My problem is that I usually hear the siren long before I can see the emergency vehicle or tell where it is, or what, if anything, I ought to do about it. It might be behind me, but it might equally well be in front, or on a cross street. And even when I do know it is behind me, there is often nothing useful I can do anyway. There is nothing I can do if I am stuck at a light, boxed in by other cars.
Instead of blocking anything, they could be equipped with a transmitter with about 1/4 mile range and new vehicles could be equipped to detect it and buzz or light up something on the dash.
That’s more like it. Especially if they can be RDF’d* so that the receiving vehicle can give an approximate bearing to the emergency vehicle.
Especially if there’s some data encoded in the signal… perhaps vehicle identification (or at least vehicle and emergency type).
Voice warning in car: “Ambulance on emergency call approaching from left side”
*Radio Direction Finding: “from which direction is that radio signal coming?”
Well, yes, in addition to the L1 receiver, I can picture civilian GPS devices carrying HF receivers that can pick up local emergency traffic, including locations of emergency vehicles. I didn’t mean (but perhaps poorly expressed) that local signals would be carried on GPS frequencies, just that the devices are already scanning for signals, so adding another receiver would not represent a major technical hurdle.
Although now that I think about it, I can picture someone using it to track and evade police cars.
It seems like this could be built into car radios. Pretty much every car has one. It could continually be listening to a specific frequency even if you weren’t listening to the radio or even if the radio was turned “off”. The emergency vehicles could be broadcasting in a small area. If the radio picks up their signal, it could voice a warning over the speakers.
The transmission could include GPS data. If the receiving radio was dumb it would just state a generic warning. But if the radio had access to the vehicles GPS, it could determine from where the emergency vehicle was in relation to your own car. Then it could say if you specifically needed to take action if you were likely to intercept the vehicle.
Obviously it would take some time for this to be fully implemented. But if they start now, eventually all the cars would be covered.
Doesn’t need to be distracting - could, for example, simply be a special ring tone (that signifies the same thing as a siren currently does).
That is a fantastic idea for citified areas and high traffic intersections. People watch for traffic signals already. And this means Emergency Vehicles could us less noise and not more, which is a huge issue for high density residential areas.
We have the technology, and we have the legal problems with it too.
The main reason given for keeping cell phone jammers illegal is that they could block someone calling 911 in an emergency.
Imagine the poor mugging victim, stabbed and bleeding out, using his last ounce of strength to dial 911, but the call doesn’t go through because of a passing fire engine.
Imagine a small plane crashes into part of a city, and injured victims can’t report their location because the approaching emergency vehicles are jamming their signal.
Your idea comes from a good place, but I think this is one of those problems best tackled from the other end. Take the money you would have spent developing and deploying your device, and instead fund an advertising campaign: billboards, tv ads, posters. The tv ad would show people driving in just the conditions you described: loud radio, totally focused on their phone, earbuds (which is illegal hereabouts, BTW) and show an ambulance stuck behind them. Show some dear old granny dying because the ambulance is too slow. Show a kid crying at granny’s funeral, and turning to watch the same person drive by (in exactly the same condition as before). Then have the words come up: “Stop being an ass! Pay attention to your environment. Act like other people matter at least a little, you self-centered juvenile twat. GROW UP.”
Or maybe just “Turn it down. You never know whose life you’ll be saving”, at which point the oblivious driver runs a red light and we see a truck speeding towards them, its horn just barely heard over the music.
Lots of gadgets trying to address that problem. About a year ago I heard of a guy who’d made a jacket with an accelerometer in it, so LEDs in the back of the jacket lit up when you were slowing down. It also had yellow LEDs up the sleeves that could sense when you raised your arm to signal a turn.
While testing his prototype he kept getting stopped by people who wanted to know where they could buy one. 
Lots of problems like this may well be moot within a generation anyway as self-driving cars become the norm.
…which now I think about it will be pretty cool. Watching an ambulance shoot through and across dense traffic, never dropping below 60mph. And without any other cars being slowed significantly either.
Somewhat more relevant to the OP (and nearer in time), I think a little alert on your dash, GPS or windscreen seems much more feasible in the near future (and arguably more effective) than radio jamming.
No one else heard of the very loud, very low-pitch vibration that I described above?
(I’d google it, except my description is too vague for any good search words. I was hoping someone might know a more official name for what I was describing.)
This is my problem too. I’ve often wondered why the traffic signal switchers can’t/don’t give us a little more information. The ambulance is already broadcasting a signal to turn the light red - would it kill them to also light up a sign that says, “Ambulance approaching northbound”. or “Please clear the left turn lane,”?
Why would you really need to block the signals in the jamming sense; seems to me that a better solution would be something along the lines of having all car radios, iPods, etc… would listen on a certain frequency and if a certain signal was received/detected, it would override whatever’s going on with the device and play that broadcast instead.
The thinking is that emergency vehicles would transmit a very low powered signal on that frequency when their sirens are on, so if you’re within a certain distance (say 300 feet) of an emergency vehicle, you’d get whatever that vehicle is broadcasting. The ambulance or whatever would have a GPS that would determine position, direction and speed, and broadcast that within that limited area- something like “Attention! Dallas Fire Department Ambulance Nearby! Ambulance is 400 feet west of the Abrams/Forest intersection moving westbound at 35 mph!”
That way, the circuitry for most consumer electronics would be pretty trivial, and the real heavy lifting part would be on the emergency vehicles.
Also, in case of a larger emergency, you’d have broadcast TV and radio stations hooked into this network as well via the Emergency Broadcast System.
I’ve often wondered what the impact of all the iPads, DVRs and other forms of entertainment not connected to the broadcast media would have in case of emergency; I know my wife and I have been late to the party on hearing about tornado alerts and watches because we’ve been watching stuff on the DVR or some sort of streaming video when they’re issued.
Seems like a mandatory override is the way to go to me for this very reason.
We had a severe thunderstorm yesterday. I was meeting my gf at MadMex for dinner, and knew nothing about the weather situation. As I approached the restaurant my new phone gave a long vibration, so I looked at it. There was a weather warning. Minutes later the sky turned black and things got nasty.
To my knowledge, I never signed up for this, but boy was it cool!
I don’t know if these are prevalent in america, but in some places in the UK and India there are illuminated catseyes (i.e they have little leds in them instead of just reflecting your headlights), which the emergency vehicles could use some how (change their colour? blink them? turn them off?)
It’s threads like these that make me realize nobody has any idea of how being on-call works these days.
If something bad happens and the ambulances are blocking cell phone signals, how do you think the doctors and CRNAs and so on are going to be notified that they need to come to the hospital to treat someone? Cell phones. It isn’t magic, it’s the same technology everyone else uses. It isn’t like there’s a secret CRNA Signal lamp they use to project a symbol onto the clouds that are somehow always available.
You mean the device that actually exists that I mentioned in Post 16? I saw the device in a police magazine about 2 years ago.
In fact, what I think would be best is to turn the light red in all directions except the direction the ambulance is approaching from. Thus, cars in the way have a green light to get out of the way, everybody else has to stop.
The main problem may be lead time: that yellow light is the length it is for a reason, and by the time you add the yellow light cycle and the delay (to allow the intersection to clear) before turning green in another direction, … That may take longer than you have.
Because a jammer would work with existing radios, while your sideband alert thingie would only work on radios built after it was developed, and then either only on some of them or it would also require a law mandating it’s inclusion in all future radios.