The emergency responders were all from Iowa, which was an early adopter of road diets, stretching back to 1996, and all had to have responded to emergencies both before and after the introduction of 4-to-3 road diets in a number of specific locations around the state. Just over half (52 percent) of the responders thought that their response times were the same both before and after the introduction of road diets, with a third saying times got slower and 16 percent saying they became faster.
What does the stopwatch say?
To quantify the actual effect of 4-to-3 road diets on emergency response times, the researchers looked at response times to certain emergency calls—”fires, overpressure ruptures, explosions, overheat-no fires, and rescue and EMS calls, as these incidents require a fast response where lights and sirens would be activated”—from three Cedar Rapids fire districts, each of which received a road diet during a six-year period between 2014 to 2020.
In total, they identified 1,202 emergency response trips that occurred before the road diets and 2,665 trips that occurred on roads that had been converted down to three lanes. And in doing so, they 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.
Now, if there was just some way of getting car-brained politicians to read this study.
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.trip.2024.101158 (About DOIs).
