Traffic and the Provision of Public Goods

We examine the relationship between traffic congestion and emergency response times by match- ing traffic data at a fine spatial and temporal scale to incident report data from fire departments in California. Our results show that traffic slows down fire trucks arriving at the scene of an emergency and increases the average monetary damages from fires. Allocating more funding to fire departments decreases response times, but not the marginal effect of traffic. We document an additional externality of traffic congestion and highlight the negative effect of traffic on one of the many public goods that rely on well-functioning road infrastructure.