Everyone knows they should pull to the side of the road when an ambulance with its blaring siren approaches. But what if you’ve got the windows rolled up, the radio blaring and can’t hear it coming?
That’s not a problem in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where the ambulances actually hijack nearby AM and FM signals to let drivers know they’re nearby.
The clever approach isn’t illegal either. A creative agency called Maruri Grey actually worked with the Radio Association of Ecuador to outfit ambulances with low-power broadcast antennas that override all AM and FM stations within a 1km radius of the vehicle. So anyone within the vicinity of the ambulance would be alerted it was coming well in advance, reducing the time it had to slow down for traffic ahead to clear.
And even though radio has been replaced by CDs and MP3 players as in-vehicle entertainment, response times for the ambulances was actually reduced by up to 40 per cent with the new system. So now we just sit back and wait for pizza delivery drivers to install their own pirate radio transmitters to guarantee a piping hot pie delivered on time. [YouTube via Behance]