The Ankh-Morpork Ambulance Guild strikes again.
Bikes: a transportation vehicle with health benefits. Ambulance: a transportation vehicle for the unwell.
Bikes are the natural enemy of the ambulance. A war between the bike clan and the ambulance clan is on the horizon.
Solution: Ambulance bikes.
(A show like Top Gear but for bicycles could be pretty awesome.)
Like brothers and sisters
It’s called a ‘for profit business’, look it up, people!
A new way to make money! Much easier than waiting for someone to need an ambulance!
they couldve gotten way more than $1,800 if they hit a few more cyclists on the way. theres plenty of room in the back of an ambulance
This is one of the most American things I’ve ever read.
Not even close. Notice the date it was posted.
If America the legal battle will cost the EMS a huge part of their budget.
lacks guns and burgers but I’ll take it
The driver was distracted because he was eating a Big Mac while cleaning his pistol.
If only there had been a good ambulance with a gun.
Look at the picture in the article and read the story. The biker was trying to ride past the ambulance near the curb as the ambulance was turning.
The biker felt entitled to do whatever he wanted instead of waiting his turn and got himself ran over.
It’s called a right-hook. Cars pass bicycles, then turn right immediately in front of them, causing the cyclist to hit the car. Quite a few cyclists have been killed this way.
Car brain drivers then blame the cyclist.
You mean the part of the article where it says the ambulance “turned into him”?
You’re making assumptions based on vague wording in the article and your preconceived notions of cyclist behavior. You don’t actually know what happened.
That’s an interesting business strategy, I’ll give 'em that
Like firemen setting fire to extinguish.
Is this fuck cars or fuck the us?
Show of hands, who pays for ambulances regardless of why?
My intention is definitely “fuck cars.” The fucked-up thing here is that even ambulance drivers, who should know better more so than almost anybody, are incompetently right-hooking cyclists. Billing him for it is merely the icing on the shit-cake.
A lot of EMTs work 24-hour shifts, and 48-hour shifts are not uncommon. The thought that the ambulance driver on the road next to me might be at hour 46 is… frequently worrying.
The problem isn’t the EMTs being incompetent, the problem is with the industry standards and the employers.
I was forced to work a few 24+ hour shifts in healthcare and working on zero sleep fucked me up. It gave me migraines, vomiting, insomnia, manic depression and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
It is beyond cruel and inhumane that employers can force people to work without sleep. It is so fucked that not allowing someone to sleep is considered a form of torture by the Geneva convention.
That again sounds more like a shithole country problem tan a car problem.
Exactly this. They transported someone, they filled out a PCR for billing to send to insurance and the patient.
My former roommate is an EMT and he spent 90% of his 48 hour shifts sleeping and playing video games.
So your alternative would be that ambulances should no longer use cars? From my perspective all kind of emergency services such as fire department, law enforcement, ambulances should be the very last cars we get rid of as a society. They have to be fast and they need to transport a lot of stuff and people.
The rest of the world does without GIANT and dangerous emergency vehicles for one. They still put out fires and transport sick people. How american fire departments are getting people killed (video from “not just bikes”)
Fun fact, many if not most of those ambulances are made in Canada, and not the USA.
The rest of the world often also builds better infrastructure, like a protected bike lane, to signifcantly reduce the conflicts between cars and not cars.
A bike lane would’ve helped. If there wasn’t one, I can see a good reason for whatever the fuck really happened here.
If there had been a bike lane, he could/would have stayed there behind the stopping line acknowledging the right of the ambulance to go first, but without one…I can see someone in panic trying to get out of the way and then getting run over regardless of where he was positioned.
Sounds like a pretty straightforward lawsuit
Your honor…he hit me!
Nuh-uh!
Yeah huh!!!
He started it!!!
No I didn’t!!!
Moooooom!!!
Your mom has been dead for 32 years…you’re 81
And I’m still bike riding the mean streets of NYC!
Yeah, and getting billed for your bad driving.
The bad driver was the one not getting billed.
