An ambulance, with its siren wailing and lights flashing, was unable to move, stuck in gridlocked traffic one recent afternoon along Eighth Avenue in Times Square. Some drivers tried to get out of the way even as pedestrians hurried past. But it was too late. The light changed and vehicles from a nearby street spilled onto the clogged roadway, causing further congestion.

Scenes like these are common for emergency medical workers in Times Square, one of the most crowded places in the country. Despite recent efforts by the New York Fire Department to improve its citywide response times, a traffic-jammed Times Square — where it took a minute and 20 seconds longer to respond to life-threatening emergencies in the 2017 fiscal year compared with the rest of Manhattan — continued to pose a problem, Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro said.

Last summer Mr. Nigro came up with a potential solution: A unit of emergency medical workers would use small two-passenger vehicles, called gator utility vehicles, instead of ambulances to respond to emergencies. Since the unit was created in August, response times for life-threatening calls in the area have improved by an average of 68 seconds in the last four months of 2017 compared with the same period in the previous year. The data provided by the Fire Department represents the time from when a 911 call was received by the department to when an ambulance arrived at the scene.