Emergency Vehicles and Courteous Driving

Living in the Menifee/Sun City area brings with it certain nuances that you just don't see everywhere. I was so surprised when I first moved to Sun City, many years ago, the amount of ambulances, police cars, paramedics and fire trucks I encountered while driving. It didn't take long, actually only one trip to the supermarket in the Core, to realize that living so near a retirement community was just different than any city in which I had lived before.

As the years wore on, I became accustomed to seeing at least one emergency vehicle a week when I was out, and sometimes, one a day. The path from the Core to Menifee Valley Medical Center seems to be the heaviest traveled, for obvious reasons. Being a mother of young children, I always pulled over at the first sight of the emergency vehicle, and my kids and I said a short prayer. I was trying to set a good example for my kids, but it turned into a community awareness for me over time.

One day my 9-year-old daughter hollered out the window of our car to a passing motorist who had not given way to an ambulance. She yelled, "Pull over, Knucklehead!" as the car drove by. I was initially embarrassed by her for yelling out of the window that way, but suddenly filled with pride. She went on to explain to me that it made her so angry when other drivers couldn't pull over for 15 seconds when there were lives at stake. "What if it was their mother, or child, or puppy, in a burning house? Would they want everyone to pull over then?"

Today I drove no more than 45 minutes, and was passed by 3 emergency vehicles. On all three seperate occasions, I noted that a couple of cars did not yield, nor pull over, and one almost drove head-on into a fire engine on Newport Road, when the engine had to pull into on-coming traffic because the road was blocked. So many motorists had not pulled to the side that the engine had nowhere else to go.

What if it was your house on fire, your father having a heart attack, your child choking? Would you pull over then? Would you want me to pull over too?