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A California cyclist who went viral after filming herself screaming at an ambulance parked in a bike lane said the paramedic was on her phone – while admitting she sounds ‘crazy’ in the video.
Start-up founder Stacey Randecker, 51, of San Francisco, who goes by @drivingmzstacey on social media, filmed herself on Thursday yelling at a city fire department ambulance which was parked in the bike lane on 7th Street outside of a Room & Board furnishing store around 11.30am.
‘I know that it sounded it crazy. I really admit I had lost it,’ she told DailyMail.com on Saturday. ‘But I don’t think people understand what it’s like. You’re on a bike, in the rain, and the one path that you have is blocked over and over again in such a short amount of time.’
Randecker said the ambulance was the fifth vehicle she had seen in the bike lane within a half mile and to make matters worse, she claimed the paramedic was on her phone when she approached the window.
‘If it had seemed like she was stressed or whatever, I wouldn’t have posted it, I would have calmed down, but she was just texting, contrary to what the fire department is saying,’ she told DailyMail.com.
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Stacey Randecker, 51, of San Francisco, who goes by @drivingmzstacey on social media, had an outburst in the bike lane on 7th Street outside of the Room & Board home furnishing store when she noticed an ambulance in her way
She claimed the EMT (pictured) was on her phone and not doing paperwork, like the fire department claimed she was in a tweet. ‘If it had seemed like she was stressed or whatever, I wouldn’t have posted it, I would have calmed down, but she was just texting…’ she said
In the video, Randecker can be heard saying: ‘I am losing my God damn mind,’ she said in a video she posted on Thursday. ‘Here’s an ambulance in the bike lane! There is a business they can park in! They can block the car lane, they can block the non-existent motorcycle park lane!
‘I am not even half a mile from a home on a rainy day. What the f**k? What the f**k?’ the exasperated woman said.
The mother seemed to be at her wits’ end as she showed a nearly empty street where only a few cars passed her and the ambulance as she screamed in the street.
Moments later, she rolled her bike up to the ambulance’s driver’s side door, where an EMT was sitting with the window cracked.
‘Get out of the bike lane,’ Randecker said as she emphasized every word before telling the emergency worker to pull into furnishing store’s parking lot or the motorcycle parking lane.
‘You’re killing us, get out of the bike lane!’ she screamed. ‘Unbelievable! They’re killing us, they’re killing us.’
The EMT did move the vehicle to the other side of the street after a few more cars passed by.
Randecker primarily travels by bike and said the ambulance was the fifth vehicle she had seen in the bike lane within a half mile.
The San Franciscan, who has lived in the city for 20 years, posted the video immediately after arriving to the coffee shop she had been traveling too.
‘I honestly didn’t even think about it. I got to the coffee shop where I was headed, I was still pissed, and I just posted it, I didn’t even listen to it.’
She had originally claimed the woman had told her she was on her ‘break,’ but the San Francisco Fire Department has since disputed that notion in a tweet, writing: ‘The crews did not say they “were on a break,” they were finishing a medical emergency with a patient care document from a call at that location.’
However, Randecker isn’t so sure that’s true as the furnishing store had just opened and most of the office buildings were empty due to the holidays and the store’s parking lot was 20 feet away from where the vehicle was parked.
In addition, Randecker made it clear to DailyMail.com that she wouldn’t have minded the interruption to her commute, if the vehicle’s lights had been on.
She also said it was impossible for her to ‘zip around’ the ambulance due to traffic armadillos (pictured), which would have caused her to get off her bike to maneuver around
During her outburst, which she admitted she knows ‘sounded crazy,’ she showed the near empty street. Moments later, she approached the EMT and said: ”You’re killing us, get out of the bike lane…Unbelievable! They’re killing us, they’re killing us.’
‘If you work for the city and there’s an active emergency, good God, no I wouldn’t have said anything, are you kidding me? But to be texting on your phone and you work for our city and it’s not urgent – if it’s urgent, you got to do what you got to do, but it was definitely not urgent,’ she told DailyMail.com.
In addition, she said a lot of her haters have ridiculed her for not just going around, but Randecker told DailyMail.com that it would have impossible to ‘zip around them.’
On the ground, there are are white traffic armadillos – a small raised bump along the outside edge of a bike lane to protect cyclists from motorists. The Pennsylvania native said she’d have to ‘get off my bike’ in order to get around the ambulance.
She also said the fire department is trying to block adding additional bike lanes to the city – which the avid biker, who using cycling as her main mode of transportation, can be completed ‘end-to-end in an hour.’
The San Francisco Fire Department said in 2017 that adding more bike lanes, especially in the heart of the city, could cause more trouble for responders trying to get to emergencies.
The ambulance did eventually move and the San Francisco Fire Department denied that the workers were on their break, but rather they were fill out paperwork after responding to a call
Former Chief of Operations Mark Gonzales said that protected bike lanes – much like the one on 7th Street which has a motorcycle parking lane next to the cycling lane – ‘shift cars so that they’ll be parked in the exact position where that truck needed to be’ when an emergency happens, he said in 2017, according to Curbed San Francisco.
A source told DailyMail.com that Randecker is well-known in the area for having an agenda and wants to close the Embarcadero roadway, which runs along the eastern shoreline, to cars.
Randecker does believe that the city should encourage its residents to pick more environmentally conscious choices, but it needs to protect cyclists, especially if it wants to complete Vision Zero – where there are no traffic deaths – by 2024.
‘We could do a lot more biking then we do, but people don’t feel safe,’ the avid cyclists told DailyMail.com. ‘So when they do put in a bike lane, and the city themselves don’t respect it, we’re not going to get more people on bikes.
‘We’ve had people killed because of cars being in the bike lane, and I carry that around with me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to die.
‘People deserve to get where they’re going – no matter how they’re going there – alive, uninjured, unhurt.’
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