Some background here. In India, if an emergency vehicle is coming, people are not very good at giving it way to pass. If there is a traffic jam, there is usually no way the emergency vehicle is going to get out of the traffic in time and has to trudge along. I learned this the hard way when I took my grandfather in an ambulance once, when we really needed to reach the hospital fast but were stuck in a jam.
One night I was driving my car on a totally jammed road in Delhi with an ambulance a few vehicles behind me and its siren on. However, no one was really giving it way. I could see the jam went on for another 300 meter’s ahead of me and it would have taken the ambulance around 10 minutes to cover that. I hesitated for a few seconds. Then I changed my lane to the slower lane, shut off the engine, and came out of the car (yes, right in the middle of the road). I then proceeded to direct all the traffic in the fast lane to go towards the slower lane and I kept running along with the ambulance giving hand directions to all the vehicles in front of it to shift to the slower lane. I was able to get it out of the traffic in about a minute and then ran back to my vehicle to turn it back on.
The amazing thing that I noted was that no one honked me when I stopped the car in the middle of the road. They could see what I was trying to achieve. When I gave hand directions to the car, they immediately gave way. Sometimes, all people need is a little nudge. It felt good.
