Deaths Expected from Delayed Emergency Response

Due to Neighborhood Traffic Mitigation

Submitted to the City Council of Boulder, Colorado

3 April 1997

Background

During the 11 June 1996 City Council Study Session for Boulder's neighborhood traffic mitigation program (NTMP), several members requested additional quantitative information so that they could better understand the issues. In particular, Councilman Mock asked for data that would allow a comparison of the impacts of delayed emergency response time versus the putative increases in neighborhood safety. His question can be answered well enough by considering cardiac arrest emergencies, for which reasonably good data exists, and then making a crude estimate to allow for the other critical emergencies. Data on the following are required: traffic accident deaths, cardiac arrest emergencies and survivals, emergency response times, and delays from traffic mitigation devices. Fairly accurate numbers exist for all of these items. They are certainly accurate enough for reasonable "risk assessment", which often involves far worse vagaries and rough estimates than in the present case.

Traffic Deaths in Boulder

Transportation staff member Bill Cowern supplied data showing that deaths from traffic accidents for the entire City averaged about 2.8 per year for 1991 through 1996. However, only one death, about 0.17 deaths per year, occurred on streets slated for treatment under the NTMP. So, assuming that this mitigation actually would save lives from reduced vehicle speeds, the improvement could not possibly be dramatic. Because the mitigation devices themselves present some direct hazards, they could possibly cause more deaths by accidents rather then fewer. For discussion purposes, I assume that mitigation city wide would reduce the present traffic death rate on mitigated streets by about 0.1 person per year on average. This is believed to be a generous assumption.

Obviously, the 0.1 death per year estimate could be considerably in error. Perhaps the one neighborhood death in the past six years was from some cause that could not be cured by planned mitigation devices; or it could be argued that a death at 13th and College should be included because there may be some traffic mitigation applied there under another program. When lives are at stake, it is best not to make optimistic assumptions, so I do not think it is wise to use an estimate higher than about 0.1 for the assumed lives saved by the NTMP. In any case, doubling or even tripling this number would not change the important conclusions drawn in the last section.

Deaths Caused by Delayed Emergency Response from The NTMP

From the NTMP planning documents, I estimate that emergency response runs will suffer roughly 14 % delay in a sizable area, or over the whole city, if the program is fully applied to the streets in that area. This amounts to about 30 seconds typically and about one minute or more on long runs. Though the NTMP presently includes a condition that the delays must not exceed 30 seconds for any run, it is obvious from measured delays from individual traffic circles and speed humps that only sparse application of these devices would be possible under this criterion. So, the BFD is being pressured to allow a relaxation of original emergency response delay condition. The analysis presented here shows this move to be ill-advised. Even the original allowance of a maximum of 30 seconds involves an intolerable trade-off - lives will be lost due to a large risk/benefit ratio.

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA, or simply CA) is the most common critical emergency needing prompt intervention. It strikes more than 350,000 people a year in the U. S. ("Sudden Cardiac Arrest", a Communicore publication). Scaled to Boulder, this indicates roughly 140 SCAs per year. About 90% of those treated within two minutes survive; while only about 10% survive if treated after 6 minutes. Survivors have a good long term outlook - about 80% are alive at one year and about 57% are alive at five years. This is impressive because the average age of victims is 65. (However, many victims are much younger, in their 30s and 40s).

Some statistics for Boulder roughly confirm the above scaled value of 140 CAs per year. Brad Baker of AMR, Boulder's ambulance service, informed me that they had "worked and delivered", to the hospital, 30 cardiac arrest victims in Boulder in 1996. Regardless of whether AMR or the BFD reached the victim first, both have roughly the same response times. So, the calculated present average survival probability of 30% for Boulder (see Appendix), if naively applied, indicates that the 30 "successful" resuscitations correspond to roughly 100 CAs. However, the calculations assume that defibrillation equipment is always available with the responding vehicle, which is not true at present; so the present success rate may be well below 30%. This consideration, taken by itself, indicates that substantially more than 100 CAs occur in Boulder each year. Also, not all CAs are reported as emergencies because the persons are found obviously dead or are reported too late for successful initial intervention, which further indicates there are considerably more than 100 CA's per year for Boulder. On the other hand, not all of the 30 victims delivered to the hospital survive long enough to be considered true survivors, which, by itself, would indicate fewer than 100 CAs per year for Boulder.

