Are you blue light aware?
How you should deal with emergency vehicles on the road
A group dedicated to supporting older drivers is encouraging all motorists aged 65 and above to think about participating in regular driving assessments. They emphasize that these evaluations can help ensure safety on the roads and provide older drivers with valuable feedback on their skills.
Rules for emergency vehicles
The Older Drivers Forum, which collaborates with police forces across the UK, is encouraging senior motorists to review their driving skills and address any medical conditions.
This appeal follows Department for Transport statistics revealing a 45% rise since 2010 in the number of drivers over 70 who have been injured or killed in accidents across the UK.
Sergeant Owen Messenger from the Devon and Cornwall Police road casualty reduction team stated: “Too often, we encounter collisions where, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the driver shouldn’t have been on the road, and perhaps someone should have identified that earlier.”
Dont be presssued into commiting offences
If you are at a red light and you can let us through, please do so but we don’t want you to go through the red light, moving aside is fine but going through the light isn’t. Doing so is an offence and you can be fined or receive points for doing it. Similarly, going through a red light and ending up in a collision could place liability on you.
The bottom line is, we don’t want you to commit offences to let us through, just make it easier for us to get past if you can.
How to make things easier
If we can’t make progress we do something called effective non-use. The lights stay on, the siren goes off. This is saying ‘I’d like to come through when I can’.
Other helpful things to consider would be not stopping dead in your tracks. Often it’s safer to keep going and let us pass in a safe place.
Stopping on a bend, the brow of a hill or directly opposite another vehicle makes it harder to get past too. In these situations it’s better that you keep going until the road opens up and we can pass safely when we have a view.
