That sign is a leftover from the good ol’ days when we used to be able to ride on the tailboard or hang off the running boards*. Firefighters were known to fall or be flung from the truck. The 500 feet (or 300 feet in some states) was enough that drivers following behind could stop before they ran over the guy who has already had a bad enough day. Fire engines used to also always drive with their rear warning lights on, to warn drivers that there were people hanging off of the back of the truck.
There’s a secondary benefit that it gives room to stop or swerve for equipment that may fall off of the truck. There’s usually 1000 feet or more of hose that’s readily deployable out of the back of an engine. If the loose end isn’t restrained it’ll come out after a good bump and all 1000 feet is coming out, usually without the driver noticing**.
*I only got to ride tailboard once, in 1994. My department put a stop to it about a month after I started.
**I’ve never lost a hoseline while driving, but was present for it happening on two occasions.
Think of the logistics and practicality of the actual question you asked for a second. Which is going to result in the cops making more money? On the one hand they can sit next to the Coors Light warehouse knowing that multiple people are going to be doing 50+ in a 40 zone all day long. On the other hand, they can assign a cop to sit at the hospital waiting for an ambulance to be dispatched to follow behind it so they can (in theory) pull over one person per emergency call for reckless driving. In theory, because the practical effect of this would be nobody speeding behind the ambulance because there’s a marked patrol car right behind it.
This is the essence of photoradar. The catch is, most tickets go to the driver. The laws need to be changed to ticket the car owner, and usually there are no dmerits since the driver may not be the owner. Oddly enough, “ticket by mail” tends to be unpopular with voters.
Since the FQ aspect has been answered, I can tell about the time I saw a driver hit an ambulance.
I was driving along and an ambulance, with lights and sirens, made a left turn onto the road. (In Taiwan, which drives on the same side as the States.)
A car traveled through the light and they collided. Fortunately, the car wasn’t going too fast, but that still must have sucked for the patient inside.
Canadians have many flaws, no doubt, but I must say I’ve never witnessed this atrocious behaviour. Maybe the odd clueless hoser doesn’t pull over, but I’ve never seen any scumbag car chasing an ambulance at speed for advantage.
During behind the wheel drivers training, when I was 15 with a learners permit, we were paired up with a classmate and one of the teachers doing the training in the summer. As I sat in the back seat, my class mate driving and the teacher in the passenger seat with a chicken brake, my classmate t-boned an ambulance with its lights and sirens on.
@Velocity and @needscoffee answered the question but I’ll also add another point - cops are first responders too. In our city all of our police on duty at any given time are out on patrol. If a fire department call comes in they are going from their location directly to the scene, and will administer CPR if they are first to arrive, or secure the scene if needed (such as in a fire) or just generally help out where they can. They are quite often the first on scene because they are already out there.
We’ve only got 2-4 officers on patrol at any given time so it would be a huge waste of resources to send anyone to find & chase the ambulances and look for shitty drivers. Granted, I’m sure other municipalities have many more officers out on patrol but those municipalities would be physically bigger than ours so it is still a logistical nightmare for a police car to meet up with an ambulance.
I live in the fifth largest metro area. The cops had enough spare time to pull me over for an “illegal” lane change, detain me for 20 minutes, (or more, I wasn’t clock watching), and bring in another cop to box my car in like I’m a wanted fugitive. We all spent a goodly long while sitting there, while they were doing their cop shit (could have got my FBI file in the time we were waiting), and then in the end they let me go (probably because it wasn’t an illegal lane change after all. Gee.).
So if they can have two dual-officer cars sitting there for twenty minutes, they could actually be ticketing people committing actual traffic offenses, like not moving over for emergency vehicles, or driving while watching their cell phones, which I see all the damn time. Or busting crack dens, stopping human trafficking, foiling bank robberies, or whatever it is you define as “actual, real crimes”. Well, with Mesa PD it’s probably shooting unarmed men lying prone on the ground, or putting 200 rounds into an SUV with a couple teenagers in it, but still.
There are two things that are guaranteed to turn 25-32% of drivers into morons (it’s science trust me). That is seeing an emergency vehicle with lights and sirens on and the sight of orange cones. Most of the bad behavior can be attributed to stupidity not malicious intent.
My point was not the ticket time as such. so much as how long they’d have to sit around waiting for an ambulance that needed to rush to a scene lights flashing (or even worse, a fire truck for an actual fire) and then tail it, and may result in 1 ticket for their trouble. Whereas they can probably spot something that could earn a ticket (in their minds) fairly quickly just driving down the street), so several in an hour.
We have Opticoms around here; ours are visual but some are infrared. One of the emergency lights is a white light that blinks at a high frequency like a strobe; there is a receiver in the traffic light that reads this & turns the traffic light red for every direction except the EV (emergency vehicle), which gets a green, including any dedicated left turn lanes as long as it is still receiving a signal from the EV; once the EV gets close enough, the signal stops, it waits some number of seconds & then resets itself to normal traffic signal, typically with the highest volume street going first. Let me tell you, it was very nice driving to one of the hospitals as I didn’t get a red light & even need to slow down the entire way if we had a critical patient.
While I won’t tailgate or speed (too much) I maaay have been known to follow an ambulance or two to ensure I don’t get caught just far enough behind that I get a long red light.
With as many communities & first responder depts that we have in the US alone I wouldn’t be surprised if someone does it differently but it’s my understanding that they are typically as I described; all directions are red except for the direction that the EV is going as that 1) clears out traffic in front of them, especially on a one-way street where every lane may have 5-10 stopped cars that the EV needs to try to get thru & 2) the EV doesn’t need to stop/slow if they have a green the way they do if they have a red. You’ll know the signal has a preempter if you see a single, white bulb facing traffic. When activated, that bulb will flash on/off white to let the EV know that they have control of the intersection & can proceed. If you have EVs coming from two directions, say PD going west & EMS heading south, obviously only one triggers it & the other EV knows that they need to stop at said intersection & proceed when safe the same as they would at a non-preempted signal.
Interesting how this varies from country to country. I live near a hospital, here in the UK, so I see ambulances with their blue lights on very frequently. Always drivers get out of the way. If anything, I’ve seen a few near misses where drivers veered out of the way so quickly it was unsafe.
And while I’ve seen people “slipstreaming” behind an ambulance, I’ve never seen anyone so close that I think they are committing an offense.
So, possibly a threadshit I guess, but it’s interesting that this is even needed.
Cops go for the low-hanging fruit. They’re going for process efficiency, not safety impact. Radar-gunning a school zone is easy, chasing ambulances isn’t.
I think the police will pull over a car trying to ‘draft’ an ambulance through traffic if they can do it without creating a huge traffic mess. I suppose a police car coincidentally in the right position could pull in behind the ambulance and they could ticket someone dumb enough to pull in right behind them. I suggest they try that, there’s plenty of idiots on the road.
“No driver of any vehicle other than one on official business shall follow any authorized emergency vehicle, traveling in response to an emergency call, closer than 300 feet, or drive nearer to, or park the vehicle within 200 feet of, where any fire apparatus has stopped in answer to a fire alarm.”