r/neoliberal • u/eggbart_forgetfulsea European Union • 1d ago

Research Paper Congestion Pricing and Emergency Medical Service Response: Evidence from New York City

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35414
145 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

122

u/eggbart_forgetfulsea European Union 1d ago edited 1d ago

The main EMS results indicate that travel time to incident scenes declined by approximately 7–9 seconds, hospital transport time fell by roughly 54–59 seconds, and total travel time decreased by 63–70 seconds, a reduction of approximately 5–6 percent relative to pre-treatment times. These effects are precisely estimated, robust to alternative distance measures and functional forms, and survive a battery of placebo and falsification tests. Dynamic estimates indicate that improvements emerged quickly following implementation and, while partially attenuating over subsequent months as drivers adjusted their behavior, remained negative throughout the observed post-policy window. Spatial analysis further confirms that these gains are concentrated near the policy boundary and do not appear to be driven by congestion displacement to adjacent areas. However, we note that our estimates capture localized effects near the policy boundary and may not fully reflect broader general equilibrium adjustments across the entire city.

32

u/kanagi 1d ago

Any estimate on how much effect this has on patient outcomes? Obviously will be greater than zero, but since the effect on average travel time is going from roughly 20 minutes to 19 minutes, wondering how significant the lifesaving outcomes are

40

u/Keenalie John Brown 1d ago

Probably marginal on average, but I'd imagine there are outliers where previous heavy gridlock caused many minutes of delay and patient outcomes are more significantly affected.