Submitted 5 weeks ago by genfood@feddit.org to [deleted]
https://files.catbox.moe/oigd72.mp4
This is a funny clip and an accurate depiction of NY congestion.
But, I live in a major city and weake way for ambulances. If it’s this bad we’ll end up with civilians running red lights or cops on motorbikes to unfuck gridlock.
I myself ran a red light last week in rush hour to GTFO when I hear sirens. Just turn on my hazards, slow roll into the red light. Cars were already stopping for me so I was safe, then pulled over.
This is really just making fun of NYC traffic and how fucked it is.
Ja?
I come and save you, ja?
You are being rescued. Please do not resist.
You are being billed. Please do not resist.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQLk-LF1JY
haben sie was getrunken, ja! (ja) fragt mich die Polizei, ja! ja
Der polizist mit seinen elfenohren …
I get imense stress from having an ambulance behind me even if there's plenty of room to pass on the side. Immediately plotting where to go if it needs to go exactly where I am.
I can't imagine having an ambulance behind you and going 'Meh, I'm driving here.'
This happened to me once. It was a main road with heavy traffic. I pulled over to the right to let the ambulance pass, but because of traffic, I was effectively sitting on the right lane. Apparently the ambulance wanted to move to the right lane because they were gonna turn right at the corner up ahead. I felt like an asshole because to everyone else on the road, it looked like I intentionally blocked the ambulance. And the siren blaring right behind you while the driver is blasting the horn is very stressful.
nyc is a crazy city
If the ambulance is immediately behind you, you’ve already failed.
In “we’ll-behaving” countries ambulance does not lose speed. If you hear a siren, you pull over, doesn’t matter if you see it or not.
I’m not directing this at you, just explaning the course of action for people like in the video.
Ayyyy I’m driving here
In case you wanna see a “RETTUNSGASSE!!!” (= rescuing lane) in action this clip is what it looks like ideally.
That’s how it’s supposed to work in the US too. Maybe it depends on the state but in MN at least it’s illegal to fail to pull over for emergency vehicles. If you see any emergency vehicle on the road running with lights on then you are supposed to stop and pull off to the side so that they can have the whole road.
The video in the OP looks nuts to me too. I’ve never seen people fail to pull over for an emergency vehicle in my area.
This is how it is in Manhattan when it’s busy. It’s not so much failing to pull over so much as there is nowhere to go.
This is a very NYC phenomenon, everywhere else I’ve ever been and lived in the US moves out of the way for emergency vehicles with their lights and sirens on, I’ve seen both issues where there is nowhere to go and times where people just don’t care, every time I’m in NYC I hope to not need medical attention
So I actually experienced one of these on 64W between VA Beach and Richmond. It was amazing how everyone including myself just instinctively moved to the sides of the road. It’s not a hard concept it just takes cooperation.
Also space to pull over is important. Here in the midwest we have room to move over and everyone does, honestly way more than is necessary. Like people start to pull over a few blocks in front of the ambulance if they just hear the siren.
New York’s problem in the video is the congestion makes it hard to move out of the way when there is nowhere to go.
At about 10 seconds on the video you can actually see a guy getting out of the way of the ambulance to let it through, though he was not doing it preemptively.
What I find strange in Germany is that there is literally an emergency lane on the right side of the highway but they block it to make a corridor in the center
That’s the “Standstreifen” and it’s used for towing, parking after an accident or other emergency and as an extra lane during traffic jams and road work. That’s too many use cases to make them also suitable for emergency vehicles.
Love this. Who says the Germans have no humour.
Mostly the French
Eh, feels like he’s playing up the stereotype of the eternal German.
"…WE DON’T DO ZIS IN GERMANY! YOU BUILD HOUSES WITH WOOD? WE DON’T DO ZIS IN GERMANY. YOU DON’T SEPARATE GLASS FROM RECYCLING? BUT WE DO ZIS IN GERMANY!!!
I’m allowed to say that, I’m Germany myself. We are obnoxious and tone-deaf fuckers.
There’s tone deaf and there’s common sense, life saving practices.
