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Audio: Whoever needed it, they’re dead.
Subtitle: Whoever needed it, they’re okay.I looked it up, and the Rettungsgasse isn’t a thing in Germany on city streets, only on highways (Autobahnen) and roads between settlements (Außerortsstraßen). (TIL it’s a thing in Germany on roads between settlements because here in Austria it is only a thing on highways.)
There’s still an obligation to move out of the way for emergency vehicles, but there are situations where that simply isn’t possible. There are sometimes dense urban traffic situations similar to the one in the video in Germany too.
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That’s not a dense urban situation at all. There was plenty of space on the road in the video. Usually the cars drive a bit on the pedestrian walkway or just really tight to the left/right end and it’s enough. Would also have been plenty sufficient on the road in the video
Living in Germany, I beg to differ.
In the situation shown every vehicle would have to move somewhere to let the ambulance pass.
Even if that means sidewalks or crossing red lights. Had to do so myself on occasion.
You simply move out of the way. Nothing more to it.
I’ve never seen a siren stuck in traffic in my life here in Belgium
Same in Sweden.
Same here. I’m German. I mean, yeah, maybe for a few seconds or something. Until people fucking moved out of the way.
Neither have I in America.
Park near a fire hydrant or pass a stopped school bus and everybody freaks out, but this is just fine somehow
In NYC people block hydrants all the fucking time. Only time it’s enforced is when there’s a fire, by FDNY
And people complain that climate protestors hold up ambulances, even though they always let emergency vehicles through.
NYC needs to ban cars
No cars on the island at least
Now I want a kinky bicycle. I just have a straight one.
Kinky and straight aren’t mutual exclusive 😏
Tape a dildo to the seat, now you have one too
Of course the ambulance have a reinforced bumper. I think the cars would move out of the way if it means that your gets damaged of you don’t
Not to defend our shitty car-centric society but most places in the US aren’t so bad. I would guess that New York in particular presents more challenges for smooth ambulance traffic than almost anywhere else in the country due to its high traffic density and relatively narrow roads and streets. People likely want to move and can’t. Excluding bicycle issues, Americans are pretty good about observing traffic laws and knowing when to give way. (but yes, to a German person, American drivers probably seem like troglodytes)
That’s fair, but this issue is solved in European cities, via mass transit lowering the number of cars on the road, ambulances being built smaller to fit down narrow passages, and wide bike lanes which ambulances use in emergencies. If anything, NY might be one of the cities most poised to implement all these, if it can just get its shit together.
Not only that, in many places there are dedicated bus, and taxi (and sometimes tram) lanes which can also be used by emergency services.
I believe this video is from before the congestion pricing in NYC. I wonder if and how much it has improved since.
I’m in Manhattan this week, and have watched an ambulance slowly move down a street as cars struggled to get out of the way. Even with congestion pricing, there just isn’t much room on the narrow one-way streets.
I’ve lived in many European cities with narrow-streets. Somehow ambulances don’t struggle too much.
Not sure what to tell you, only reporting what I’ve seen. On the avenues they’re fine, it’s just the east-west streets in midtown I’ve seen them struggle with.
The Orange Moron killed it, if I didn’t miss something
https://apnews.com/article/nyc-congestion-pricing-toll-trump-hochul-2c42443618f127f88bda986f1795eef5
They want to kill it but haven’t been able to. I was going to say; quite unbelievable, but with this ‘administration’ it’s not. Everything they’re doing is either counterproductive, fascist or just plain retaliation because ‘0wning the libs’.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/nyregion/mta-congestion-pricing-dot.html or https://archive.is/sv1RE
Does congestion pricing cause people to give way to ambulances? 🤣
What are you on about? Congestion pricing reduces congestion, which makes ambulances go faster.
Yeah true, there’s fewer people on the road means fewer will not know how to drive, as people who don’t know how to drive tend to not like driving so might be more motivated to avoid it by the charge. Or it’s just a tax on people who are too poor to be able to turn down a job that requires them to drive…
The ambulance will still get stuck behind people who don’t know how to drive…
Knowing how to drive doesn’t create a space to move your vehicle into when the road is packed like Tetris. The world’s best drivers can get stuck in these situations, too.
Not if people use a reasonable following distance.
But yeah, I’ve seen people managing to block an ambulance on an empty road, some drivers are a special kind of stupid. Which is another good reason why driving should not be the default mode of transport.
Congestion pricing impacts rich people more than poor people. You can drive to New York, park outside of the center and take the metro or the bus. Poor people have been doing that for a long time in New York because it’s expensive to park in the city. What jobs in the middle of New York city require you to drive?
I live in East Asia, where public transport is given major funding and has high ridership. There is no law requiring people to move their cars for an ambulance and people just don’t bother. Ambulances routinely get stuck in traffic.
Haha I like what you did there at the end
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Not to defend our shitty car-centric society but most places in the US aren’t so bad.
+1. I’ve never seen this problem in Chicago. Most people pull over and stop until the ambulance has passed.
Yep. Traffic gets the hell out of the way and stops immediately if there are emergency vehicles trying to get through where I live, even in the city.
Ah, so it is because of bikes! /s
Yeah those pesky cyclist blocking the road ahead!
Easy Douggie!!
In my experience this, and running red lights, is more of an American phenomena than one inherent to cars
Never send paramedics to do a German cyclist’s job!
alt source? catbox won’t load for me and many others.
Nobody moves says man showing video with car behind him literally moving out of the way. What an asshole.
Edit: no no don’t trust the evidence of your eyes trust the Narrative of the video.
Don’t be so fragile.
For anyone wondering, the Rettungsgasse (“rescue aisle”) is something we do on longer stretches of road whenever congestion happens, to allow ambulances to pass through as quickly as possible. Everyone on the right side of the road keeps to the right and everyone on the left keeps to the left, forming a roughly ambulance-sized gap in the middle. On multi-lane roads, it’s formed to the right of the left-most lane.
There’s also laws for it. You can get fined, if you hold up the ambulance, because you failed to form the Rettungsgasse, or if you have the audacity to drive down the Rettungsgasse to try to skip a traffic jam.
It’s not really a thing in cities like shown in the video, as we’d typically try to drive into side roads or onto parking spaces or the sidewalk to make room for the ambulance. The laws don’t apply there either.
The ambulance should havet the right to trash the cars of they don’t move out of the way. That would maybe get people to move.
Put a giant cowcatcher in front of it
While that sounds nice, it also risks the ambulance being rendered immobile, or the equipment/patients being thrown around.
Maybe not ramming them at full speed. But just enough to put a dent in their car.
Okay. Now we have a damaged ambulance and a damaged car, but the ambulance still can’t pass. What’s the advantage?
This is the law in both America and Canada, the issue is either just assholes deciding they are more important than the ambulance ,or a lack of places to move.
The law in my part of the U.S. specifically says to pull to the right to let an ambulance pass, but as far as I know, it doesn’t give you the right to drive on the sidewalk (so as you say, nothing to account for a lack of places to move).
What our German friend there is describing is a convention to inform drivers whether they should pull to the right or to the left depending on lane position, which is really smart and which I’ve never heard of. If there is such a system here, it needs a marketing campaign, because it only works if everyone knows about it and clearly we’re not there yet.
And also we just let people die instead of enforcing the rules.
Fuck drivers
Most of province 20 over the limit seems fine and you got a really mean cop if you got a ticket for it, even though we know speed, tailgating, agressive passing all increases the risk for a collision that tax payers ultimately pay for.
Dieser Kommentarbereich ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland
… ist nun Eigentum der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ja
So viel Zeit muss sein
