Lobbying on the part of fire-fighting entities to alter infrastructure standards, such as road width, could be a result of an ineffective solution approach. If the problem is that our current fire trucks need more space on roads to maneuver properly, one may say a reasonable solution would be to widen the roads. Fire agencies which branch out from the government would likely be biased towards this solution, as the government has control over infrastructure.
If a workman is familiar with a certain set of tools, he will likely use those tools to solve most problems ahead of him, even if they are not the right tool for the job. Regarding the fire vehicle problem, a cheaper solution may simply be to redesign our current fire vehicles for better optimization.
This approach has already been taken with the Grumman LLV, the main mail truck in the US Postal Service fleet. In the 1980’s, the defense contractor Grumman (now Northrop-Grumman) was tasked with designing a car that was heavily optimized for delivering mail. The main feature of this vehicle was its ability to execute extremely tight turns, a feature which would significantly improve efficiency in mail delivery.
Now, decades later, the USPS fleet has a significant successor, the Oshkosh NGDV (Next Generation Delivery Vehicle). The contract value for the NGDV was valued at approximately $6 billion. To pave one mile of road, the cost can typically range anywhere from $2.5 to $5 million. Assuming a department would want to expand a road by 5-10% to accommodate larger vehicles, it would cost the United States government between $525 billion (on the low end) to $2.1 trillion to expand the 4.2 million miles of road in the United States.
For someone working in government who knows how to influence state policy, changing standards may be the obvious solution, but incorporating more viewpoints, such as the engineering input, could uncover solutions to a problem which leaders may have not thought of.
Problems have numerous dimensions and numerous consequences. Ensuring the right people contribute to a solution and evaluate all options ensure a minimization of unintended 3rd order consequences while generating an optimal result.
At the extreme of this engineering philosophy is “design by bureaucratic committee,” and that has a host of its own problems. One cannot anticipate all potential requirements or even where a solution will lead. The engineering process of intelligent testing and iteration, starting with a reasonable approach to a problem fueled by multiple viewpoints, is the best method we have for solving real world problems.
Insisting that one’s solution is right, and even lobbying for an unvetted solution, leads to an almost certain suboptimal outcome with multiple unintended consequences.
Sam Louwrens
Lead Editor
John Schlaerth III
Contributor
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