“Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani could make driving in the Big Apple hell on wheels.” – as if traffic isn’t already hellish in NYC and in every other major city on the planet.
I already refuse to drive in NYC. You cannot make it any worse for me because it’s already beyond my threshold of “I won’t do it”.
Billionaire Mayor Mike Bloomberg closed down a lot of streets and encouraged bike rental kiosks all over the city. He was also a fan of congestion pricing. [I’m not a fan of Mike, but credit where it’s due]
De Blasio created a system of fast ferries around the city.
Every NYC Mayor tries to improve traffic.
That ambulance is not blocked by traffic. It’s not in Emergency mode.
Wouldn’t make a difference in NYC. Half the cars don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves, and the other half have nowhere to go
that sounds great! I’ll trade places with any NYC billionaire that is fleeing that communist hell hole! You can take my place in Tennessee where everyone drives an F950 apartment on wheels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8P5vGcf-NU
Ferd Fteenthousand!
i am for the limitation of the city car traffic, but this ambulance has no lights blinking, so maybe there was no emergency
Plot twist: they turned it off seconds before the photo was taken, cause the guy inside died, cause they could not get through traffic
Correct. This rig is not running “hot”.
10min before this pic:
Dispatch:
EMS THREE-FIVE, MOVE UP TO STATION ONE-SEVEN.
In carbrains… well… brains, it’s the car haters fault that traffic jams exist in the first place. YoU jUsT wOuLd NeEd To BuIld ThIs OnE aDdItIoNaL lAnE!!!
Obligatory: Just one more lane, bro
That’s part of what makes this tweet confusing to me.
If EMS response times in NYC were really hamstrung by traffic (they’re generally not, the biggest bottle neck is actually staffing) that would be an instance where the “one more lane” types would have a point.
NYC has America’s best public transit options, probably the strongest anti-congestion policy in the country, and the steepest financial penalties for driving in. But their EMS response time is like 2 minutes slower than LA which has more cars, more lanes, newer roads, and less public transit.
We do, but our busses are actually slowest in the world. So, yes and no
I’ve made the mistake of driving in manhattan once, and it taught me two things. How to maneuver within gridlocked traffic, and why you take the subway in NYC.
When they want to visit NYC, my in-laws will take a train for hours to avoid driving in the city and I absolutely don’t blame them. It’s the speed of a mall parking lot on Black Friday and the same stress as highway driving. I’d much rather deal with the fairly low chance of seeing a dude whip it out on the subway.
What Amsterdam did for visitors to the city, is put big parking lots at the edges of the city where you can park for really cheap on condition you combine it with a public transit ticket into the city. Much better than getting stuck in traffic and paying a small fortune to park in the center of the city.
Or of course you can take a train straight into the heart of the city.
We do have a lot of park and ride situations in the us as well, although struggle to make the transit part compelling in most places.
I assume nyc has them as well but it has several extensive rail networks so you’re likely to park in your own town to ride in. For example I parked in Massachusetts, LoL
I’d much rather deal with the fairly low chance of seeing a dude whip it out on the subway.
So true. And the chance two of us whipping it out? Astronomically low!
Me too. I just went there this past weekend: hopped on Acela near my house, got off at Penn Station, walked to my hotel. No driving anywhere near Manhattan.
I am somewhat disappointed that everything was walkable this time, and I had no use for the subway. It may be loud, dirty and chaotic, but it’s functionally outstanding
I’m not sure about this. After driving in the DC area, it was refreshing in Manhattan to know exactly what everyone was going to do. But, you do need to be an assertive, maybe aggressive driver.
Chicago is very much like this to. When not gridlocked, I don’t mind driving in cities since the drivers are very predictable and polite (although impatient of you don’t commit). If convenient I’d still rather take a bus or train and not worry about it though.
I like to use the expression “Assertive but predictable” when talking about city driving.
In my country, if you don’t make room for an ambulance, fire trunk, or PD vehicle in mission, you commit a crime.
In addition to the lack of siren and lights meaning they don’t get priority in this case, the important point is they can’t. The other cars have nowhere to go, no way to clear the path. I mean eventually they will, but an ambulance in this situation is delayed regardless of anyone’s best effort
That’s why dedicated lanes for buses and emergency vehicles are such a good idea. Emergency vehicles can get where they need to go, but with more people travelling by bus, there will also be less cars and less congestion. Everybody wins.
Or if nothing else, a dedicated two-way bike lane still works infinitely better than a dead stop car lane.
There is a single car in front of the ambulance, and an opening in the bus lane one car length ahead. Those cars absolutely would and could make room for that ambulance.
A guide to sirens
- Ambulances: something bad has happened
- Fire trucks: something bad is happening
- Police: something bad is about to happen
Only you can help keep people in your community safe. Block and slow cop cars whenever possible.
If you block the police car you can prevent the bad thing from happening
Lemmy gold 🏆
'Murica, where you’d rather let a crime happen than let a cop commit the crime.
Most theft in the US is wage theft. But cops aren’t on their way to arrest the real criminals
Slight correction, police usually also means something bad has happened. Usually an accident that’s already over and now needs processing, a robbery which you can only call after (most robbers don’t say "go ahead and call the police, I’m about to mug you), murder victim has been found, murder was witnessed, shots fired heard in the distance, etc. Most of the time they can only show up after, take a report, maybe do a little investigating, and maybe find the guy wherever he went off to.
Sometimes you can call before, like if someone is kicking in your door and it takes a few swings or someone is having a suicidal crisis and is working up the nerve or whatever, technically hitting a silent alarm for a bank robbery would be “is happening” but we’ll count it, but even then it still takes anywhere from 11min-30min for them to show up depending on where you are (last time I called it was over an hour in a city, after the event had happened,) and sometimes they don’t even come until the next day in the sticks I visit frequently.
Police aren’t actually that effective at *stopping" crime unless they just so happen to already be in the room when it happens (and that’s assuming they’re not the ones committing the crime themselves, which they also do more than anyone is comfortable with.)
Nope. Usually police are on their way to hurt someone who hasn’t done anything wrong.
Phone calls from rich white Karens who saw someone walking in their neighborhood gasp while black!
Stop watching TV.
Oh now I get it, woosh. I thought it was implying they actually show up to stop things on the first read.
But also not really, they mostly collect reports for insurance RE: car crashes and theft as I noted, but that doesn’t make as good of a news bulletin, so they don’t report the endless amounts of that instead focusing on the bleeding leading and outrage bait.
But nice snarky comment, sure showed me! That’ll show me for saying the police are ineffective at best by nature and sometimes the criminals themselves while being realistic, I meant to say every cop has a quota for how many black people to shoot before they can clock out for the day, that better?
Edit: Hold the fuck up, .nl? Your cops are supposedly fine wtf you talkin about? Are you misappropriating American problems for clout?! You doing ok bud?
My country in South America doesn’t have an instance. Anyone can join this instance, not just the Dutch…
I once made room for an ambulance in NYC and the ambulance followed me to the side because the idea that someone would do that is a foreign there. Someone else then cut us both off before the ambulance got around me.
Same here in the US. But what the “witty” twitter poster fails to think about is that the ambulance isn’t running code. No lights and sirens. No emergency.
In my country you only need to make room when the siren is sounding and the lights are flashing.
Otherwise it’s just normal traffic, just like what seems to be happening in this picture.
Yes, and that’s what I said, in a mission.
Yeah and sometimes that’s literally physically impossible in NYC
And 2 vans on the bus lane.
I hope they cut back on traffic in the city because I’m tired of gridlock.






