I've read a lot of state statutes over the years. Most of them say some version of the same thing. You can speed. You can run the light. You can go the wrong way down a one way. But you have to do it with due regard for the safety of everyone else.
Due regard sounds like a standard. It reads like one on paper. But look closer and it's not a standard at all. It's a judgment call, made in a moving car, under a siren, with dispatch talking in your ear.
I went looking at how different jurisdictions actually write this into law. Most of them are nearly word for word identical. Georgia, Ohio, Minnesota, Texas, Delaware, Utah. All of them tell the officer to proceed past a red light after slowing as necessary. That's it. The rest is left to the officer's own read of the moment.
A couple of jurisdictions did something different. Massachusetts and Ontario both require a full stop before proceeding through a red light. No judgment call. You stop, you look, you go. The decision gets made once, by the legislature, long before any officer is ever behind the wheel.
Here's why I think that matters more than it looks like it should.
I've spent my whole career teaching this simple idea. The faster you go, the less you see. Not figuratively. Literally. Your useful field of view narrows as speed increases. I've shown the chart to hundreds of students. Go from a stop to about 40 miles an hour and you've already lost a huge chunk of your peripheral field. The information is still out there. You've just lost the ability to take it in.
So think about what "slowing as necessary" is actually asking an officer to do. It's asking them to make their best safety decision at the exact moment their vision is most compromised. The standard degrades right along with the eyesight. A full stop sidesteps that problem entirely. Stopped is the best speed there is for taking in information. Full stop, full field of view, full picture before you commit.
Here's an example I use with students all the time. Picture yourself approaching an intersection, and there's a vehicle coming from your right on the cross street, also heading toward that same intersection. Depending on your speed and theirs, that car can look like it's holding still relative to you. No side to side movement across your windshield, nothing your eye picks up as a threat. But it's closing the whole time. This is the same principle sailors and pilots train for, called constant bearing, decreasing range. If another vehicle holds a steady angle relative to you as you both close the distance, there's no lateral movement across your visual field. Our eyes are built to catch movement and contrast, not steady bearings. So the brain doesn't flag the danger until that car is nearly on top of you. That's the same reason a sniper car waiting to turn left across your path gets missed. Nothing moved, so nothing caught your eye, right up until it's too late to matter.
Now stack that on top of a study out of Monash University, on what they call goal conflict. Officers driving to a call aren't running one goal in their head. They're running two. Get there fast. Get there safe. Under normal conditions those two can coexist. Under time pressure, they can't. The urgency of the call pulls attention toward speed before the safety side of the ledger even gets read.
Put all three of these together and you get a clear picture of why due regard keeps failing in the field. The officer's field of view is narrowing with speed. Their eyes are wired to miss the exact kind of threat that's most likely to hurt them at an intersection. And the goal that's supposed to be checking their speed is losing the fight for attention before it even gets a vote. Asking that same officer to weigh risk against urgency in real time isn't asking for bad judgment. It's asking for a fair fight between forces that were never evenly matched to begin with.
I think about the shoplifting call in my book. I was riding along, watching my driver run nearly double the speed limit toward what turned out to be an eleven year old crying for her mom. I stayed quiet on purpose. Not because I agreed with the response, but because it gave me a chance to see exactly how he'd handle the rest of the call, and how he'd assess the risk on his own. He never did. The urgency of getting there had already taken over before he processed any of the information coming across the radio. That's goal conflict, playing out in a car I happened to be sitting in.
There's a paper that looked at intersection behavior and landed on something almost boring in how simple it is. Drivers should visually confirm that another vehicle has actually yielded before proceeding. Not assumed. Confirmed. That recommendation lines up, without either side knowing about the other, with Ontario's full stop law. The legal standard and the human factors research arrived at the same place from two completely different directions.
If due regard is a discretion clause dressed up as a rule, the fix isn't a better definition of due regard. It's teaching the thing that actually makes discretion possible in the first place.
To every instructor and trainer reading this. Keep telling your students the thing that sounds too simple to matter. Slow down and you see more. See more and you decide better. Decide better and you get through that intersection and get to the call, in one piece, ready to actually help the person waiting on you.
References Hsiao, H., Chang, J., & Simeonov, P. (2018). Human Factors in Marine and Vehicle Intersection Safety. Muir, C., Newnam, S., Newstead, S., & Boustras, G. (2020). Goal Conflict in Emergency Vehicle Driving. Monash University.
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon