Next phase builds on six years of collaboration that shortened ambulance transport times, strengthened hospital coordination, and advanced 911 operations
NEW YORK, April 30, 2026 — The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) and the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), headquartered at Columbia University, today announced the next phase of their joint effort to improve emergency medical response across the five boroughs.
The expanded work will develop and deploy advanced dispatching and simulation tools designed to help the FDNY assign resources more effectively, prepare for increased demand, and evaluate operational changes before they are implemented. Improving the time between when 911 is called and an ambulance gets a patient to the hospital for care can be the difference between life and death.
“Responding to emergency medical calls quickly and safely is critically important to saving lives, and we are always exploring new ways to lower response times,” said Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore. “We are grateful to our partnership with Columbia University in attacking a problem that is crucial to public safety, and we are excited to continue exploring ways to come up with solutions together in the future.”
“For New Yorkers, seconds matter. When someone calls 911 with a medical emergency, the time it takes for an ambulance to reach the patient and get them to the right hospital can shape the outcome,” said Columbia University Professor and CS3 Director Andrew Smyth. “In a city with New York’s scale, density, and traffic patterns, that is an extraordinary challenge. The FDNY-CS3 effort has focused on improving those critical moments.”
The work began in 2019 with a clear set of priorities: route ambulances more efficiently, keep hospital demand balanced, and align staffing with real demand. CS3 researchers worked alongside FDNY leadership to turn those priorities into tools the department could put to work.
In December 2020, the FDNY implemented new ambulance routing strategies that cut transport time by one minute and 24 seconds for roughly one in ten ambulance responses citywide.1
Additional tools introduced the following year helped balance hospital demand during COVID-19 surges by directing patients to hospitals with available capacity. Updated models were also rolled out that helped align 911 call-center staffing with demand.
Together, these improvements have strengthened the FDNY’s emergency medical response under pressure.
The next phase focuses on the critical moment when a call arrives and resources must be assigned. The FDNY and CS3 will develop new optimization tools and enhanced simulation models to help the department test scenarios, prepare for surges, and evaluate policy changes before they go live in the field.
A major component of this work is a five-year project launched in 2025, funded by the National Science Foundation and undertaken with the University of Southern California, to build a live simulation model—or “digital shadow”—of FDNY emergency medical operations.
Using artificial intelligence and operational data, the digital shadow will mirror how the system behaves, giving the FDNY a safe environment to test decisions, anticipate pressure points, and improve readiness before changes reach the street.
About CS3
CS3, the NSF Engineering Research Center for Smart Streetscapes, is a multi-university research center headquartered at Columbia University, with partners including Florida Atlantic University, Rutgers University, and Lehman College (CUNY). CS3 develops technology to make urban environments safer, more responsive, and more vibrant. CS3’s work with FDNY is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through two awards: Cooperative Agreement No. EEC-2133516 (Engineering Research Center) and Grant Number CNS-2531559 (FDNY Digital Shadow).
Between 2020 and 2023, FDNY’s work of this nature was sponsored by Google.org and the Tides Foundation under award 2001-088480. FDNY wanted to replicate elements of that experience, which included having a team of dedicated faculty members, working with graduate students, in the fields of industrial engineering, civil engineering and operations research, who would be “on call” to work on FDNY’s “engineering initiatives” aimed at supporting systemic improvements in multiple areas. The dedicated faculty would be available over time, as work on an engineering initiative would lead to others, pending available funds. Following completion of work, FDNY would support publication of academic articles related to such work. In 2025, FDNY tapped the Master Academic Consortium Contract, managed by Town+Gown:NYC @ NYC DDC, to solicit responses for this innovative idea from an academic consortium vendor pool consisting of 14 academic institutions. The FDNY RFP received the highest number of responses in the history of this Master Contract, with the award of a task order containing the first set of engineering initiatives to Columbia, and an ability to issue subsequent sub-task orders under this task order for future engineering initiatives.
- Olivier, A. et al. “Data analytics for improved closest hospital suggestion for EMS operations in New York City.” Sustainable Cities and Society, Vol. 86, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.104104
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