ambulance
Chennai: Tamil Nadu ’s 108 ambulance network has identified 70 road accident “super-hotspots” across the state—busy stretches where crashes occur so frequently during morning and evening rush hours that one ambulance cannot reliably meet demand. The designation has prompted the emergency service to add vehicles or create standby clusters around the most congested locations, including Koyambedu CMBT and near the Maraimalainagar Municipality Office in Chennai. The goal is to prevent one accident call from delaying care for the next.
They identified more than 450 peak-hour hot spots where most road accidents occurred.
“An ambulance typically takes about 80 minutes to reach a victim, provide first-aid, transport the patient to a hospital and return to service,” said Emergency Management and Research Institute (EMRI) head M Selvakumar. “The problem arises when there are accidents back-to-back in an area, which is what happens at the super-hotspots. With an increase in road accidents and higher demand for ambulances, EMRI managers used the Integrated Road Accident Database (iRAD), a centralised webpage that analyses accident data to identify trends and hotspots after dividing the state into 2x2km grids.
The response time—the time taken by an ambulance to reach the accident site after receiving the call—fell to 11.17 minutes in 2024 compared to 13.46 in 2021. The time it takes for an ambulance to reach hospital has also come down to an average of 18.01 minutes compared to 19.45 minutes in 2023 and 21.50 minutes in 2022.
The overall impact is now visible, Selvakumar said.