Lights and Sirens

At night I hardly use sirens, i’ll Blip them at intersections ect unless there is traffic. Frankly the sirens have killed my hearing and I don’t want to make it worse, secondly the whole neighborhood doesn’t need to be woken up at 3 am for a probable bs call.
 
Lights and sirens are there to make your presence known. If your presence is known and people cannot move, you are potentially raising the anxiety level of a lot of people, who cannot do anything, and you are potentially being more harmful, rather than less harmful, without any benefit to anyone.
 
Siren definitely off, lights likely off.
 
In any case, this is why I learned to hate medians lol. If I could see one coming up, and/or knew the area had them, and saw a stale green coming up, I'd be quick to hop over and oppose.

Obviously not if there was a wall of oncoming traffic, or whatever, but I found I'd rather oppose and slide back over if the light was still green vs stuck behind a wall of traffic wishing I had opposed.

Obviously it was very situational dependent (mostly on what exactly stopped and oncoming traffic was doing), but it always made more sense to me to oppose while going code vs having to stop and shutdown, just to restart, drivers always just seemed to respond to me better IME.

Of course safety is paramount, you cant just blindly charge headlong into oncoming traffic anymore than you can blindly go straight thru a red light without clearing it first...
 
If my entrance to an intersection is blocked (any of the above listed scenarios) then I turn off the siren and leave the lights on. If there is a separate lane for turning left, I'll straddle the line between the let turn turn lane and the lane directly to the right of it. There are a few intersections in my area that having alternating preference (some allow the left turn first, some don't). I'll hang back about 2-3 car lengths. I often end up sharing a lane with someone by straddling, but it's the only way to make sure I have the space to take either lane when I don't know which will get clear first.

I would dare say that even given all that, someone will enter the intersection on red ("pushed") like 60% of the time. I've considered turning the lights off because of it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top