Making the main staircase more fire-resistant is great but I'm not fully convinced by the arguments for removing external ones instead of having both.

If the main stairs do turn out to be impassable for some reason despite the new measures, I'd much rather have the option to risk taking an external fire escape even if it might be rusty or blocked by clutter.

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jccooper 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every large building in the last 100 years has been built with multiple integral fire-safe paths of egress for the very reason that a path should be available if one is blocked. The design of buildings is very much conditioned on tables in the fire code about how many paths of egress, how large they must be, and how long they can be based on how many people need to be evacuated. (Not to mention how many hours of fire each door and partition must be designed to resist.) It's kind of a PITA. And it works very well.

External fire escapes are merely the retrofit allowed to old single-stairway buildings to get them to be vaguely as safe as a modern building.

	▲	fishtoaster 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In San Francisco, there's a bit of a push right now to re-allow single-stair design ("Single Stair Reform") for certain buildings (eg up to 4 or up to 6 stories). Requiring two stairways makes sense from a fire safety perspective, but it's made it incredibly difficult to cost-effectively build medium-size buildings on oddly-shaped lots. It's tradeoffs all the way down!

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wffurr 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of buildings now require at least two stairwells for buildings over three stories. There's talk in Massachusetts of easing that requirement the requirement to four or six stories, which is more common worldwide and could help build more affordable housing.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/28/opinion/stairwells-bu...

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the__alchemist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Note: This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. Depressing line corridors, and only one side of windows unless you're in the corner. Other countries don't have the double stairway requirement, and are prettier as a result.

	▲	somat 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A particularly dramatic example of this is Baltimore's Bromo tower https://www.bromoseltzertower.com/about/virtual-tour It was turned into some sort of artist studios, and as a minor architecture nerd i was having fun looking at the floor plans. The two staircases right next to each other confused me. Turns out it is that same requirement to have two independent stairwells and that was probably the least worst place to put them. Still stupid however. Are the two elevators a code requirement as well? See also: The Newby–McMahon Building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_littlest_skyscraper Where they sort of want to use the upper floors. but it can barely fit one staircase, two would take up the entire floor, a building code quandary.
	▲	cucumber3732842 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>This requirement is a contributor to US apartments being ugly. US apartments look ugly because the IBC has been picked over by every flavor of money grubbing business interests masquerading as concerned do gooders. Once you filter out all the options rendered financially noncompetitive by each of their bought and paid for rules there's only a few paths to a viable building. You might have a dozen megacorps buying windows from a dozen suppliers but those dozen times dozen theoretical options are the same thing in practice because that's what it takes to hit Leed Platinum (TM) or whatever. Seriously. Go watch some 80s/90s movies that were set in the then present day. Those cube farms have more diversity of style and material than anything today.