...My nephew lives in a cul-de-sac.The houses at the end don't have driveways of their own and as such cars are parked in front of the other houses which do have drives.Thus you have a street with cars parked half on the footpath,half on the road making the access quite narrow.Recently someone has taken to parking his flatbed lorry like this and the gap is now down to a small family saloon.In the event of a fire would an emergency vehicle be permitted to effectively bulldoze its way down the street in order to access the fire,obviously causing considerable damage to the parked vehicles,or would the fear of litigation mean the property would be aloud to burn along with any possible victims.
the fire engine would (as has been known) be entitled to push vehicles out of way to get to fire (obviosuly depends on nature of fire)
I once heard of a fire engine about to do same thing (on a crowded high street because of bad parking) when the owner of one vehicle came out of takeawy he was in to say the crew that he'd just be a minute. Bad enough that the blues and twos were on, but even worse when they recognised him as a fellow firefighter!