Late-night US car crashes drop

Houston: The light bulb moment for neurosurgeons came as they conducted patient rounds one morning in 2017. "What we realised is that we weren’t doing as many emergency surgeries on Friday and Saturday nights at two o’clock in the morning," Christopher Conner remembered with a smile from his hospital in the fourth-largest US city of Houston.

"This is probably because of Uber." A study of the app-based ride-hailing service by researchers at University of Texas Health Science Center validates the theory and was published June 9 in scientific journal JAMA Surgery.

It shows that use of Uber and similar services in Houston has reduced the number of traffic accident patients at the city’s two main Level 1 trauma hospitals, plunging 20.1 percent to 1,527 in 2019 from 1,911 in 2007, despite an increase in the population.