I live in a London apartment building with a single staircase, which is standard here. The difference in principle seems to relate to “what happens when there’s a fire?”. Here, we don’t need to escape if there’s a fire in the building[1], because regulations demand walls, floors and doors that can withstand many hours of fire, which provides more than enough time for the fire service to attend and extinguish the fire. My building specifically asks residents to shelter in place.
If a fire in my neighbours apartment meant I needed to escape, certainly an extra egress point would be nice, but the solution to that problem seems to be… better fire isolation.
[1] The grenfell disaster (mentioned by the article) was so deadly because people sheltered in place as instructed… but that building had been modified without following regulations.
If a fire in my neighbours apartment meant I needed to escape, certainly an extra egress point would be nice, but the solution to that problem seems to be… better fire isolation.
[1] The grenfell disaster (mentioned by the article) was so deadly because people sheltered in place as instructed… but that building had been modified without following regulations.