This State Has the Longest Ambulance Response Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 8, 12:39PM EST · Published Apr 11, 8:36AM EDT

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This State Has the Longest Ambulance Response Time — © polybutmono / Getty Images

Ambulance response times are critical for very sick patients and people severely hurt in accidents. Response time to fatal crashes is not a perfect proxy for the time period per state. However, response times are extremely different state by state, and information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System is telling. Reaction time to COVID-19 patients can be the difference between life and death in some cases, almost certainly.

The Auto Insurance Center’s national average for ambulance responses to fatal crashes is 15 minutes, 19 seconds. Wyoming has the worst figure at 35 minutes, 44 seconds. The second worst is Vermont at 22 minutes, 56 seconds, followed by Montana at 22 minutes, 35 seconds. Fourth and fifth are North Dakota at 21 minutes, 30 seconds, and Kansas at 21 minutes, 22 seconds. Clearly living in rural or semi-rural states with few or no big cities is a disadvantage.

The state with the best response times by the same measure is Illinois at 6 minutes even. Likely this is influenced by Chicago, the country’s third-largest city by population, and one that is densely populated. Second on the list is California at 6 minutes, 52 seconds. Its population is also dominated by large cities, in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Rhode Island is third, with a response time of 7 minutes, 4 seconds. Much of the population is concentrated in Providence. Connecticut is fourth, with a response time of 7 minutes, 54 seconds, while in fifth is Massachusetts at 8 minutes and 33 seconds.

It will be some time before ambulance response times for COVID-19 patients are collected and analyzed. At that point, the effect of response times on patients will be precise. In the meantime, more general data points to states where people are worse and better off.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.