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Each article takes one question about New York City and works out what the public data can say about it. Every article ships with interactive charts, the dataset it used and the code that reproduces its numbers, and lists the source of every external figure it quotes.

All articles (9)

  1. The ambulance is slower: where the extra time goes
  2. Who gets the rent freeze
  3. Twenty months of the toll
  4. What people do in New York
  5. Raising a child in New York
  6. Who is leaving New York, and who is arriving
  7. Who still goes to the office
  8. The hour-plus commute
  9. The six-figure renter

emsambulance911

The ambulance is slower: where the extra time goes

Ambulance response to calls ultimately classed as life-threatening rose by a minute and three-quarters in fiscal 2026, to the slowest year in the city's figures since 1988. The extra time appears before and after an ambulance is assigned, not in the 911 call. For calls urgent from the start the rise was about a minute, most of it after assignment, as ambulance capacity fell and calls did not rise.

The Mayor's Management Report says ambulances took 10:32 on average to reach life-threatening medical emergencies in fiscal 2026, up 1:43; the FDNY's dispatch records reproduce it within five seconds (10:37, up 1:45). In the city's own figures, which run back to fiscal 1988, it is the largest one-year rise and the slowest year since 1988: thirty years ago, in fiscal 1996, the year the Emergency Medical Service merged into the Fire Department, the figure was 8:58, and it fell to a low of 6:25 in fiscal 2012 before rising five years running. Call-taking barely moved (five seconds); the time from job creation to first assignment rose 51 seconds and the trip from assignment to arrival 54. That headline counts calls by their final coding and times upgraded calls, about one in eight, from the original call. For calls life-threatening from the start the rise was 56 seconds (57 under the initial-coding definition), with under ten seconds before assignment and 47 after; upgraded calls account for 64 of the 105 seconds in a shift-share decomposition, and the public file cannot separate their queueing from time spent at a lower priority. Calls held because no unit could be assigned at once rose from 6.9% to 11.5%. Ambulance in-service hours fell 5.4% while all ambulance incidents fell 0.6%, about 5% more calls per unit of capacity; hospital turnaround was flat and fire engines on the same kind of call slowed by eleven seconds, so the evidence converges on tighter ambulance capacity, though the data do not identify the cause. Every borough slowed, and the summer of 2026 was slower still.

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