Emergency Response Times and the Myths of Street Design

People in residential communities over the past decade have been asking their city officials to implement traffic calming measures including speed bumps, lowering speed limits, narrower streets, and really anything that slows down vehicles to protect pedestrians and cyclists (Burden, 2000). A problem that has contested this idea is the response times for emergency vehicles. Considering the speed needed for responses and the size of fire trucks, cities are hesitant to implement these traffic calming measures. In our study, we looked at the city of Boulder, Colorado and two fire stations in particular to debunk these myths that traffic calming measures slow down emergency response times.

Station 2 in Boulder is located at the intersection of Broadway and Baseline.

In Dan Burden's report, “Emergency Response: Traffic Calming and Traditional Neighborhood Streets”, he proposed the myth that traffic calming measures reduce response time. East of Broadway is composed of faster roads while West of Broadway is primarily local roads, 25 mph or under.

The mean response time of the West side of Broadway is 4.3007 while the East side is 3.7046. In running a correlation coefficient of the speed limits on each side along with the response times, it produced 0.06317 proving that there is no correlation between response time and speed limit.

Another form of traffic calming that is commonly used around the Boulder Fire Department’s Station 1 is roundabouts.

This map depicts the roundabouts in yellow with labels of their intersection and the green dots are the response times of Station 1. The mean response time for this station is 4.15 minutes which is longer than Station 2, but when looking at all the stations response times, is not considerably different.

The ratio of response time to station response area of Station 1 is not significantly higher than the stations without traffic circles proving that traffic calming measures do not affect the response times of emergency vehicles.

References:

https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/emergency_response_manual_burden.pdf