The sun is up and you are driving down Interstate 95 with the radio set to a soft rock station
. All of a sudden you are sirens in the distance and you try to make out where it is coming from. Your eyes dart at the other side of the divider and you then you notice the flashing red and blue of police lights coming up from the rear really fast. You realize you are driving on the left lane of a two-lane stretch of Interstate 95. So you decide to signal right and then carefully switch over to the right lane. The police cruiser whizzes past you with the sirens blaring and the lights flashing. You think to yourself, "I hope they get where they need to be."
This is something that happens on a daily basis in many parts of the United States and most likely, the rest of the world as well. Besides the loud noise of the police sirens, the police light bars are the best way to warn other vehicles on the road that a police cruiser is on its way. For most people it is difficult to accurately pinpoint when a police car is on its way through sound alone, which is why police lights are necessary. Seeing the flashing lights is a much more poignant signal for you to make way than just using the siren alone.
Ambulances and other cars that use emergency vehicle lights also use them to get where they need to be. And much like for police cars ambulances do use sirens but within a city, which by its very nature has a lot of noise pollution, they need lights to make people get out of the way in a hurry. In a city like New York, its residents need more than loud noises to make us move; we need the flashing signals of vehicle warning lights to get us moving on our way quicker.
For tow trucks, they need vehicle lights to warn other cars on the road that they are towing one or several cars to their intended destination. These lights warn other cars on the road that the tow truck is carrying a very heavy load and that they need to be careful around them.
Without vehicle warning lights, regular cars would react very slowly to emergency vehicles which would cause greater problems if they were not able to get where they need to be on time.