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Faster on the pump.

Hydrant overlays, rendezvous points, and risk data routed straight to the cab.

A Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service appliance, with the in-cab tablet visible through the open cab door

Fire and rescue is one of the harder routing problems in emergency services. Appliances are heavy and wide. A 26-tonne pump can’t transit every road a car can. Speed humps are the difference between a smooth arrival and a hard one when you’ve got crew and equipment on board. Hydrant locations matter from the moment you turn out, not when you arrive.

A Typical Emergency Response*
Call handling · 1m 24s 15%
Crew turnout · 1m 30s 17%
Measured. Audited. Optimised.
Drive to scene · 6 min 11 seconds 68%
Treated as a fixed cost. Increasing year on year.
*MHCLG, Detailed Analysis of Response Times to Fires, England — year ending March 2025 (FIRE1001).

Most services treat the drive to scene portion of total response time as fixed. Blue Light Maps was built to shrink it within those constraints. Blue Light Routing accounts for appliance dimensions and weight against the road’s real characteristics, not just the headline mapping data.

It also factors in the exemptions emergency vehicles can use, like bus lanes, restricted turns, and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, to find shorter routes that conventional mapping won’t surface. See how that compares with TomTom’s truck navigation and Sygic’s emergency routing. Hydrant overlays, hazmat and structural notes arrive as custom data layers drawn from your service’s own records, surfacing in the briefing pane while you’re en route rather than after you arrive.

Meanwhile, for multi-pump incidents a dispatcher drops an RVP and every responding crew sees it on the same map they navigate from, because shared overlays sync it to every device in real time. The same panel shows the other appliances attending — who’s en route, who’s already on scene, and their live shared ETAs — so the first arriving officer knows how far behind the second pump is without asking.

By team

How fire and rescue teams use Blue Light Maps

  1. 01 · Days or weeks ahead

    Event planning

    Mark the RVP, access routes and water supplies for a planned event, so every appliance arrives with the same plan.

    Responder App

  2. 02 · The first minute of a call

    Control room

    Rank appliances by blue-light ETA, with width and weight limits taken into account, before you mobilise.

    Responder Match Responder App

  3. 03 · On the road

    Emergency response

    Routes that fit the appliance's dimensions and weight, with hydrants and risk data on the map as you arrive.

    Responder App

  4. 04 · Through the shift, and beyond

    Cover planning

    See where fire cover is thin while appliances are committed, using blue-light reach rather than a circle on a map.

    Responder Cover

Capabilities

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