As I discussed Dutch firefighters earlier, let's make this a series.
When traffic is busy, ambulances are often escorted by 3 to 5 police motorcycles. A commander drives right in front of the ambulance and constantly updates the others of their location and status of traffic lights. The other 2 to 4 play a game of leapfrog to close off the crossing ahead: each takes one intersection, then when the commander and ambulance reaches the first one, he rushes past the others and through the blocked crossings to stop traffic at the next unblocked one.
The following video uses split screen to show the view from the ambulance in the center and the view from one of the leapfroggers in the corner. English subtitles are available, but may only work on YouTube itself and not in the embedded version. (Only the first 7 minutes show this process well. Afterwards they mostly drive on the highway.)
[media=https://youtu.be/4tM1pjeRLoM]
Rotterdam takes it even a step further for the most urgent transports: they sometimes assign one or two vehicles to every intersection and use about 80 police officers to close off the entire route at once, as shown starting at 3:15.
[media=https://youtu.be/l5C1GX2BwD0]
The following video uses split screen to show the view from the ambulance in the center and the view from one of the leapfroggers in the corner. English subtitles are available, but may only work on YouTube itself and not in the embedded version. (Only the first 7 minutes show this process well. Afterwards they mostly drive on the highway.)
[media=https://youtu.be/4tM1pjeRLoM]
Rotterdam takes it even a step further for the most urgent transports: they sometimes assign one or two vehicles to every intersection and use about 80 police officers to close off the entire route at once, as shown starting at 3:15.
[media=https://youtu.be/l5C1GX2BwD0]
