In Indiana and North Carolina, you’re not required to pull over for flashing yellow lights. Other jurisdictions, YMMV.
In my state if you are being approached by an emergency vehicle you must yield the right of way and pull to the right hand side of the road. If you don’t you can be heavily fined.
In my state, the operator of the emergency vehicle must have on lights and sirens if they are on an emergency call. If they don’t, they can be heavily fined and terminated from their jobs.
In the real world, it’s not at all unusual to shut the damn siren off and get some peace and quiet if it’s not absolutely necessary - say in light traffic or traffic all moving along at the same speed. If there’s an accident, the emergency driver can be held liable because the siren wasn’t on but it does happen.
Those are (usually) yellow lights and are not emergency indicators. So no, you don’t need to pull over for them. I don’t think there’s any jurisdiction where you need to pull over for non-emergency vehicles.
Are flashing lights of all other colors (white, red, blue, green, etc) considered emergency indicators?
That makes me wonder, are flashing white headlights on a bicycle technically against the law in most places? What about flashing red lights on the rear of a bike?
Well if you can’t tell the difference between an emergency vehicle light and a bicycle flashing headlight or tail light, perhaps you shouldn’t be driving!
That “light counting thing” was a joke, BTW.
Another related question is whether you should go through a red light traffic signal when an ambulance is boxed in behind you or wait for the signal to turn green. I don’t know.
I wouldn’t be worried about a ticket, I don’t think I’d want to risk getting hit by a car coming the other way that might not be aware of the ambulance.
My understanding, with no cite, is that red lights (and blue lights in some states) are considered emergency colors if they face forward on a vehicle. It is illegal to have a forward facing red or blue light on a vehicle. Red brake lights are ok because they face backward.
I heard this somewhere, so it may be false. White indicates nothing except the direction of travel. White headlights face forward. White lights facing behind indicates reverse. A broken red cover on a tail light causes the light facing behind you to be white instead of red. This can cause drivers behind you to see your tail lights as white lights and they may mistakenly believe your car is coming at them instead of going the same direction.
Obviously you still need to drive defensively in all situations.
I’m talking about instances where they will creep up a bit but will NOT cross the ‘stop line’ marker. Not by one inch.
Red/Blue (usually with white) is the standard for police/emergency vehicles. Construction vehicles, snow plows, etc use amber/yellow. You don’t need to yield for amber flashers just because they’re flashing although obviously it might be a good idea for other reasons. In other words, it’s the law to yield to construction vehicles entering/leaving the road but not just because they have lights. A landscaping truck with the same lights wouldn’t legally require the same respect.
The only time I’ve seen green lights was on a private security vehicle. I’m guessing that flashing green lights as you speed down a public street doesn’t do much besides get you pulled over by an actual police officer.
Magistrate with lots of traffic court experience checking in; I agree with the consensus above.
Long ago, my dad was counsel to our small-town hospital. At the time, the ambulance drivers were employees of the hospital. One newbie driver went to someone’s home to pick up a corpse (hours-old, truly, incontrovertibly, undoubtedly dead). The driver wanted to see what it was like to use the lights and sirens, and did, while driving the corpse to the morgue.
The corpse was in no hurry, really. The driver was fired.
These must be regional, because I’d estimate that half the tow trucks I see have blue lights. Never red, though.
Does anybody have a cite showing that construction vehicles have different legal rights than landscape trucks?
My general rule for emergency vehicles coming from the other direction is this: if it’s one lane in either direction, I pull over. If there’s traffic coming the other direction, I pull over. If it’s two lanes in either direction, especially if there’s a center turn lane, and the other direction (the one the emergency vehicle is coming) is clear, I just get in the right lane. There’s really no need to pull all the way over if it’s clear that they’re gonna stay on their side.
And while we’re on the topic, if you’re going to pull over for an ambulance, and if you’re in the left lane, and I’m in the right lane, please check to make sure I’m out of the way before you suddenly swerve into my lane. Thanks.
