Pull over, it’s the right thing to do

SOME decades ago the office raconteur recounted a story of a young boy who had been seriously injured, how I cannot now remember, but his condition required a life or death dash to Addington hospital from the upper Highway area.

This was the era before there were hospitals in Hillcrest, Pinetown and Westville and as it was quite early in the morning, Field’s Hill was thick with traffic. With lights flashing and siren blaring the ambulance driver did not have to severely reduce speed because the traffic gave way, opening up the centre of the road “like a zip being pulled down.” I was reminded of this excellent description on the way home one evening last week when I watched a police van, in full voice, trying to negotiate a path through rush-hour afternoon traffic.Very few people gave way, except for the old fogeys who had been brought up to consider other people and to respect authority when necessary.

One car in particular, a little silver job, hugged the centre line. We were climbing a hill on a winding, narrow road where overtaking on the wrong side of the road was dangerous in the extreme. So the police van sat on this car’s tail in stop, start traffic until it was safe to overtake. Not once did it occur to the driver to pull over, that someone’s life may have depended on it. This exercise in patience was repeated over and over until reaching the traffic lights where the police van sped off, obviously to attend to an emergency of some sort. I wondered how the driver of the little silver car, and the many others, would feel if the person requiring police assistance was a member of their family. I also wondered what they had learned when studying the rules of the road for their learners licences.

In the same vein paramedics attempting to reach the scenes of accidents, often when people’s lives are hanging by a thread, are being stymied by motorists who insist on blocking the lane inside the yellow line, the emergency lane, thus preventing the medics from reaching the patients swiftly, and at times with tragic results.

Social media was vocal on this issue at the weekend with police and paramedics pleading with the public to be more considerate and obey the rules. The Fatal Moves Team said in a tweet on Sunday “Heads up! To all those arrogant idiots blocking the N bound N2 emergency lane how dare you block emergency response units from saving life.”

There were dozens more. One shows a photograph of a paramedic on foot, walking through the backed up traffic, followed by an ambulance, instructing motorists to pull over to let the response teams through. A scroll through facebook and twitter reveals the same problem countrywide, from Palaborwa to Pofadder, Cape Town to Durban and Johannesburg. South Africans are lousy, selfish drivers.

How do we stop this arrogant, self-centred behaviour? How do we get it through to those hell-bent on being first in the queue that the yellow line indicates a lane for the use of police and emergency vehicles only; it is not there to allow people to leap frog the traffic jam.

What we need are more stringent policing, fines with real punch, rather than a slap on the wrist, and the possibility of charges of culpable homicide for people obstructing the police and emergency response teams preventing them from reaching crash scenes in time to save lives.