Emergency vehicles travel at high speeds when responding to an incident and so must be easily detectable by other road users to ensure that a collision does not occur. Lighting on emergency vehicles is one way this is achieved.

On behalf of the Home Office, User Perspective conducted research on the effectiveness of emergency vehicle lighting using a number of methods. These included stakeholder interviews, reviews of academic and applied literature, and an experimental study in an applied environment.

Through our research, User Perspective highlighted gaps in current knowledge on driver responses to emergency vehicle lighting, as well as making recommendations as to how emergency vehicle lighting might be improved.

This study was accepted and published in Applied Ergonomics and can be found here.