291–300 of 309 posts
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2 stairways are much harder to block than one, especially if they are at opposite ends of the structure. One person will struggle to keep them blocked. That’s a whole lot better than 1 stairwell!
Why? Lock one, go to the other, douse it with something flammable, light it. Anyway. Most of the world does not go up in flames regularly, despite having not having this regulation.
Some folks would get stuck and not get out, but it generally requires dedicated eyes on a crowd if you want to keep them inside something for any length of time. Hence prison guards, locks being a dedicated profession, etc.
I live in an apartment with 2 staircases, an elevator, and a fire escape. Several months ago, there was a fire in a first floor apartment that blocked me from using ALL of them, via either unbreathable smoke or flames. I ended up just hiding in my room until the fire department dealt with it. I'm not sure whether this argues for more staircases or fewer. (In hindsight I did have other options, but this was my first f…
If the building is properly compartmentalized, you're supposed to stay in your apartment in case of a fire (unless yours is the one that's on fire, obviously!)
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The problem is the 2nd staircase creates the need for a hallway between the staircases. Look at the floor plans in the article. In one you've got units clustered around a staircase landing. In the other you've got a long hallway and 2 staircases with units along the hallway.
Yes and when the fire alarm goes off every family crushes into that tiny space and tries to get down one staircase. Not to mention countless other bad situations. There's qualitative reasons not to maximize this. Build up one more floor, problem solved.
So you can somehow get a zillion floors of people down 2 stairwells, but only one floor of people down one?
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And steel, or reinforced concrete are safer than both.
Where in the world are single-family homes typically made of steel or reinforced concrete? Note: not apartments. Houses.
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The price differential reflects the high cost of devoting space to parking, not of the demand for it. A parking space require not only the square footage for the car, but also the lane to get to the parking space. A constructed parking space is equivalent to 1-2 bedrooms worth of living space, which is a huge difference in real estate prices.
It sounds like you haven't ever actually been in a garage. The lane to the spaces is shared by all the spaces, and the garage also houses electrical distribution, water supply, heating and cooling which couldn't be co-located with a unit anyway. It would be at best storage space, and at worst it would just go to waste.
Take a look at any aerial view of a parking lot and you'll see that only roughly half of the are is dedicated to parking spaces.
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Can you imagine hundreds of people trying to rapidly descend ladders. A good chuck of the population physically couldn’t do it. Not to mention mistakes from the rush. And to actually save space you would have to make these ladder decent zones very small which would be dangerous itself.
How about a spiral slide?
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Everyone in the comments is raising the (valid) fire safety argument; however, I'd like to point out that this is a non-obvious trade-off. How many house fires are there? How many of them are in tall buildings? How many of them would block just one stair, and not two? Yes, there is a probability that an extra stair will save your life; however, this is a very tiny probability, against a certainty of extra living spac…
The problem is that you can't track how many disasters were prevented by having two means of egress, so I cant imagine there are real statistics on that I hate the space argument because its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue - make the building 1 floor taller, or don't cram your residents just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.
You need to go back and read the article more closely. It's a HUGE quality of life issue; mainly US building codes restrict apartments to one side of the building which has all kinds of implications - cross airflow, alignment of rooms with the sun - and the ability to have more variety of sizes of units to better meet needs that currently go unmet, especially with families.
I mean if you look at the article the majority of it is all about quality of life - not only for the apartments, but greater/more effective use of the stairwells and common areas.
If you want to save space maybe eliminate the parking lot/garage before you eliminate the extra staircase.
Wouldn't that make parking pretty annoying? Anecdotally, at least in SF, lack of parking options set a home's value back pretty far.