One in a Hundred
I was interviewing for a job at the Skid Control School. Part of the interview was a drive with the owner in the passenger seat. About 20 minutes, his well-practiced route, almost no feedback along the way.
When we got back, he asked me about my very first lane change. My shoulder check had been late — perfunctory, really, more habit than actual verification. I told him I was pretty certain it had been clear. Then, trying to sound confident, I said I was 99% certain.
He didn't let that go.
"So, what you're telling me,” He said, "is that you're 99% certain it was clear. That means for every 100 lane changes you make; there could be someone there."
I got the job. I've carried that line for my entire career since, and I've used it on more students than I can count.
But I never applied it to due regard until recently — and once I did, I couldn't unsee it.
What Due Regard Actually Means
If you've never run lights and siren, you may not have heard the term "due regard." If you have, you've probably heard it a hundred times without anyone ever pinning down exactly what it means.
Here's the plain version. Most US emergency vehicle exemptions — the right to exceed the speed limit, go through a red light, cross the center line — come with a catch built directly into the law. Those privileges don't relieve the officer of the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of everyone else on the road. If that duty isn't met, and something goes wrong, the exemption doesn't protect them.
The test underneath that language is basically a reasonable-person standard: would another well-trained officer, in the same seat, under the same conditions, have made the same call? It's not about intent. It's about whether the actions taken held up.
Now here's where the lane change math comes back in.
If an officer is 99% certain that an intersection is clear before going through that red light — what does that actually mean? It means for every 100 times that same decision gets made, under those same conditions, there's one where somebody's there. One where the geometry doesn't work out. One where due regard gets tested in a courtroom instead of a training debrief.
A missed shoulder check costs a fender bender and a hard conversation. A missed intersection at speed costs a lot more, and the standard an officer gets measured against isn't "I felt confident." It's whether the actions taken — before, during, and after that split-second decision — held up to reasonable scrutiny.
This Isn't Theoretical
A recent case out of Ohio has been on my mind. An officer ran a red light responding to a call, at speed, and struck another vehicle. The driver died.
I won't get into the specifics here — it's a live legal matter, and it's not my place to litigate it in a newsletter. But watching that footage, one thing stood out to me: there was no visible slowing, no pause, nothing that looked like a moment where due regard was actually being applied before entering that intersection.
That's the pattern I keep coming back to. Not one bad officer having one bad day — a standard that most officers can recite but very few can point to and say, "that, right there, is what it looks like." If the standard is that fuzzy going in, it's hard to imagine it holding up once adrenaline and urgency take over.
That's not due regard. That's playing roulette at 99% certainty — betting that the 1% doesn't land on you today.
Where I've Landed
I was in a room at an IADLEST training session in Texas full of instructors who could all recite the legal definition of due regard word for word. Not one of them could describe what it actually looks like from the driver's seat. That gap is the whole problem. Officers don't always get it right. Instructors don't always get it right either — myself included. “Due regard” isn't something you arrive at once and keep forever; it's a question that gets asked over and over at every intersection.
The 99% certain line stuck with me because it reframes confidence as a number, not a feeling. Confidence isn't the same as being right. And in our line of work, the 1% isn't a rounding error — it's a person.
Next week: why an intersection stops feeling like a hazard and starts feeling like an obstacle — and the psychology behind it.
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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
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