760
Ambulance hits cyclist, rushes him to hospital, then sticks him with $1,800 bill
(www.oregonlive.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
760 points (97.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
9666 readers
66 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is this fuck cars or fuck the us?
Show of hands, who pays for ambulances regardless of why?
My intention is definitely "fuck cars." The fucked-up thing here is that even ambulance drivers, who should know better more so than almost anybody, are incompetently right-hooking cyclists. Billing him for it is merely the icing on the shit-cake.
A lot of EMTs work 24-hour shifts, and 48-hour shifts are not uncommon. The thought that the ambulance driver on the road next to me might be at hour 46 is... frequently worrying.
The problem isn't the EMTs being incompetent, the problem is with the industry standards and the employers.
That again sounds more like a shithole country problem tan a car problem.
Exactly this. They transported someone, they filled out a PCR for billing to send to insurance and the patient.
I was forced to work a few 24+ hour shifts in healthcare and working on zero sleep fucked me up. It gave me migraines, vomiting, insomnia, manic depression and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack.
It is beyond cruel and inhumane that employers can force people to work without sleep. It is so fucked that not allowing someone to sleep is considered a form of torture by the Geneva convention.
My former roommate is an EMT and he spent 90% of his 48 hour shifts sleeping and playing video games.
So your alternative would be that ambulances should no longer use cars? From my perspective all kind of emergency services such as fire department, law enforcement, ambulances should be the very last cars we get rid of as a society. They have to be fast and they need to transport a lot of stuff and people.
The rest of the world does without GIANT and dangerous emergency vehicles for one. They still put out fires and transport sick people. How american fire departments are getting people killed (video from "not just bikes")
The rest of the world often also builds better infrastructure, like a protected bike lane, to signifcantly reduce the conflicts between cars and not cars.
A bike lane would've helped. If there wasn't one, I can see a good reason for whatever the fuck really happened here.
If there had been a bike lane, he could/would have stayed there behind the stopping line acknowledging the right of the ambulance to go first, but without one...I can see someone in panic trying to get out of the way and then getting run over regardless of where he was positioned.
Youre ignoring the bike lanes are separate from the car lanes, which protects cyclists. But in the US the firedept doesn't like that. Lanes need to be so wide and space so clear that the bikes have no space
I'm not sure I get what you're saying, or what I'm missing.
I'm talking about the most basic kind of bike lane, which by all means is just a line on the tarmac. It does however ensure that the bike has a place to be, and that the bike will be visible to the cars, because the bike lane's stopping line is further ahead than that of the cars. I also don't know the exact situation from the article, but if the bike had been at the stopping line in this bike lane, it would never conflict with a right turning ambulance.
Why bother doing all that, saying you dont understand when you could have just watched the video lmao.
Get out sometime, see what things look like in the world instead of drawing images in your own little view.
I still don't have any clue about what part of my comment you object against, or why you're so fucking negative about it.
All I'm saying is that the right turn accident was completely preventable by making a simple painted line on the tarmac, as it is done in many places where there isn't room for the kind of huge separated bike lanes as shown in your photo.
Fun fact, many if not most of those ambulances are made in Canada, and not the USA.
Fun fact: Where they are made doesn't dictate what specs they should have.
Absolutely true, it was mostly just a response to the "rest of the world" part of the grandparent's comment.
Ahhh okay, but you’re not trying to argue that paramedics should be on bicycles or taking public transit! That was the thing that puzzled me.
I think we could avoid a lot of the issues with pedestrians and cyclists getting hit by motor vehicles by getting rid of stroads and properly designing cities to separate streets and roads.
I will always opt for a Lyft or Uber, unless I am actively dying from something that could kill me in 30 minutes or less, like a massive severed artery or something like that.
They are just as fast, and if I start literally dying in the hospital waiting room, they will most likely pay attention.
The only way it makes sense to take an ambulance to a hospital is if you literally have no other option, or if you are so seriously injured you've already lost consciousness or are mostly paralyzed.
You can call an ambulance, paramedics arrive, stabilize you, and then refuse to get in the ambulance.
This costs you nothing.
Then you just bite on your wallet and take an Uber or Lyft, which costs 10 to 20 dollars.
Get in the ambulance? 1 to 3 thousand dollars, for a shitty version of the care you'll recieve in the hospital anyway, can't avoid those costs.