By Ted Slowik
Who's to say why a Naperville woman on Thursday failed to see the big fire truck with the flashing lights are loud siren? Who's to say why she was failed by the wonderful technology that turns lights green for oncoming emergency vehicles and thus red for the cross traffic? Somehow, she collided with a Naperville fire engine on Route 59 and Liberty Street, and it's a sign that drivers aren't paying enough attention to what they're doing.
The law says drivers are supposed to yield to emergency vehicles by pulling over to the right and stopping. Sometimes people simply don't see the flashing lights in their rear-view mirrors. I saw this just yesterday--a cop car, lights ablazing, siren blaring, directly behind a car in the center northbound lane of a four-lane highway, and this puzzled look on the driver's face like she was expecting the officer to pull around her and pass her in the curb lane.
People, that is not how it works. You're supposed to get out of their way.
I could write a book about the idiocy I see on the roads during my 90 to 100 minutes of commuting every day, but it would be the same old story. Then again, just when you think you've heard it all, someone relates an amazing story of driver stupidity.
So what have you got? Regale us with your tales of slow-moving pokey puppies and maniacally swerving lane-changers. Tell us about the time someone cut you off or refused to let you into traffic or stopped to let you into traffic but the cars in the other lane didn't know you were going to be pulling out because they didn't see you. You get the idea.
Hey who knows, maybe they were eating while driving?
I was surprised by this accident. Usually suburban Chicago drivers are very accomodating to emergency vehicles, pulling off to the side of the road well in advance of their arrival. I guess this was one of those cases where, as bad luck would have it, everything went wrong at the wrong time.
I really hate stereotyping people and making sweeping generalizations about any group, but this much is true: Suburban drivers are better about getting out of the way of emergency vehicles. Chicago drivers are at their worst at red lights. Almost all of them pull up close to the car in front of them, blocking intersections and leaving other drivers bottled up in parking lots or alleys.
Around Naperville, it's the "Suggestions of the Road"; it seems like the "Rules of the Road" are optional.