Signal priority for ambulances on fixed hospital-transfer routes
TL;DR Ambulanceway links an ambulance's live location to the traffic signals on a few busy hospital-to-hospital routes, so the police control room can hold greens for it with one click. It starts with planned critical transfers, not every siren. Traffic police or smart-city companies buy it, and hospital chains co-fund their corridors.
Ambulances in India reach patients faster than a lot of people assume. In Punjab and Haryana records for 2025, 91% arrived at the pickup point within 30 minutes. The weak leg is the ride to care - only 67% delivered patients to a facility within an hour of the call, and transfers between facilities made up 61% of all ambulance use[1].
In big cities traffic eats that hour. A 10–30 km hospital transfer can take 40–90 minutes at peak[2]. Police already know how to clear the way, and for organ transport they hand-coordinate signals along a "green corridor". That takes several agencies and holds up everyone else, and as an IJMR paper notes it may not scale to routine use[2].
What it does, in regulatory terms: a signal-priority request tool for traffic police. The police control room approves every trip and keeps authority over every signal. Ambulanceway gives no medical advice and does not dispatch ambulances.
The seed pitched AI-driven green waves for every emergency vehicle across a city, and that's far too much. Indian signals belong to traffic police, many junctions still run on fixed timers or a constable's hand, and turning every siren into a green wave would gridlock the very roads it's meant to clear.
So Ambulanceway starts with three to five fixed corridors, such as a district hospital to a trauma centre or a cath lab to the nearest stroke unit. A hospital requests priority for a critical transfer, the control room approves it, and the system tracks the ambulance and asks each junction controller on the route to extend or bring forward its green as the vehicle gets close. Where a junction is manual the constable gets a phone alert instead. Every trip is logged with time saved per junction, so police can see whether the delay to other traffic was worth it.
Patients benefit, but they never see a bill. The buyer is whoever runs the signals, which means a city traffic police unit or a smart-city company, usually through a tender. Private hospital chains are a second payer because faster transfers help their referral business, so they could fund the corridors that lead to them. Ambulance operators running 108 or 102 contracts may pay for the vehicle-side link. I found no public prices in India for signal-priority systems.
Many Indian cities have installed connected signal controllers and command centres, and Indian traffic platforms already advertise integration with controllers[3]. The 2019 Motor Vehicles amendment wrote the golden hour into law and set up a cashless treatment scheme for it[4]. Cloud-based priority products abroad now work without new roadside hardware[5][6], which cuts the cost of a pilot.
There's no public figure for the Indian market in emergency-vehicle signal priority. The narrowest real number is the gap, with one in three ambulance trips in two states taking longer than an hour from call to drop[1]. Road crashes alone killed 1,68,491 people in 2022[7]. That's context for the harm, not a market size.
The best-known US signal pre-emption system has offered signal pre-emption for decades and says it serves hundreds of cities, and the vendor claims up to 25% better response times[5]. Another US vendor sells cloud-based signal pre-emption alongside driver alerts[6]. In India, police build manual green corridors case by case[2], and enforcement-focused traffic platforms connect to controllers but don't advertise ambulance priority[3]. Nobody we found in India sells this as a product.
| Difficulty | Hard (60/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹0.9–1.8 Cr |
| Time to launch | 12–18 months |
The code is the easy part. Every city has different controller brands and vendors, and some of them will not open their systems. Police must trust the tool enough to let it touch signals, and you need clean data to prove that a corridor saved minutes without causing jams elsewhere.
There's no licence to buy, but nothing runs without written permission from whoever controls the signals.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
AI never switches a signal on its own authority. The police control room approves every trip, and the product makes no medical calls about which patient is critical.
Want to work out the AI layer for Ambulanceway? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I'd only take this on as a founder with experience in traffic systems or government technology who can sit in a police control room and earn trust. Expect a long sales cycle and very little revenue in year one. Before raising money, prove one corridor in one city where logged transfers are measurably faster and the police want a second corridor.
Plan for roughly ₹0.9–1.8 Cr, with a long sales cycle and very little revenue in year one.
No licence, but each corridor needs a written order from the traffic police, consent from the signal vendor and DPDP-compliant handling of trip data.
Yes, though some markets already have established preemption systems. Check who controls signals locally and what approvals they need.
The free Ambulanceway validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the permissions checklist for signals and data, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for police, hospitals and ambulance operators, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Ambulanceway or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting one police unit and its signal vendor to let you touch live controllers, and that's the kind of slow, careful ask I help founders plan. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.