We dont use them yet, but some of the fire/ems services I did my ride times with did, they were awesome for being in a lot of traffic and needing to get somewhere really quick. Or else you would just go from one traffic jam to another.
Cons are, people can tell when theyre on, so if a cop spots you using it to go get lunch pretty quick, they can call up your higher ups and get you a bum chewing.
We dont use them yet, but some of the fire/ems services I did my ride times with did, they were awesome for being in a lot of traffic and needing to get somewhere really quick. Or else you would just go from one traffic jam to another.
Cons are, people can tell when theyre on, so if a cop spots you using it to go get lunch pretty quick, they can call up your higher ups and get you a bum chewing.
Cal, there's other ways to tell other than seeing the light. If traffic control is actually watching the lights, they can see when the light was preempted, for one. And, my company has Big Brother installed, and can see a lot of things that go on in the rig, you can bet dispatch would be monitoring a preemptor, same as the monitor the lights and sirens.
theres an ir lens you can put over the light to make it invisible to the naked eye, but as previously mentioned, theres other ways to tell.
if your company wants to write the check, they can remotely montior every single electrically operated function of your vehicle. they can wire a transmitter to the dashboard light that comes on when you dont put your seatbelt on. that light comes on, a light flashes on teh dispatch console.
the downside to that system is that is is fantastically expensive, so the companies that do use it limit it to the biggies. emergency lights etc.
The flashing white light is there to indicate to the EV Operator that the light ahs successfully been preempted and that his green is the only active green at the intersetion. Otherwise, how would he know if the opposing signal is also green? I've seen it in action once or twice, but even at lights where it is installed, for whatever reason, departments around here don't use them very much
We don't use them. The largest city we cover is 60,000 pop so there's not really any real burden of traffic jams and clearing an intersection adds no more than 3 seconds to your response time.
Not having any experience with them we were told about a system that worked along those lines in class but our instructor said the reason nobody here used whichever particular system he was talking about is because they change the other light directly from green to red which ends up causing more accidents than anything. Our system is to the point that they're running lights and sirens as rarely as possible and that extra 10 seconds on a trip isn't worth the hassle.
The only time I could see them really being beneficial is if you're stuck in a line of traffic at a stop light and there's no room to get around them but again it doesn't add much time to shut the lights and siren off and wait for a green then fire them back up.
Does it really matter? If the driver is going straight then the status of the opposite light really shouldn't be much of a concern whereas if he's turning left, he would need to worry provided he doesn't have a left turn arrow. My understanding of how these systems are supposed to work is that all lights in the direction that the emergency vehicle is traveling in (straight and left turn lights) supposed to be green.
Does it really matter? If the driver is going straight then the status of the opposite light really shouldn't be much of a concern whereas if he's turning left, he would need to worry provided he doesn't have a left turn arrow. My understanding of how these systems are supposed to work is that all lights in the direction that the emergency vehicle is traveling in (straight and left turn lights) supposed to be green.
In The city of Columbus, most traffic lights do not have them installed. Ironically, they are in abundance in the suburbs where this is not much of a problem.
Also, at elast with the system that I know of, it does not change the light directly from green to red. It switches all greens to yellow (except the direction of travel of the EV) and then the yellow times to red leaving only the EV direction green. It is at that point that all the others that are red does the white "globe" start flashing.
I worked briefly with a fire department that had them installed on three lights in the region. The lights were intersections between a highway and the main street of the town-- so being able to stop traffic when coming from town was helpful. The intersections were open-- so it is possible to see oncoming traffic from the other directions a few seconds before coming through. Even with the opticon system activated, they had a policy to stop at the light-- just as an added precaution. The department argued that the system didnt cut down on the response time by any measure but increased their margin of safety. Its important to note that drivers come to rely on timed lights at intersections and assume that they can "make it" with a certain margin of time. The opticon system changes that-- and that causes accidents. As I recall, when activated, the lights for oncoming traffic turn directly to red from green-- no yellow, no delay-- and that is potentially dangerous.
As I recall, when activated, the lights for oncoming traffic turn directly to red from green-- no yellow, no delay-- and that is really incredibly stupid which should have resulted in some traffic engineer being fired.
Anybody can tell, if they have a cell phone with a camera. All you have to do is act like you're going to take a picture of the rig with it's lights on and if they have an IR light/lens, it will show up on the camera. This also works as an easy way to see if your TV remote control is still working.
Sometimes, once preemption is activated on the light, while it is cyciling through, the white light goes "steady"... then goes to flash when you have full preemption.
These things are great. They make things a little safer for me... however you still need to pay attention and check intersections before you go through.
