{"id":169226531,"date":"2010-05-13T15:22:11","date_gmt":"2010-05-13T15:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/?p=169226531"},"modified":"2010-05-13T15:22:11","modified_gmt":"2010-05-13T15:22:11","slug":"the-fallacy-of-speed-and-emergency-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/?p=169226531","title":{"rendered":"The Fallacy of Speed and Emergency Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

[B’ Spokes: note that sometimes emergency response time is used to to keep residential neighborhoods car centric and bike unfriendly.]<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

by Tom Vanderbilt<\/p>\n

One of the oft-cited complaints about any sort of traffic calming treatment (speed bumps, narrowing streets, etc. etc.) is \u2018what about emergency response?\u2019 This has become something of a knee-jerk response, and it\u2019s said with such seeming authority that it seems impolite, at the very least, to question it, even if it means we allow our local streets to become a source of daily unpleasantness and danger to accommodate what are statistically very rare needs (and there has been some good work<\/a> on so-called \u201cemergency response friendly\u201d traffic calming).<\/p>\n

After all, what individual, when questioned, wouldn\u2019t intuitively want to be whisked to the hospital as fast as possible, or have fire crews sent racing to their house with minimal delay? I began thinking differently on this topic after meeting Nadine Levick<\/a> at a traffic conference last fall. Over lunch, Nadine, a tireless crusader on a subject outside of most people\u2019s purview, noted to me, according to one survey, riding in an ambulance, per mile, was one of the most dangerous things a person can do. And not simply because of, as you might imagine, clueless drivers not noticing an ambulance blazing through an intersection \u2014 but often because of unsafe actions by drivers themselves, as well as alarmingly substandard ambulance design (ambulances are not regulated by NHTSA for the crash protection of the occupants in the back; she\u2019s got loads of horrific slides of the \u201cboxes\u201d having flown off the vehicle in a crash, and I\u2019d urge you to otherwise delve into the site). The underlying sense I got from her was that of a sort of macho heroic undertone to emergency response, albeit shot through with the best of intentions, to get to or from the emergency with greatest possible haste \u2014 damn the consequences.<\/p>\n

In any case, I thought of this again today thanks to an excellent article at Slate<\/a>, by two medical personnel, that points out something that Levick was getting it: Despite the notion we may have that lives are at stake and a delay of a few minutes will be the crucial difference (isn\u2019t it better for the speeding up to happen at the hospital end, or to work on better preventative and monitoring measures?), it turns out, as the authors note, \u201cnot to be backed up by good science\u2019; and, what\u2019s more, as they note, the risks taken in fast transport (to those outside the vehicle as well) may exceed whatever medical benefits are gained. <\/p>\n


\nhttps:\/\/www.howwedrive.com\/2010\/05\/12\/the-fallacy-of-speed-and-emergency-response\/<\/a>oldId.20100513152211310<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[B’ Spokes: note that sometimes emergency response time is used to to keep residential neighborhoods car centric and bike unfriendly.] by Tom Vanderbilt One of the oft-cited complaints about any sort of traffic calming treatment (speed bumps, narrowing streets, etc. etc.) is \u2018what about emergency response?\u2019 This has become something of a knee-jerk response, and … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Fallacy of Speed and Emergency Response”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169226531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking-elsewhere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169226531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=169226531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169226531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=169226531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=169226531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.baltimorespokes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=169226531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}