Rijkswaterstaat, Defense and organ and blood transport are authorized to drive with flashing lights and sirens.
It is a shock when you are neatly waiting at the traffic lights and suddenly out of nowhere see the police driving through a red light next to you without a siren or flashing light. The police have been granted a legal exemption to deviate from the general traffic rules, if this is necessary for their work. This means that police cars, even without optical and sound signals, may, for example, exceed the speed limit, drive through a red light, drive over the emergency lane or bus lane or park on the sidewalk.
This applies to all police vehicles, both conspicuous and inconspicuous. There are two conditions attached to this exemption. Firstly, the police car driver must not endanger road safety and secondly, it must be necessary for carrying out police work. The latter is somewhat more difficult to check, because the definition of police work cannot be immediately determined by a layperson in the case of such an infringement.
give priority
When an emergency service, such as the fire brigade, ambulance or police uses blue flashing lights and sirens, you must give way to this vehicle. Approaching a vehicle with blue flashing lights without a siren, giving is not mandatory, but the flashing lights are on for a reason.
A priority vehicle can be recognized by a flashing blue light and a two-tone siren. The most common in traffic are the vehicles of the fire brigade, police and ambulance. But Rijkswaterstaat, Defense and organ and blood transport are also authorized to drive with flashing lights and sirens.
We have recently added a new priority vehicle: the road traffic controller or road inspector in his yellow Rijkswaterstaat car. After special training, this person is allowed to use a blue flashing light and siren in so-called priority-1 situations, ie when the emergency is really high.