This. I absolutely prefer to be a tone-deaf fucker among tone-deaf fuckers if that means my ambulance arrives timely after someone tried car buttsex at 260 kmh. (162 mph)
What, speed limits? Don’t you dare touch my freedom.
Could just be they talk so damn loud they can’t hear anyone else.
Agreed
I’m not an American but I’ve lived in Washington for years. Every time an Ambulance is moving with its siren on, people move to the side of the road to let it pass. This guy is just inaccurate.
Manhattan has gridlock that prevents this. There’s no space to move into.
yup, I was on a street so narrow just a couple months ago that I couldn’t pull over far enough to let a firetruck go by. I had pulled over as far as I could. The truck got behind me and I couldn’t move over. SO I just said “fuck it” - and zoomed into the road as fast as was safe and turned off the road the first place I could find.
He clipped the video as someone was moving out of the way, too
But surely this one example is enough to judge an entire country by!
m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGd3QWgTLs&pp=0gcJCdgAo7Vq…
For contrast: a video of a more congested street in Paris 17 years ago. The situations aren’t completely comparable: bigger emergency vehicle, smaller other vehicles, smaller street with less options to get out of the way, … One other major difference and the reason I’m posting this, is that 30 seconds into the video, you can see that most drivers have moved to the sides of the road AHEAD of the firetruck and that they are holding still while waiting on the firetruck to pass them. The street + path are less than ideal and there isn’t really enough room, so the truck is still not going very fast, but it’s at least able to keep moving. By moving to the sides, the drivers also blocked in that smaller firetruck that was coming from the side street, so that’s going to cause some confusement after the big one has passed.
The reason that that NYC ambulance is completely stuck I’m traffic, isn’t because of space, because there is plenty compared to that Parisian street, but it’s the drivers who are not creating a path. It’s not an infrastructure problem, it’s something that can be taught + encouraged if there is a political will to make a change.
Distracted drivers are a serious problem in more ways than one. A couple weeks ago I was 2nd in line at a red light, only us 2 in that lane and several more in the other. An ambulance drove up behind us flashing and it was immediately clear the shortest path through the intersection was for our 2 cars to clear out. I put on my hazards and starting alternating lights and horn, while the person ahead sat blithely scrolling through their phone while the ambulance and I were both laying on the horn and didn’t move until the light turned green. Even then, didn’t pull aside so the bus had to weave around him. The lack of situational awareness and empathy on the road is sadly lacking.
Yeah, smartphones are a menace as well in traffic, especially when combined with someone as oblivious as in your example :). The government(s) in my country has had several police + information campaigns against smartphone use since a few years. There’s now also a fine of 175 euro + loss of driver’s license for 15 days for using the smartphone while driving in traffic. And waiting in traffic, still counts as driving. If used for navigation, then the destination has to be put in before starting to drive & the smartphone has to be in a holder or connected to the infotainment system.
This heavier punishment is pretty recent and the chance of being caught seems low, so there’s still often people using smartphones inappropriately. Last one I saw this week was an oblivious teenager on a bicycle. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s been a noticable change in a few years.
So why not put paramedics on a e-bike, so they can actually arrive at the scene first. It’s not like the patient gets put into the ambulance immediately on arrival. Might as well have someone take care of the patient before the ambulance arrives. Just put a e-bike in the back of the ambulance or rack it on the front.
Shitty solution to a shitty problem in my opinion. Quite often patients are indeed put into the ambulance immediately. Ambulances also have tons of medical equipment, none of which you can fit on a bike, obviously. Then there’s the question of paramedic safety, especially given how many road accidents there are in the US. Plus, that would be a major cost for healthcare providers. Instead of 2 paramedics, you’d need 3 or 4, since they can’t go solo, again due to safety concerns. Overall this isn’t something we should be looking for alternative solutions to. You can’t keep making workarounds for systemic issues, like horrible road/traffic design or society being severely uneducated.
Our service uses bikes in highly urban areas, but I can’t speak to the pros or cons of it as I don’t have the brain power right now. It’s a large service, but not anywhere near a significant part of the service. Urban stuff, large gatherings stuff, terrain stuff with quads and even a boat.
