Law Students

Drive Faster AND Slower

By Pete

I hate slow-pokes in the left-hand lane on the interstate. Seriously, one of my huge pet peeves. That said, I’m not sure I trust the police and traffic courts to strike a good balance between speed limits and left-lane camping legislation.

The basic gist of the article, people hate slow drivers and some states are starting to write tickets for it. Fine, fair enough, but the problem I have is this: we still have low speed limits on interstates.

So we have one set of laws that say “You can’t drive faster than X MPH” and we have another set of laws that say “Don’t get in the way of people driving faster than you.” So what about the folks traveling exactly the speed limit in the left hand lane? Are you really going to give them a ticket so that other people will be less irritated when they break the law?

This to me is illustrative of a pretty simple fact: traffic laws like these have a very small public safety component and a very large government revenue component. There are now several states in which virtually all driving in the left-hand lane can be ticketed.

Full post as published by PeteHoliday.com on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).