New York is one of the only states that asks volunteer EMS personnel to respond to life-threatening emergencies behind a green courtesy light — a color most motorists read as construction, utility, or snow removal. Fix 375 is the campaign to retire green for volunteer EMS and align the standard with volunteer firefighters: one color, one signal, one meaning. Blue.
Under New York Vehicle and Traffic Law §375(41), volunteer firefighters responding from home to a call are permitted to display blue courtesy lights. Volunteer ambulance personnel — responding to the same neighborhoods, often for the same calls — are restricted to green.
Green reads differently on the road. Across the United States, green flashing lights are used on snowplows, oversized load pilot vehicles, private security, mobile command posts, and utility vehicles. In Ohio and Michigan, green is explicitly deployed as a caution signal for municipal service fleets. The public has learned to associate it with slow-moving work, not urgent medical response.
A volunteer EMT racing from home to a cardiac arrest at 2 a.m. needs motorists to recognize — instantly — that a first responder is approaching. Green doesn't deliver that recognition. Blue does. The fix is to retire green for volunteer EMS entirely and adopt the same blue standard already proven for volunteer firefighters.
The question isn't whether green is visible — it's whether green is recognizable as an emergency signal. Decades of human-factors research point to the same conclusion: color carries meaning, and meaning comes from convention.
Human-factors research on emergency warning lights has repeatedly shown that drivers rate blue and red as having greater perceived saturation than white, yellow, or green at equivalent intensity — meaning a single blue courtesy light is detected sooner than a single green one under typical nighttime response conditions.
Bullough et al. (2018); ERSI Driver Perception Study (2022); SAE J595The USFA's Emergency Vehicle Visibility and Conspicuity Study (FA-323) emphasizes that recognition — not raw brightness — determines whether a driver yields. Blue has been the near-universal American courtesy-light convention for volunteer responders for 40+ years. Green has no such established meaning in the public mind.
USFA FA-323 (2009); Solomon & King; Langham & Rillie (2002)Maine uses green on state plow trucks. Ohio permits green in place of amber on construction and service vehicles. Private security fleets and oversized-load pilot vehicles display green across the country. A New York motorist encountering a green light has statistically more reason to expect a utility truck than an EMT.
Ohio DOT guidance; Maine DOT fleet practice; industry survey dataFix 375 calls for a clean amendment to New York Vehicle and Traffic Law §375(41)(5): retire green as the courtesy-light color for volunteer ambulance and mobile crisis personnel, and replace it with blue — the color volunteer firefighters have used effectively for over forty years. Same authorization process. Same use restrictions. Same Move Over Law protection. One color the public already understands.
A reasonable phase-in period (we propose 24 months from enactment) gives agencies and individual responders time to retire existing green equipment at the next replacement cycle. No one is forced to throw away working equipment overnight. But at the end of the transition, there is one volunteer first-responder courtesy light color in New York: blue.
Because the entire problem is that the current color carries the wrong meaning to the public. A patchwork — some volunteer EMS using blue, some using green — would extend the confusion indefinitely and undercut the safety case. The point of standardization is uniformity. If a motorist sees a single blue light on a personal vehicle anywhere in New York, it should mean the same thing: a volunteer first responder is en route to an emergency. One color, one meaning, statewide.
No. Police in New York use red, white, and blue in combination, typically on full light bars with sirens. A single blue courtesy light on a personal vehicle, without siren, has been the volunteer firefighter standard since the 1970s without measurable confusion. The public already distinguishes between "cop behind me" and "volunteer heading to a call." Volunteer EMS would enter that same already-understood category.
Under current law, NY already makes no visible distinction between a volunteer firefighter responding to a structure fire and one responding to an EMS call through a fire-based ambulance service. Many volunteer fire departments run EMS — those members already use blue. The green/blue divide isn't about what the responder does; it's an accident of which statute paragraph they fall under. Unifying under blue eliminates an artificial distinction that never made sense in the field.
Volunteer EMS personnel are a small population per capita, and courtesy lights are used only during authorized emergency response — not while driving to the grocery store. The real-world increase in blue lights on the road at any given moment would be marginal, and would be more than offset by a significant increase in motorist yielding behavior.
Decades of public-awareness campaigns about green have not shifted recognition in any state that has tried it. Meanwhile, blue recognition is already near-universal. Changing the color is cheaper, faster, and more effective than trying to rewrite public intuition — and it harmonizes New York with the standard most other states already use for volunteer responders.
Yes — eventually. That's why Fix 375 calls for a 24-month phase-in from enactment. Existing green courtesy lights stay legal during the transition window, allowing agencies and individual responders to retire equipment at the next normal replacement cycle. After 24 months, the standard is uniform: blue. A single LED courtesy light costs $40–$120 — a one-time, modest expense weighed against decades of clearer recognition and faster motorist yielding.
Legislators respond to constituent data. Fix 375 maintains two parallel instruments: one for the driving public (to measure color recognition) and one for volunteer EMS personnel (to document operational experience). Responses are anonymous unless you opt into follow-up contact.
For: Licensed drivers in New York State. Approx. 4–5 minutes.
Purpose: To measure how the driving public interprets the five emergency light colors used in New York, with specific focus on whether green is reliably recognized as an EMS signal.
For: Active or recent EMS personnel and first responders in New York State — career or volunteer (EMT, AEMT, Paramedic, firefighter, driver, officer). Approx. 6–8 minutes.
Purpose: To document operational experience with green courtesy lights and measure support for a parity amendment to VTL §375(41). Career responders: even if you don't personally use a courtesy light, your observations of motorist behavior toward volunteer responders on shared scenes are valuable to this campaign.
Five minutes as a motorist, eight minutes as a responder. Every response builds the constituent dataset we bring to Albany.
Find your NY State Senator and Assembly Member. Reference previous bills (S4523, S7414, S214) as starting points — then ask them to introduce a parity amendment for volunteer EMS.
Forward this page to your squad, your chief, your county EMS coordinator, and your local paper. Visibility for the campaign builds visibility for responders.