Ambulance driver and police driver here… Everyone has appeared to answer this pretty thoroughly but yes… pull over for red and/or blue lights, with or without a siren. I don’t know about other colors in other states. Not to defend anyone illegally using their lights but it is quite possible to forget lights are on during the day. I’ve done that in the cruiser. And sometimes it’s possible, depending on the ambulance and/or the light setup, to not realize that SOME are on at night… Usually you see the reflections but on the side and rear maybe not… so if you turn off some and not the others (ours are all separate switches) you could miss it until you get out and realize it…
But of course there are those who could theoretically be abusing the “power” but in reality it’s our liability if we are illegally using lights/siren…
Huh…interesting. I was always under the impression that squad cars and ambulances had lights on the inside that told you what lights were on the outside. No idea why I thought that, but it never occurred to me that the driver might not actually be aware of what lights were on.
Thanks for the ignorance-fighting!
BTW the most annoying thing (and can be embarrassing since people don’t understand) is when you are busting lights and siren to get somewhere and dispatch tells you to “disregard” or places you “in service”. As in… “You are no longer needed… Stop running code”. So you just busted through intersections and made people get all confused and screwed up traffic and now you have to turn everything off and turn around to go back la-dee-da…
>it is that simple
Well, I feel kinda silly, posting such a dumb question. It’s settled, then - you pull over for any flashing lights.
Unless they’re not red.
Or not red or blue, depending on state.
Or unless they’re yellow.
Or green.
Or red but facing backwards.
Or they’re on the other side of a highway that’s divided.
That is, unless the divider is actually one you could drive over.
>If they all decided to jump off a 500-foot cliff, would you do that, too?
It depends. If they were in the habit of doing so without any apparent disadvantage, and the rules governing cliffs presume that they would often do so, and I could get a flat tire or get my car stuck in a rut or have a slightly increased chance of geting rear-ended, by not jumping off a cliff - in other words, if the cliff situation were analogous - then, yeah, I would probably jump off a 500 foot cliff.
>Pulling over" is only a safety hazard if you’re doing it wrong. You’re not supposed to immediately slam on the brakes and violently swerve into the right-hand or breakdown lane as soon as you spot an emergency vehicle with either lights or siren going. You’re supposed to slow down, look around, ascertain where the emergency vehicle is going and what its potential needs are, determine what the drivers around you are doing, and then pull over, carefully.
I hope not to belabor the point needlessly, but, surely things are generally safer on the road if people only pull onto the shoulder in situations where they are expected to or need to. Using the shoulder always incurs some small extra risk - isn’t that why you’re usually not allowed to drive there?
I’m not in such a rude rush that I want to thwart ambulances. I only think the situation is confusing enough to warrant asking the question, guilelessly.
Thanks for the informative replies. The parts I’ve quoted have made me wonder whether the OP’s perception of vehicles using ‘some of’ the lights may be true, by asking, are there particular lights which you wouldn’t want to use simply while driving through traffic, but perhaps when stopped in a hazardous position on a highway? The strobe in particular makes me think of ones I’ve seen on British police cars which can be seen from a very long distance, and that I’ve only ever seen when the vehicle was stopped on a main high-speed road.
Come on, you’re making this out to be much worse then it is.
Find out what the emergency light colors are in your area and you pull over for them. It’s going to be red or red and blue. Everything else is a red herring, pardon the pun.
You pull over where ever you can, or move as far right and slow down if you can’t stop. It’s just common sense at that point when dealing with divided highways.
That makes sense, unless you go abroad 
In all seriousness, the British system is simple
blue = emergency vehicle = pull over
yellow = slow-moving vehicle
red = addition to blue on emergency vehicles to warn oncoming traffic = slow down/prepare to stop (red = stop, see?)
green = doctor on emergency call (quite why they don’t count as emergency vehicles, I don’t know)
Well, simple-ish.
Ooooh, the Wikipedia entry on all this manages to get down to section 6.8.1:15, ‘Colours-United States-By Service-Optional Colours’. Emergency vehicle lighting - Wikipedia