Roundabout, blocked exit and an ambulance behind
You are third in line at the entry to a two-lane roundabout. Traffic on the roundabout is heavy but moving. About 30 m beyond the exit you want, a police checkpoint has formed a slow queue, and vehicles are backed up across that exit, so the roundabout is half blocked. An ambulance with siren and flashing blue lights comes up close behind you. On your right, a delivery van waiting at the same entry keeps edging forward, its left indicator flashing, cancelling, then flashing again. Ahead of you the second car in the queue has stopped half over the give-way line.
1. How do you make way for the ambulance here, without blocking the roundabout?
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The instinct is to drive forward out of the way. Here that would be wrong: the exit is blocked, so anything that enters the roundabout now will stop on the circulatory carriageway and jam it completely - including for the ambulance.
So:
- Keep left and signal left, and pull as far to the left of your lane as is genuinely safe, to open a channel.
- Stop before the give-way line, not over it. Do not mount the pavement or the verge where pedestrians from the checkpoint queue are standing.
- Do not enter the roundabout to 'clear the way' unless you can see that you can clear it and leave at your exit.
- Stay predictable. A vehicle that lurches first left, then right, then forward creates the hazard the ambulance then has to negotiate.
The ambulance driver can see the queue across the exit as well as you can, and will choose a route. Your job is to give them a gap and not to add a stopped vehicle to the middle of the junction.
2. Does the siren and the blue lights give the ambulance an absolute right of way?
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No. It is a request for priority, not an exemption that transfers to you.
- The ambulance keeps the same duties as any other driver, including giving way to traffic already circulating on the roundabout.
- You must give way only when it is safe to do so. Stopping dead in a live lane, crossing a red light, or mounting a pavement to let it past creates a new hazard and can cause the very collision everyone is trying to avoid.
- The correct response is early, obvious and undramatic: mirror, signal left, slow, position left, stop if you can do it cleanly.
- Do not follow closely in its wake. The space behind an emergency vehicle is exactly where other drivers are least prepared.
3. The van on your right is hesitating, with an indicator flicking on and off. Who has priority, and how do you proceed?
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Priority belongs to traffic already circulating on the roundabout - not to you and not to the van. Between the two of you there is no automatic winner.
Work from what you can see rather than from the indicator:
- An indicator is a statement of intent, not a grant of permission, and this one is flicking on and off, which means the driver may not know what they are doing either.
- Do not enter side by side. Two vehicles entering together on a curve will converge on the same lane.
- If the van has already crossed the line and is committed, let it go. Two seconds lost beats a scrape in the middle of a junction that the ambulance is trying to get through.
- Do not follow it blindly into a blocked exit. Whatever the van does, your exit is still jammed, so a gap on the roundabout may be the wrong gap to take.
Make eye contact if you can, hold back, and enter only when you can enter and leave cleanly.