“The average police response time in 2012 was 9.1 minutes, compared to 6.9 minutes in 2007 in New York City, an increase of 31 percent (NY Post),” and this does not include the time between placing and answering calls. The massive increase in response time is threating the safety of the residents of New York City, and while the government is introducing new plans to help alleviate the problem, their solutions are not working.
Public safety is a public good; it is non-excludable because everyone in the city is theoretically guaranteed help from public safety officials and theoretically it is also non-rivalrous because there are enough police officers, firefighters, and EMTs to take care of any number of emergencies that occur in the city. There is a threshold until which public safety acts as a public good, but once that threshold has been reached, it transitions into a common good, because some people have to wait an exceedingly large
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The main logistical problems surrounding the introduction of these roads is the already dense New York City road network, which has limited room for expansion, and even if there is room, the funding would be difficult to acquire after the recent failures in improving public safety in the City. Another problem is that drivers in the city would not leave a lane open regardless of the reasoning for the lane, and keeping these lanes clear would be difficult to enforce. Another difficult solution to implement would be raising the number of police officers. In today’s economy, people are moving away from jobs such as becoming police officers or firefighters, and are trying to obtain more service oriented jobs. Public safety jobs do not nearly pay as much as service oriented jobs, and the added dangers of public safety jobs scare away young people from this career