St. Luke's hospital is ten blocks away on 59th Street. There's a firehouse three blocks away on 66th. The people driving the ambulances and fire trucks could cut west to West End Avenue or east toward Broadway (where traffic is less likely to occur compared to Amsterdam), yet most often, these same drivers never fail to take Amsterdam where they sit in traffic while people suffer and die needlessly.
(I have no idea if people are suffering and dying needlessly due to the traffic I can see from the window on the seventeenth floor, but when I say it like that, as if I'm a journalist writing for the ever-accurate and ever-ethical New York Times, it sounds pretty damn dramatic, doesn't it?)
Here's some more video I took less than five minutes after filming the video above. Clearly, the EMT are yet to upgrade to GPS systems with live traffic updates.
Yet while it may seem an anomaly restricted to the corner where I live, I was talking recently to a friend who bought a house on Staten Island not long ago. He's a fireman stationed in Manhattan. At one point in our conversation, he mentioned, "Response times out on the island suck. My house ever catches fire, I'm screwed."
Wonder why?
