On a recent drive on a Florida interstate in the dusk of early evening, traffic was heavy but moving at 65 mph. There were blue lights flashing on the right shoulder ahead. No one slowed down, in spite of Florida’s “move over” law. Turns out it wasn’t an emergency vehicle; it was a contractor’s pickup truck.
Thirty years ago in my high school, an English teacher asked the foreign exchange student from Sweden, “Do you have a favorite English word?” She said, “Emergency. In America it really means something. People react immediately and want to help. There is no such word in Swedish.”
In today’s America, “emergency” means “Please help me if you have the time, resources, proper training and liability insurance.” Similarly, over time the motorist’s reaction to flashing lights on emergency vehicles has changed. The lights no longer seem to trigger the reaction they once did. Why don’t people slow down anymore?
During the 1990s, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) sponsored incident-management training at state departments of transportation and included local law enforcement representatives. Highway officials conveyed to police that their flashing lights had a dramatic effect on traffic.
As a result, many police agencies revised their policies to minimize the use of the flashing lights to only what was necessary for safety at the scene. Technological innovations followed, such as new light bars that can only be seen from behind the patrol car so they do not slow traffic in the opposing direction. If police were using their lights less, why would people start to ignore them?
The problem may be that flashing blue lights have proliferated to other types of vehicles, not just emergency responders. The safety of construction workers is just as important as the safety of police officers, so it is hard to deny anyone flashing blue lights. In the case of the Florida interstate mentioned above, the highway has been under construction at night for years. Motorists have been desensitized to flashing blue lights.
Have the laws changed to allow contractors to use flashing blue lights? The website for one local police department in Florida states: “It is a violation of law to display flashing blue lights or red lights unless authorized by statute. If you are not sure whether you are authorized, you probably aren’t.”
It seems that all that is required to use flashing blue lights is a little swagger. The applicable Florida statute is wordy, and although it is easy to identify a few groups that are clearly allowed to use flashing lights, it is difficult to rule anyone out. Highway contractors are not mentioned as a group with a clear blanket authorization to use flashing blue lights, and I’m no lawyer but the statute seems to imply that authorization might be obtainable.
Looking at the patchwork of differing statutes across the nation, a common theme did arise in my research. Almost all state highway patrols used to use rotating flashing red and white lights on their patrol cars, and blue lights were often reserved for others, such as volunteer fire departments.
It seems that with just a few exceptions, many state highway patrols have gradually converted from red and white to combinations including blue, based largely upon light-bar manufacturers’ anecdotal claims that the blue lights were more noticeable. There is some research to the contrary. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute specifically targeted this issue and in 2003 published conclusions that “while the color of a signal light can make a small difference in visibility when the signal is very difficult to see, the flashing and strobe lights found on emergency and hazard vehicles are designed to be very visible and stand out from their background, no matter what color they are. At these levels, color no longer makes an important difference. It simply is a tool to help us distinguish among different kinds of emergency or hazard vehicles.”
So what is the answer? Obviously, we need an enforceable uniform national standard that provides unique lights to emergency responders. What should it be? Maybe the big old red-and-white rotating bubble-gum machine Andy Griffith had on his black-and-white was the best solution after all.
RSS: Roads & Bridges Articles
