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Get out of the left lane!
Published April 06. Two thousand seventeen Five:53PM | Updated April 07. Two thousand seventeen Ten:22AM
By David Collins Day staff writer
I found a fresh legislator hero in Rhode Island this year, when Rep. Dennis Canario, a retired Portsmouth police officer, introduced a bill to end what he calls “lollygagging” in highway left lanes.
The law, which has yet to work its way out of committee in the Rhode Island legislature, would restrict the extreme left lane of multiple-lane highways to passing vehicles.
Violators, lollygaggers, anyone not passing a slower vehicle, could be fined $85.
Canario has gotten some good press mileage out of the bill, telling anyone who asks that he believes people who obstruct passing traffic make the highways less safe, because they are forcing swifter drivers to weave in and out.
Of course you can read the thought bubbles over the goes of many of these lollygagging drivers: “I am going exactly the speed limit, and you people backing up behind me are the speeding lawbreakers.”
They are often self-deputized highway law enforcers.
Or sometimes they are just clueless, maybe on the phone, or otherwise not paying attention to the broad open highway opening up before them and the dozens of cars backed up behind them.
Canario actually is railing a progressive motor vehicle law enforcement wave in statehouses around the country, as fresh laws are enacted to get slower drivers out of the left lane. Some of the fresh measures are called slowpoke laws.
By some accounts, as many thirty eight states have some laws that would make left-lane hogging an offense, but many are vague, ineffective or not enforced.
States that have more recently put more teeth in slowpoke laws include Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. It aches me to admit this, but Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing and signed a fresh slowpoke law in his home state of Indiana two years ago.
Fines for offenses run the gamut, from $50 in Tennessee to up to $1,000 in Illinois.
Closer to home, Massachusetts and Fresh Jersey seem to have the most unambiguous laws meant to keep the left lane clear, reserving them for passing.
Connecticut law is woefully regressive when it comes to reserving the left lane for passing.
A Connecticut State Police spokesman told me they rely on a statute, Sec. 14-220, that says no person, with some exceptions, may operate a motor vehicle at a speed lower than forty miles per hour on any limited-access, divided highway. It says nothing about clearing the left lane.
Only one hundred twenty three tickets for slow speed were written over a two-and-a-half-year period, and many of those stops were associated with driving under the influence, according to the state police spokesperson.
It’s too bad it’s necessary to write fresh laws to enforce what we all learned in driving school anyway: stay to the right because the left lane is for passing.
But thanks to lawmakers like Canario, who see that it is.
And once again we see the enlightened state of Rhode Island speeding past dowdy old Connecticut.
Not only has Rhode Island immovable its bloated pension system and agreed to install electronic tolls on its highways, but they are way ahead in plans to legalize marijuana. Gina Raimondo, my fresh governor hero, who is also behind efforts in the state for free college, has indicated she will sign a pot bill.
Here in Connecticut, we are just lollygagging at forty miles an hour in the left lane.
This is the opinion of David Collins.
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