One of the biggest differences between Europe and North America in this regard is that in European cities, emergency vehicles have to be designed to fit a 1000-year-old city in terms of width, turning radius, maximum weight, etc. This leads to a much more compact shape and shorter wheelbase.
In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example.
The narrowest street in San Francisco is roughly a regular European street. This[1] is par for the course on most European cities, while San Francisco has very few streets narrower than this[2] (and the average is probably wider, if you look anywhere westwards of Park Presidio where theoretically two way streets are wide enough for traffic to continue flowing in both direction even with double parked trucks.
I would also point out that I'd prefer narrower streets in SF[3].
Just as a side point... A lot of architects like this idea from an aesthetic or architectural-sociological reasons.
Living in em.. these as houses don't give you a lot of privacy. People walk by, less than a meter from where you're sitting. They sometimes stop to look at your TV.
You get used to it, but it's not the kind of thing people go looking for on purpose.
A truck being small is not incompatible with a truck being a beautiful shade of red polished to a shine. Just look at Japanese firetrucks. They have some very small trucks that look great.
In North America streets are designed to fit emergency vehicles. You're not allowed to build a street so narrow that a fire engine couldn't turn around there, for example.