Author: DOUG DAHL

Q: I regularly drive through a construction project that often has one of the lanes on the freeway closed. Drivers merge in a single lane a mile ahead and often get angry when people pass them in the unused lane. I even got behind a driver who was straddling the line to prevent anyone from getting ahead in either lane. It makes sense to use both lanes and merge at the orange cones, but is that the law?

A: First, a message for the driver that was blocking both lanes: You’re the problem. The law requires drivers to drive within a single lane. Okay, now let’s talk about the zipper merge.

Many drivers, when they see a “lane closed ahead” sign, move over right away, doing the long-established early merge. But just because we’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean it’s the best idea, and many transportation departments around the country, including Washington DOT, encourage drivers to late merge, or zipper merge, when traffic is heavy. Utah has even made it the law.

Continue reading “The Zipper Merge”

You’re being lied to. I know, that sentence sounds like conspiracy theory clickbait. But the lie I’m talking about isn’t coming from the government, Hollywood, NASA, the educational system, or a cabal of doctors. It’s from your own brain. Next time you drive at night, your brain is going to tell you that you can see better than you actually can.

Vision has two jobs when you drive; your ambient vision takes care of lane-keeping (helping you know where you are), and your focal vision identifies objects and obstacles up ahead. The problem is that we don’t need a lot of light for lane-keeping; our headlights are more than adequate. But they fall short for obstacle recognition, and sometimes by a lot. Your ability to safely travel in your lane leads you to believe that you can adequately see and respond to any obstacle up ahead in the road. That’s the lie.

Continue reading “Your Headlights are Worse than you Thought”

Q: When the roads get snowy, are snowmobiles allowed to ride on them in town?

A: Last week, when our streets were covered with a blanket of snow I saw a monster truck drive through my neighborhood. I don’t mean a jacked up pickup truck with oversize tires sticking out past the fenders a few inches, like we normally complain about. I’m talking about an actual home-built monster truck with enormous tires entirely outside the body of the vehicle. I didn’t see if it had a license plate, but this person clearly built this with no intention of ordinary road use. On other snow days I’ve seen people driving all-terrain vehicles down the street, cars towing people on sleds, and cross-country skiers gliding down the middle of the road. And you have a snowmobile zipping through your neighborhood.

Continue reading “Snowmobiles on the Road”

Q: The law requires registration and license plates “to operate any vehicle on a public highway.” Does this mean that electric bicycles need to be licensed in Washington State? Also, in the quote above I note the word “highway”. Does that include city streets and county roads?

A: Here’s a paradox. A bicycle is both a vehicle and not a vehicle. According to the principles of classical physics, an object cannot be both a specific thing and not that thing at the same time. But this isn’t physics, it’s quantum mechanics. No, wait, it’s traffic law.

Continue reading “Registering Electric Bicycles”

Q: I saw an electric unicycle on a city street violating various traffic laws. I looked up what I saw online, and some of these unicycles have top speeds of over 50 mph. Do you have thoughts on what kind of vehicle this qualifies as?

A: I looked at the website for Inmotion, an electric unicycle company, (I’m calling you out, Inmotion) and they had videos of riders on city streets violating various traffic laws and taking unnecessary risks; running red lights, riding in the oncoming lane, speeding, weaving through traffic, riding on the sidewalk, switching from the sidewalk to the street mid-block, I could go on.

Continue reading “Electric Unicycles – One Wheel Short of a Good Idea?”

Q: What are the rules for high beams on parallel roads or divided roads? Does the 50-foot wide median on the freeway negate the need to dim your high beams for an approaching car? What if the median is full of vegetation or has a wall that divides the freeway? What about a vehicle on a frontage road when there are cars on the freeway?

A: I’m going to make an assumption here; you’re asking this because you’d like to use your high beams as much as possible within the boundaries of the law. That makes sense. You can outdrive your low beam headlights at surprisingly low speeds. Even high beams aren’t as effective at illuminating our path as we might hope. How ineffective? We’ll get to that in next week’s article. That’s right, this is a two-parter.

Continue reading “High Beams and Parallel Roads”

Q: We live in a neighborhood with sidewalks. Skateboarders are using our streets and speeding down the hills. We have almost hit them by simply driving and being overcome by speeding skateboarders passing us. Is it illegal for them to be using the roads?

A: Just for fun, I’d like to add a second question to this: Does the speed limit apply to pedestrians? Unless you’re capable of running at speeds in the range of Usain Bolt (max of 27 mph) this seems like a pointless question. But the legal definition of a pedestrian includes more than walkers and runners. The Revised Code of Washington defines a pedestrian as, in addition to folks on their feet, a person using a wheelchair, power wheelchair, or “a means of conveyance propelled by human power other than a bicycle.”

Continue reading “Skateboarding with Traffic”

Q: It’s obvious that many drivers routinely exceed the speed limit in many areas, not just on freeways. So the next logical question is: How are speed limits determined? One would hope that there is some science, not just politics or customary historical norms, that inform the speed limit decision for a stretch of road.

A: Your hope is not unfounded. The law does set default speed limits for various kinds of roads, which I guess you could say is setting limits based on historical norms, and they’re set in state statute by elected officials, so you could call that politics, but there’s more to it than that.

Continue reading “How Speed Limits are Set”

Did you know that starting January 1^st it is illegal to kill a pedestrian with your car? Hopefully when you read that you thought, “You mean it wasn’t illegal already?” Okay, I admit I’m being a bit sensationalist with that opening sentence. We already have a vehicular homicide law.  But we did have a significant gap in our traffic laws – one that left pedestrian, cyclist and other vulnerable road user deaths surprisingly unpunished.

Continue reading “New Law Increases Penalties for Pedestrian Deaths”