Driven To Tears
Dear Licensed Drivers of Georgia:
The law requires you to yield to emergency vehicles. Really, I’m not kidding. It says so in the official Code of Georgia, Annotated.
This means you, even if you decide that talking on your cell phone is too important or that you have to get your kids home from the sitter. This means you especially when it’s not just one fire truck, but a fleet of them because there has been an explosion!
You, Dear Atlanta Driver, are just not that important. You’re not. If there is a police, ambulance, or fire truck blaring its siren at full blast repeatedly, they are not kidding. Someone could be in danger, dying, or in a situation so terrible that you’d not want to imagine it.
When you don’t pull over to the side of the road, but rather stop dead in the middle so that you can still make your left turn, you could kill someone. If someone were to die because you thought Jimmy just had to have a happy meal, you could be subject to a felony manslaughter charge and sent to jail for a long time.
Now some of you are thinking that this really doesn’t happen, however, it does. People in Atlanta have forgotten that they’re supposed to get out of the way of emergency vehicles. A parking lane or turn lane will be available for the mini-van driver to get out of the way and the driver, who is talking to her kids won’t; Nor the Lexus with the executive talking on his phone without a hands-free device. They clogged the lanes.
It’s becoming all to common. Yes, emergency vehicles are annoying…but only until you need one.
February 25th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
You might also want to point out that traffic in both directions should come to a stop. It’s also not advisable to make left and right hand turns at intersections when an emergency vehicle is approaching on a cross street. It doesn’t matter if you have a green light, you don’t have the right of way.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Yeah, I got one of these tickets when I was in high school (circa ‘97). Even though I paid the ticket I will swear to this day that I didn’t violate the law. The ambulance didn’t have its lights on!! But, fine.