Citation

Abburi D, Doustmohammadi M, Anderson M. Int. J. Traffic Transp. Eng. (Rosemead, Calif.) 2019; 8(2): 25-28.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Scientific and Academic Publishing)

DOI

10.5923/j.ijtte.20190802.01

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Timely emergency response to crashes has the potential to save lives. As such, emergency vehicles have priority in traffic with the goal of minimizing response time. However, even with traffic priority, it sometime takes a long time for emergency vehicles to arrive at the scene of a crash. This paper examines the difference in response times between different locations in Alabama - essentially the difference in response time between rural and urban crash locations. The data used in this paper for analysis include over 560,000 crashes that occurred in Alabama during a 5 year period, of which roughly 125,000 had emergency vehicles deployed to the crash location. From the analysis, there was a clear difference in response time between urban and rural counties, which has a significant impact on the safety of the residence in rural locations where the population tends to be older and roadways tend to have a higher speed. Both of these situations are potentially hazardous leading to an increase in severity of crashes, which will increase the need for emergency medical service.

Language: en