Ambulance drivers dealing with emergencies have been known to put on their lights and sirens, followed by occasional speeding and the running of red lights. Police generally do not pull over the ambulances and fine the drivers who are behaving in this fashion. But police officers have human discretion, while cameras that automatically record speeding or red-light running offenses do not.
In Britain, where speed cameras are pretty common, ambulance drivers have been receiving hundreds of speeding tickets each week. It should come to an end now, at least in England and Wales, because at the beginning of July the police reached an agreement with the health minister calling for a cessation to the tickets — as long as the ambulance’s blue emergency lights are visible in the photograph. The agreement was spurred by a particularly notorious case, as reported in this article from the Guardian on July 3: “Pressure for a change to the penalty procedure mounted last year after Mike Ferguson, a Bradford ambulance driver, was charged with speeding as he delivered a liver for a transplant operation in Cambridge.”
So, man triumphs over unfeeling machine — but maybe we shouldn’t be too pleased with ourselves. In the pre-camera days of the 1960s, British law against red-light running did not include an exception for emergency vehicles. As with the recent circumstances with the cameras, the 1960s situation placed drivers of fire engines in a quandary: their licenses (and hence livelihoods) were at risk, while some chief officers of fire departments mandated that their drivers ignore red lights. An exception to the red-light law was finally carved out for fire engines and other emergency vehicles, first in the common law — in 1971! — and later by an Act of Parliament.
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