Reporting which lane is blocked

[dman65]

When reporting an accident or a disabled vehicle it would be nice to be able to indicate/see if all lanes are blocked by it, just the left, just the right, or the center if there are three lanes. When I report one of these I try to put "Left lane blocked" or "Right lane blocked" so anyone behind me knows that they are going to need to get into one of the open lanes at some point. The only problem is that requires enter a good bit of text which is possible some of the time, but not all. If there were just some check boxes or something to click to select left, right,center or all I think that would communicate some useful information.

[txemt]

Here's a problem with your solution:

I-10 through Katy, Texas is 8 lanes wide, each direction, not counting the 2 HOV lanes in each direction.
I-75/85 through Atlanta is 6 lanes each direction not counting the 1 HOV lane tucked in on the inside.
I-35E through Dallas is 3 lanes here, 4 lanes there, 6 lanes over here
I-10 through New Orleans is 3 lanes through the city

SO....how do you assign a lane assignment that works country wide? I know cops in California assign them numbers, but cops in New Orleans don't. Lane 1 is the way outside lane with the higher number being the very inside lane. I don't know what cops in the other cities of the country do when it comes to lane assignments. I don't know how many non public safety people know about lane assignments. On top of that, if you hit the accident button right as you're at the accident and need to start typing, you could cause another wreck (I wish voice commands would work to fill in the text box), so now you've caused and even bigger traffic nightmare by blocking another lane that was just open (and all of this is theoretically combined with 10 years being an EMT and almost being hit twice).

[gerben]

Over here they count lanes from the inside...

[dman65]

I see where the different lane configurations could be an issue. Perhaps instead there could be an option to have three or four self defined pieces of additional information that you could click on when indicating an accident or really any other post so you can have predefined items that make sense based on where you are that you can quickly select.

As far as causing another accident, usually when I am reporting something it is because I have been stopped in traffic and then I move up a bit and see that there is an accident in front of me. At that point I am usually not moving, so it doesn't create that much of an issue. If I am totally stopped and it is taking a while I can report the accident and type in "Left Lane Blocked", etc. But sometimes the traffic gets moving faster and there isn't time to pull up the keyboard and start typing all of that.