What is needed here is the number of CA emergencies that were either reported promptly or that were given CPR along with reasonably quick reporting. These "fortunate" victims would approximately follow the CA survival curve used in the calculations in the Appendix. From the discussion in the previous paragraph, 60 to 80 is a reasonable, perhaps conservative, estimate of the number of good prospects for successful resuscitation. In the Appendix, I have used 60. The final conclusions will not be changed even if these estimates are much in error.

The relevant CA survivability curves and the BFD response time curves are fairly well known. This allows a calculation of the number of survivals out of the "fortunate" victims for both the current response times as well as degraded or improved response times, as detailed in the Appendix. The Appendix also has a written confirmation of the calculation procedure from Dr. Irving Weiss, who is a retired math professor and who specializes in statistical analysis.

From my estimate of 60 "fortunate" CA victims per year, the calculations in the Appendix indicate that roughly 5.3 additional deaths per year in Boulder can be expected if full neighborhood traffic mitigation is implemented. This assumes that the one minute response time improvement target of the BFD is not accomplished. If their goal is met, only to be negated by the NTMP, then roughly 6.5 additional CA deaths can be expected from the NTMP. I believe the BFD improvement goals are realistic and will be achieved. Therefore, I offer the 6.5 additional CA deaths as the best guess as determined by the present analysis.

But what about other time-critical, life-threatening emergencies? I have not been able to find sufficient data on these to make a satisfactory estimate. However, the worst possible assumption would be that there are no additional deaths from response delays for burn victims, heavy traumas, choking children, drowning victims, ruptured appendices, child birth emergencies, shock victims (electric, toxic, etc.), severe asthma attacks, and other critical emergencies. It is lamentable that better data is not kept with respect to these emergencies. As a gross guess, I estimate that at least two additional non-CA deaths per year would result from a one minute degradation in response times, for a total of roughly 8.5 lives per year.

Discussion

To put the predicted consequences from a fully implemented NTMP in perspective, I note that 8.5 lives per year is three times larger than the usual 2.8 traffic deaths per year for the entire city. Further, these predicted additional deaths are very large compared to the 0.1 life per year assumed to be saved by this program. The present analysis indicates a risk/benefit ratio of 85 to 1, in terms of human lives (property loss risks are ignored here but are probably quite sizable). Over time, 85 additional deaths are predicted from delayed emergency response for each life saved, if any, by the NTMP.

Of course, the above comparisons are very rough due to the lack of precise data and the assumptions involved. Assuming a wildly optimistic posture, if the estimate for lives saved by the NTMP is low by a factor of three, giving 0.3 lives saved per year; and if the estimate for the lives lost due to delayed emergency response is high by a factor of three, then only about three additional lives lost per year are foreseen. Even with these rather absurd allowances, nearly 10 lives are predicted to be lost, over time, for each one saved by full implementation of the NTMP.

The risk/benefit ratio will be the same in mitigated portions of the city as for the whole city, as long as the mitigation is extensive enough to cause, on average, the same proportional delays in the emergency response curve. However, different models and analyses are needed for projects of limited extent - for example, a few obstructions on a cul-de-sac. Given the large risk/benefit ratios for extensive mitigation, it is likely that such local mitigation also involves significantly increased risk. For the few special situations where obstructive mitigation appears possibly beneficial, the city should conduct the proper engineering studies rather than blindly allowing mitigation projects that might endanger the affected residents.

© Ronald R. Bowman, 1997 / Boulder, Colorado