Health, I just wanted to get back and answer your question, although I feel no need to “prove myself” that I am educated in these matters. Until you have personally birthed a baby, I wouldn’t start to give advice about who is educated and who isn’t. Standard advice is to wait until contractions are between 6-8 minutes apart. This would ideally be the time you could comfortably travel, the contractions themselves are not lasting too long that to slow down is enough to make it easier on her during an actual contraction (yes I have traveled to the hospital in a taxi in this situation as well), but they’re not so far apart that she’ll get to the hospital and find out that she’s barely started things and is either sent home or sent to walk around the neighborhood until she’s progressed enough to be admitted to the hospital.
I will say that I had been having a lot of contractions, but they were all about 10 minutes apart, not what I would consider to be a dire emergency to run to the hospital. I thought I still had at least a few hours. Suddenly, I would say in the matter of 5 minutes, I went into very strong labor and could barely move in my house and think clearly enough to deal with the situation I was in. I was actually alone at the time and was waiting for my husband to come home so that we could go to the hospital together. I ended calling for an ambulance (which I felt was preferable than delivering in a taxi if necessary). I was able to walk out to the ambulance by myself, but when they started going over speed bumps I realized I couldn’t continue and they pulled over, at which point I delivered the baby within 5 minutes, less than 1 hour from the start of what I considered hard labor. I hope I didn’t give too much detail here that this post will get mod’ed. Please edit whatever is inappropriate for a public website mods. Suffice to say, however, that a woman has to know her own body but no birth can be compared to a prior one, but usually later births are faster than previous ones, although I have known women who have had subsequent births that took twice as long if not more than previous ones. I hope this is enough of a “proof” for you.