Cities Use AI to Help Ambulances and Firetrucks Arrive Faster

The efforts follow a general trend of AI-driven productivity gains and corporate cost-cutting across the US, but in these cases, the positive results can save lives. In New York City alone, the average emergency response time has grown to almost eight minutes, more than a minute longer than it was in 2013, while response times for fires have also lengthened. C2Smarter—a federally funded consortium of researchers from seven institutions that’s headed by New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering—has just begun work to create a so-called digital twin of some streets in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, mimicking traffic behavior and patterns to improve the fire department’s response times.