Despite common concerns that narrower traffic lanes and bike infrastructure can slow emergency response, response times in one study didn’t change.
A study that sought to quantify the impact of road diets on emergency response times found that “there was virtually no difference in emergency response travel time (in min/km) after a road conversion compared to before, both in total and when they looked at specific road diets.”
As Jonathan M. Gitlin explains in Ars Technica, a research team from the University of Iowa surveyed first responders. Roughly half of the first responders surveyed believed there was no change in response time, while a third believed response times slowed down and 16 percent thought response times became faster.
The team then looked at specific response times from three fire districts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where road diets were installed, finding no change in response times. The study is an important part of the debate over traffic calming tools such as lane width reduction, which has been shown to improve traffic safety — thus also reducing the need for emergency response to traffic crashes.
FULL STORY: Bike lanes and narrowed streets don’t slow emergency vehicles
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research