TY - JOUR
T1 - Traffic congestion, transportation policies, and the performance of first responders
AU - Brent, Daniel
AU - Beland, Louis Philippe
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/9
Y1 - 2020/9
N2 - Traffic congestion is a growing problem in urbanizing economies that results in lost time, health problems from pollution, and contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. We examine a new external cost of traffic by estimating the relationship between traffic congestion and emergency response times. Matching traffic data at a fine spatial and temporal scale to incident report data from fire departments in California allows us to assign traffic immediately preceding an emergency. Our results show that traffic slows down fire trucks arriving at the scene of an emergency and increases the average monetary damages from fires. The effects are highly nonlinear; increases in response time are primarily due to traffic in the right tail of the traffic distribution. We document an additional externality of traffic congestion and highlight the negative effect of traffic on a critical public good.
AB - Traffic congestion is a growing problem in urbanizing economies that results in lost time, health problems from pollution, and contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. We examine a new external cost of traffic by estimating the relationship between traffic congestion and emergency response times. Matching traffic data at a fine spatial and temporal scale to incident report data from fire departments in California allows us to assign traffic immediately preceding an emergency. Our results show that traffic slows down fire trucks arriving at the scene of an emergency and increases the average monetary damages from fires. The effects are highly nonlinear; increases in response time are primarily due to traffic in the right tail of the traffic distribution. We document an additional externality of traffic congestion and highlight the negative effect of traffic on a critical public good.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086636164&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85086636164&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jeem.2020.102339
DO - 10.1016/j.jeem.2020.102339
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85086636164
SN - 0095-0696
VL - 103
JO - Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
JF - Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
M1 - 102339
ER -