It seems like a week can’t go by without some sort of news breaking about the fight to keep Long Island College Hospital alive. As a resident of Carroll Gardens who has used the ER there, it’s obvious to me that those in my neighborhood would be affected. But which neighborhood would pay the biggest price in the closure of their local Emergency Room?

One might assume that those neighborhoods closest to the hospital would be disproportionately affected. But perhaps it is not that simple…

To get a handle on this I turned to a few data sets.

First, I found the blocks in NYC where the closest ER was LICH. Next, I measured the distance from each of those blocks to LICH. The map below shows those distances:

One can see that the hospital serves the obvious nearby neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Clinton Hill and Brooklyn Heights ( the dividing line at the Gowanus was quite striking). But also noticeable is the fact that LICH seems to be Red Hook’s primary hospital as well.

In light of the debate around LICH’s future, I decided to take a look at how much further residents would have to travel to get to the next closest ER in the event LICH closed. That additional travel distance is on the following map:

A look at this data reveals that residents directly around the hospital and in the Columbia Waterfront District experienced the greatest change in travel distance. Of course, this is not surprising, since those in the immediate vicinity of LICH now have to travel, as opposed to having an ER at their doorstep.

But it’s also important to look at total travel distances to the nearest hospital in a world where LICH is no longer operational. Indeed, those who are impacted the most might be the residents that have to travel the most to their nearest ER in absolute terms. So, I recalculated the minimum distance to a hospital without LICH in the mix and a different picture emerged:

The map clearly shows that of all those affected by the closure, the residents of Red Hook would end up in the worst situation as far as access to ERs go. This is especially troubling given the hig her asthma rates in Red Hook, and its isolation from mass transit.

(Maps made in QGIS, with Google Street Map layer)