Saving lives through faster emergency unit response times: Role of accessibility and environmental factors

Road crash fatalities and debilitating injuries are preventable, both before and after the crash occurrence. The provision of medical care in cases of road crashes is among the most defining elements in trauma handling, with the care provided within the first hour (a period frequently termed as the golden hour) significantly decreasing mortality. As a result, the reduction in response times often represents one of the top priorities, especially for large-scale urban conglomerations. In this research, response times in cases of road crash emergencies in urban networks were investigated, particularly correlating important features that affect them, such as location accessibility, type of emergency or crash, and environmental conditions (in this case weather). Besides the response times, all other data came from opportunistic data sources, available for any region in the world. The methodological framework leverages advances from the field of spatial econometric modeling, which explicitly take spatial relationships into consideration. Incorporating the spatial dimension, in turn, may capture location-specific relationships, weather effects, or other significant elements and provide detailed results on response times for alternative cases of emergency. The application was performed over a suitable metropolis case, namely, the urban area of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, while the results offer valuable insight that can be exploited for a meta-analysis aiming at improving the system's performance. Results suggest that besides accident severity and distance from the central business district (CBD) and points of interest, visibility and wind play a role in modeling emergency crew response times for the case of Riyadh.