THE MIDTOWN GAZETTE
By Jonathan de Bock | October 24, 2025
New York City ambulances are taking longer to respond to emergencies this year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, an annual evaluation that shows how well city agencies are performing.
Emergency Medical Services take 11 minutes and 21 seconds to arrive on the scene, a 29-second increase compared to last year and 1 minute and 4 seconds longer than in 2023.
In Midtown— where an estimated 490,000 cars traverse the district and around 300,000 pedestrians crowd Times Square daily — ambulances routinely battle clogged streets and mounting call volumes.
Walter Adler, a paramedic with more than 20 years of experience, said the official response times don’t account for the added time it takes to access buildings and climb up stairs. “You’re really talking about 14 to 15 minutes before you can get an ambulance in the city,” he said.
This is not a new problem. According to the mayor’s report, ambulance response time has been increasing every year since 2021, a concerning trend for the world’s busiest emergency medical service. For patients suffering from critical situations, like strokes or heart attacks, the increase in response time can have dire consequences. The American Heart Association warns that irreversible brain damage can begin within four to six minutes without oxygen, and that survival chances drop sharply if CPR isn’t started within eight to ten minutes.
But Midtown’s traffic and crowded streets alone aren’t what’s slowing ambulances. Behind these rising response times lies a deeper problem — chronic understaffing.
With not enough EMTs and paramedics left on staff, New York’s ambulances are struggling to keep up with the rising demand. On October 10, the NYC Fleet Daily Service Report, a city-issued update that tracks the operational status of municipal vehicles, revealed that out of the 647 ambulances in the FDNY EMS fleet only 378 were on the road, even though 485 were supposed to be in service.
According to Oren Barzilay, president of FDNY EMS Local 2507, a labor union for EMTs, paramedics and fire inspectors, low pay lies at the heart of the staffing crisis.
“When members can make more money working in a job with less of a mental and physical toll, it is hard to justify being paid poverty wages as an emergency medical first responder,” said Barzilay in a recent press release. The union introduced the #StandWithEMS campaign earlier this month.