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Comment by hacoo | Hacker News Reader

It’s not hard, use a tow truck. But getting a tow truck to every incident (especially in the bay area, not know for functional towing services) is the hard part.

Since there’s no driver present and the controls are presumably locked, you cant push the car to the side of the road which is what would normally happen with a stalled car.

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I think it's pretty simple: fire trucks are really big. Use the fire truck to push the disabled car out of the way. This will cause damage to the car, but who cares? That's the car owner's problem. It's just like when firefighters smash the windows of illegally parked cars and put fire hoses through them.

This also may cause damage to the fire truck, or to legally parked cars the disabled car gets pushed into, or to pedestrians on nearby sidewalks.

There's videos of fire trucks doing exactly this (one even to a police car that was blocking their way to a building on fire!).

Fire trucks are made for stuff like that.

Legally parked cars are the problem for whoever was blocking the road, not the fire truck. When there's an emergency, fire trucks have wide latitude to do whatever is necessary to get to the scene. They can't cause other crashes, but causing property damage for illegally-parked vehicles is fine.

I didn’t say they couldn’t, I said they shouldn’t unless truly there are no other options.

This is not a concern that stops US emergency crews very long. I guess things may vary in other countries.

In the major US city where I live I’ve often seen fire engines re-route to avoid double parked cars.

Seems much more efficient than just plowing through.

I'm sure it is, depending on just how long this re-route takes. I should hope that it's obvious that if they can simply steer around an illegally parked car without any issue, they should just do this, for many reasons. But if the double/triple-parked cars are completely blocking the road, they can plow through, and they have every right to.

A single double-parked car in my city can result in the street being completely inaccessible for thru-traffic. I've also seen them break out the spotters and back up into their turning lane.

I assume they're also reticent to implement the nuclear option, because even a cursory google search didn't return any incidents of this happening anytime recently (though obviously that doesn't mean it doesn't).

It did, however, return a few results about fire trucks being in (non head-on) collisions on city streets and several firefighters being injured on-board.

When a fire truck pushes another vehicle out of the way, it doesn't ram into it at full speed; that would be dumb. It slowly makes contact with the vehicle, then pushes. A fire truck easily has enough power to push a parked car out of the way. Of course, this doesn't happen often.

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