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To the editor:
Whatever the arguments, congestion pricing was never going to be the only remedy to decrease long ambulance response times. Since congestion pricing began below 60th Street in 2025, the average response time by ambulances to life threatening medical emergencies, in the totality of Manhattan, has only increased.
In Manhattan for all of 2024, before congestion pricing, the average (not the longest) ambulance response time to life threatening medical emergencies was already 11 minutes, 28 seconds. Currently, it's on a trajectory to be over three minutes longer by the end of 2026.
Other factors, not traffic, are greater contributors to the worsening ambulance response times. By the end of FY2025, the city-wide number of 911 calls for life threatening medical emergencies had increased to 620,467, up from 515,598 in FY2021, an increase of 20 percent.
Meanwhile, the number of FDNY Emergency Medical Services EMTs and paramedics, who staff the ambulances, barely changed. An October 2020 FDNY workforce report to the NYC Council listed 2,845 FDNY Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and 893 paramedics. The workforce report five years later listed 2,818 EMTs and 967 paramedics.
In June, FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore testified to Members of the NYC Council, that it costs NYC $41,000 to train each EMT and $130,000 to train each paramedic. That means from 2020 to 2025, NYC taxpayers shelled out almost $80,000,000 to train more than 1,900 EMTs who scarcely replaced the more than two-thirds of the FDNY EMS ambulance workforce, who had left.
Everything points to a worsening situation in the absence of strong interventions. By last month, the average (not the longest) response time to life threatening emergencies in Manhattan had already climbed to over 15 minutes.
Would 22-year-old Manhattan resident, Adam Benhammou, be alive if the ambulance he needed in May had arrived in less than 43 minutes?
Helen Northmore
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JTKerr
The solution is not mysterious.
New York City should bring FDNY EMS to full staffing strength, address compensation parity for EMTs and paramedics, and publicly report response time and scheduled-versus-actual ambulance coverage by borough and tour.
Prior analysis indicates that full staffing and fair compensation would require roughly $340 million annually, or about 0.3% of the city budget. In return, the city could reduce response times, stabilize the workforce, improve ambulance availability, and prevent avoidable delays from becoming tragedies.
Medical research has long shown that minutes matter. In sudden cardiac arrest, survival falls by roughly 7% to 10% for every minute without treatment. In respiratory distress, overdose, stroke, and trauma, delay can change the outcome.
The East Harlem death should not become another one-day headline followed by silence. It should prompt three immediate actions: a full public accounting of the incident, monthly borough-level reporting of ambulance staffing versus actual deployment, and a serious budget commitment by the Mayor to provide the resources to rebuild FDNY EMS capacity.
New Yorkers do not care which agency answers the call. They care that help arrives when they need it.
Sunday, July 26 Report this