This also feels like a good fit for Not The Onion.
Pro gamer move
“Hoesch estimated to police that he was going 5 mph to 10 mph and said he didn’t think the ambulance was going to turn in front of him.”
-So he’s illegally passing on the right at an intersection and making assumptions. -Wouldn’t have a case with me on jury.
The ambulance was making an illegal turn across traffic.
Um what? From the article you posted
“he and the ambulance were traveling the same direction”
“The ambulance attempted to make a right turn onto another street”
They were both traveling on the right side of the road of (based on the supplied pictures from the articles) a two way, single lane each way street, and the ambulance turned right and didn’t cross any traffic, thus the Ambulance didn’t make a illegal turn.
The Ambulance should be at fault, and the Fire and Rescue should be covering charges as the ambulance driver wasn’t being well aware enough to make the turn, but at the same time Hoesch, The cyclists, also should have given way.
I’m all for less cars on the road, but don’t go throwing information that isn’t true, please.
If you were turning right, and there was a pedestrian in the crosswalk, would it be okay to hit the pedestrian?
I think it would be fair to blame the infrastructure if we want. Bikes shouldn’t be exposed to right turning traffic. Clearly it’s a safety concern.
Nevertheless, regardless if you’re turning left or right, you still need to yield to whatever is in your way. Just because you are making a right turn does not automatically grant you right of way.
if there is a cyclist on your right, it doesn’t matter if there are two lanes, you don’t cut their path: if they go straight, they have priority
They were both traveling on the right side of the road of (based on the supplied pictures from the articles) a two way, single lane each way street, and the ambulance turned right and didn’t cross any traffic, thus the Ambulance didn’t make a illegal turn.
Okay, I’ll try a second time to explain:
The ambulance did cross traffic, by definition, because the bicycle was to the right of it and counts as traffic. In order for it to not cross traffic, it would have needed to start the turn from a position far enough to the right that there would have been no space for the cyclist to be in.
Cyclists don’t purposefully cram themselves into tiny spaces between cars and curbs, you know. The only reason a cyclist would enter the space between the ambulance and the curb would be if the ambulance was waaaaaaay off to the left somewhere and left a huge (several foot wide) gap that invited him in, and that’s not something that is okay for a car about to make a right turn to do.
Bottom line is, it is illegal to right-hook a cyclist. If you hit a cyclist while performing a right turn, you fucked up. Full stop, end of. I don’t understand why people are having difficulty understanding this concept!
This was in the US where they drive on the right making a right turn not ‘across traffic’. The picture at the article further shows the positions.
Okay, let me explain it to you: if there are two lanes going in the same direction, you are in the left one, and you turn right, you are turning across traffic (across the right lane going in the same direction as you). That’s what happened here. The fact that there was space to the right of the ambulance for the cyclist to be in means there were effectively two lanes.
(And don’t try to claim there was only one lane: you conceded that point already when you claimed the cyclist was “illegally passing on the right.” Even an illegal pass doesn’t entitle the vehicle in the left lane to make a right turn across the other vehicle’s path! In order for this collision to be the cyclist’s fault, both vehicles would have had to be in the same lane to begin with, which means there wouldn’t be room for them to be side-by-side and the bike would have hit the back of the ambulance, not be struck by it from the side.)
The picture in the article clearly shows there’s only a right and left lane. There is no room for turning lanes. There’s also no space for a vehicle. Space for a bike doesn’t make it a lane.
What part of “you already conceded that point” did you not understand?
But hey, you want to claim there was only one lane now? Fine. In that case, the cyclist was the vehicle lawfully occupying it and the ambulance must have swung wide to the left for some reason, out of the lane, and then back into it. Either way, it crossed the path of and collided with a vehicle in that lane. You are not entitled to deny this point.
- Cyclists are traffic.
- The ambulance was making a right turn.
- The ambulance hit the cyclist from the side.
- Therefore, the ambulance was turning across traffic, because no traffic means no cyclist to hit. QED.
