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Comment by ericras | Hacker News Reader

The downside is that with a mass of publicity around promoting it, some people (such as children) will get it mixed up with 911 and in an emergency there will be a delay in getting the proper help.

Edit: I'm not necessarily against this idea, I'm merely trying to participate in due diligence.

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They should just be able to forward you to 911.

And, also, is there an major epidemic of emergency calls being placed to 311 or similar?

The Suicide Prevention Hotline may go to a national center and forwarding to local 911 may be complicated.

If cell phones can figure out how to call local 911 from wherever they are I'm sure this can be done.

Cellphone locating for 911 is a whole mess and sometimes doesn't work anywhere near as well as you'd like it to and requires the police to drive around block sized areas trying to find whoever needs help.

Add in the complexity of transferring calls (how many times has your call been dropped when a support agent transfers you?) and this is a bucket of trouble.

That’s probably a bigger problem of 911 being hard to enter compared to, say, 999

Wasn’t 911 chosen to be hard to dial by accident?

That's why I like 999, despite the risk of it being entered accidentally (this isn't as common as Americans seem to imagine). Same goes for 112, which is just as likely to be input by accident.

In placing an emergency call, sometimes milliseconds count.

In the UK, in 2008, there were several million silent 999 calls. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7748046.stm

It's harder now, because smart phones have made it harder, but it still happens.

Do you have an example of milliseconds counting?

I’m not doubting you - just can’t think of one and would like to know.

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