(People! When you see red and blue lights behind you, hear sirens wailing, and see headlights flashing, DON'T just signal and mosey over a lane after head-checking twice! Get out of the f*cking way, and that RIGHT NOW!)
Not trying to pick on you, but, I think this is terrible advice, (brought on by high emotion and adrenaline and a want of thought and perspective.) Please continue to drive carefully and don't allow yourself to be suddenly panicked by emergency lights, which could lead you to making a driving error and potentially an accident in addition to the scenario the emergency personnel are already responding to, only slowing their response to the original incident exponentially more than a quick lane-check (or even two) ever would.
The sudden arrival of a fast-moving vehicle with bright flashing lights and loud blaring siren behind you only makes it
more difficult to perform driving maneuvers like lane-changes safely. I think it's actually perfectly reasonable to expect a lane change to take a little longer under those conditions than under normal ones. That is a lot of extra sensory input that must be filtered or processed in order to make the lane change safely. Recommending making the maneuver immediately without consideration, skipping safety checks, is kind of absurd.
It's automatic for most to believe that LEOs are the hero-solution here, but let me remind everyone briefly that we here know better. We all here know that the solution to problems like this is not to carelessly throw our vehicles to the side of the road to try and shave off 4 or 5 seconds from a LEO's response time. Even if you halved, no, even if you quartered your LEO friend's response time, it likely wouldn't have been enough to save a single life in this case. (If you know the incident and response time-lines, feel free to do the math and check my speculation.) We must be prepared, trained, and otherwise ready to defend ourselves in a moment's notice - ultimately that's why we are here, is it not? ETA Point is, I think your reaction reveals a common false belief (the false belief that we must rely on LEO response to save us, and the false belief that there is any chance they can respond fast enough to situations like this), and I thought it prudent to highlight and explain for multiple reasons.
