Strong work. Looking forward to / dreading the update with the 2023 and 2024 data that I've been more involved with. RIP to all of the young people in their late teens and 20s who made the mistake of using a road for anything other than driving. RIP to the older folks who got smoked just crossing the street. RIP to everyone else who didn't deserve to go. Hopefully there is traffic calming and reliable, frequent public transit in heaven.
Unfortunately this dataset doesn't include the, probably more frequent, severe TBIs. Surely wouldn't take many patients for the cost of a hemicraniectomy, 2 week neuro-ICU stay, trach/peg, and long term acute care stay to equal the cost of a few measures to slow drivers down. Not to mention lost earning/tax potential. Too bad it's not from the same budget.
Wear your seatbelt and a helmet and hopefully you can avoid the pain of your family having to have a surprise end-of-life discussion with me.
Honestly speaking, that's an incredibly difficult issue to try and optimize for. There are a ton of different measures you could implement to try and improve ambulance travel times, but they're the same street design choices that we know drastically increase accident rates and fatalities for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike.
Wider travel lanes on normal streets? More signalized intersections with overrides for emergency services instead of roundabouts, stop signs, or other measures meant to decrease intersection accidents and fatalities? Removal of speed bumps, raised pedestrian crosswalks, etc.? Additional lanes so ambulances have space to pass other cars?
Sure, they could all ostensibly improve ambulance travel times. But they'd do so by dramatically increasing the number of fatalities on our streets. Not to mention the workload on those same emergency services. So while it can make sense to consider the impact on those services, they probably shouldn't be the driving factor. Or even a main one.
On the other hand, even if speed bumps and other measures cause minor delays, other changes might be able to balance them out. Dedicated bus lanes, for example, are basically exclusive express lanes you could choose to route emergency service vehicles down with potentially significant time savings.
In the Netherlands we have a completely seperated bus network. No speedbumps, traffic light priority and audible cue at the intersection. Works pretty well for emergency services.
Unfortunately this dataset doesn't include the, probably more frequent, severe TBIs. Surely wouldn't take many patients for the cost of a hemicraniectomy, 2 week neuro-ICU stay, trach/peg, and long term acute care stay to equal the cost of a few measures to slow drivers down. Not to mention lost earning/tax potential. Too bad it's not from the same budget.
Wear your seatbelt and a helmet and hopefully you can avoid the pain of your family having to have a surprise end-of-life discussion with me.