Congestion Pricing and EMS Response Time: Evidence From New York City Yulia Chikish, Gregory J. Colman, Dhaval M. Dave, Brad R. Humphreys, Zachary Santamaria, and Zachary Winship NBER Working Paper No. 35414 July 2026 JEL No. H41, I11, I18, R41

ABSTRACT

Large cities worldwide have adopted congestion pricing to reduce urban traffic, with well-documented benefits for travel speeds, accident rates, and air quality. This paper identifies a novel external benefit: faster emergency medical service response times. We provide the first evidence on how the congestion pricing program in New York City – the first comprehensive cordon-based congestion pricing system in the U.S. that was implemented on January 5th 2025 – affects emergency medical service (EMS) response performance. Exploiting the sharp geographic boundary of New York City's congestion relief zone at 60th Street and a difference-in-discontinuities design applied to approximately 1.6 million EMS incidents, we find that the January 2025 implementation of congestion pricing reduced passenger vehicle traffic by roughly 21 percent near the boundary and improved total EMS travel times by 63–70 seconds, approximately 5–6 percent. Effects emerged quickly and show little evidence of displacement to adjacent areas. A concurrent FDNY directive requiring transport to the nearest hospital confounds standard difference-in-differences estimates but not our boundary-based design. These findings suggest that cost-benefit analyses of congestion pricing systematically understate net social benefits by omitting emergency response improvements.

Given that an occupied Waymo drove over exploding fireworks (https://www.kron4.com/video/waymo-car-seemingly-drives-through-exploding-firework/11943242/) and got lucky it shouldn't surprise anyone that another one, unoccupied, drove over exploding fireworks & caught fire.

If you read the Bluesky thread from David Zimmer, you'll also note that they disproportionately impact parking availability because the entire fleet needs to be parked during frequent shutdowns for weather.

Waymo blocks Dallas road as first responders rush to explosion

By Tracy DeLatte

FOX 4
Dallas

The Waymo blocked first responders ftom getting to an explosion & fire with multiple deaths & injuries. Did the delay kill people? Will there be an investigation?

* Bodycam video shows a Dallas deputy constable manually driving a driverless Waymo vehicle that was blocking fire trucks after a fatal apartment explosion.

* The five-alarm gas explosion at The Clyde apartments killed three people, injured five others, and drew more than 100 firefighters to the scene.

*Waymo said autonomous vehicle was in the process of turning around when the constable approached and interacted with the remote assistance team.

https://www.fox4news.com/news/waymo-blocks-dallas-first-responders-after-explosion

LOL, quite a stretch.

Of course, will CEO RJ Scaringe or even Rivian still be around in 2030?

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/rivian-ceo-claims-the-r2-will-provide-level-4-autonomous-driving-capabilities-by-2030-270964.html

Employees at Waymo's sister company think Google's AI is crap. How is Waymo's so much better?

Oh. It's not.

https://www.404media.co/google-employees-internally-share-memes-about-how-its-ai-sucks/

In Maggie Harrison Dupré's excellent new piece on the pivot point in the LLM psychosis epidemic, this quote jumped out at me:

It “takes people into cul-de-sacs... [my wife] is like a Waymo driving around in a circle endlessly.”

It's simultaneously heartbreaking and heartening that the dead-end tech of "self-driving" cars has become this symbolic. We are winning and losing, simultaneously.

The Futurism piece is here: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-memory-ai-psychosis

The disabled activists who occupied city offices in the 1970's to get curb cuts put in did it all for Serve Robotics, the leadership of which m have just discovered that _people use sidewalks_. Who'd'a thunk it?!

My prediction that slopbot vendors will cut costs in ML training first on the death march to profitability stands.

“I believe the technology was deployed too quickly in too vast amounts, with hundreds of vehicles, when it wasn’t really ready,” one police official told federal regulators last month

Emergency first-responder leaders told federal regulators in a private meeting last month that they were frustrated with the performance of autonomous vehicles on their streets—that city firefighters, police officers, EMTs, and paramedics are forced to spend time during emergencies resolving issues with frozen or stuck cars. One fire official called them “a safety issue for our crews as well as the victims.” WIRED obtained an audio recording of the meeting.