They carry 100lbs of gear.
Their solution is going to be ai controlled drones, you think they’re going to create solutions that require people?
That sounds like a legit idea. Most important 1st aid gear can fit in a backpack. Inhaler. Defibrillator. Tracheostomy Tube. Etc including stuff to stop bleeding, including the knowledge of how to do it correctly.
This is the kind of culture you get and deserve when you allow corporations to control your country and culture
It’s not just corporations. It’s the individual over the collective. And that is just the nature of certain societies, specifically more competitive societies. In India for example, the mindset of everyone in traffic is ‘me over others’ - fuck everyone else, i grab what space I can get. If I don’t, the next fucker will. Like if it starts raining, your 1 hour trip is now 3 hours, not 1.5 hours because there will be a jam at every intersection in the city. There are just so many people on the road and infrastructure (and society / government at large) that hasn’t lent itself to cooperation but rather competition. It becomes their mindset, it becomes everyone’s mindset. That is why many from that region turn right politically. I bet it’s the same for many Latin countries.
I’m in Portugal, and it’s definitely not.
I mean, people are clearly more selfish behind a wheel than they are in person (a lot of Portuguese “good manners” is really just social shame, which isn’t there when people feel anonymous, so many become a lot less polite when inside a car), but everybody just moves over when an ambulance comes and for example you’re more likely to be given way to turn off the road across the other lane, than not.
You do see some asshole shit (for example, cars trying to scare pedestrians into waiting for the car to pass before entering a zebra crossing), but generally it’s a minority (which the notable exception of people not using direction indicators to help others, only themselves, which is a majority) rather than the majority.
In my experience Spain is pretty similar.
From own experience in Latin America it wasn’t much worse, though it was only in Peru and I wasn’t long in Lima to get a good feeling for their big-city driving.
Ja.
Absolutely every second for an ambulance matters. Every. Second.
People blocking an ambulance should be punished and made examples of.
Looking confused. Why can’t the ambulance go through the small gaps between sidewalk. In my country ambulance drivers drive like its GTA.
There’s no place for anyone to move to. The congestion is such that you cannot get out of the way. The Van Wyck alone will slow an ambulance to 3-5mph because of traffic. You cannot get out of the way if there’s no place to go!
Where I live in Canada traffic moves for anything with lights(other than a tow truck unless of course they have an EMS escort). We pull up on to sidewalks, curbs, and anything really to clear a path. Heck I’ve seen people put their vehicle into a snow bank pr a ditch to get out of the way. I guess we’re of the mindset that others will do the same for us should we be the ones awaiting EMS to arrive or deliver us to an ER.
America is a bit bigger than your NY road…
There are cities that use medics on motor bikes for this exact reason. They can’t evac someone but getting there quickly to use a defibrillator or control bleeding could make a difference.
To be fair, with the congestion that severe, the ambulance should use helicopters. Like they do here in London.
I saw this exact same thing yesterday in Cologne Germany but not with one, but two ambulances.
You should see major cities in latin america if you think that’s bad. In many countries it’s like they don’t even care.
In the video right after he says nobody moves out of the way there is someone moving out of the way but he edited the video to remove it.
Disingenuous bullshit.
I’ve seen roads so congested in NYC that they literally cannot get through. Saw a firetruck honk for a solid 5 minutes before getting to move anywhere.
He’s just demonstrating New York City is fucked, not America
Were all the "ja"s an affectation or do modern Germans just ja that much?
You’re fucked ja
Nobody more annoying than a German tourist bitching about everything
Wenn die Polizei vorbeifährt, ja?
Oh look a cyclist bitching about shit
What’s German for “trying too hard?”
riodoro1@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I speak perfect english but still use „ja”, ja?
lennee@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Ja.
genfood@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
Ja.
riot@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Das ist der Weg
stebo02@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
how else would we know he’s German
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I assumed it was some weird YouTube thing he was doing. None of my German friends use that haha.
tromars@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
Wenn die Polizei vorbei fährt, ja! (ja)
dann halt ich erst mal an, ja! (ja)
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
Ja sonst ist es nicht authentisch genug. Aber war schon witzig.