Category: Road Rules

Q: I live in a neighborhood with some two-way roadways that, when cars are parked on the side of the road, are too narrow for cars approaching each other from opposite directions to pass. Who has to yield when there are cars parked on one side and not the other?

A: I used to think that what you’ve described was a problem. Now I think it might be a feature. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient to drive through a neighborhood with narrow roads, but maybe that same inconvenience makes it a better place to live.

Continue reading “Navigating Narrow Neighborhood Streets”

A: On my daily walks I’ve noticed a large increase in outdated license tabs, some of them for more than a year. Is there a fine for not renewing? It doesn’t seem fair as I thought our State needs the money for our infrastructure.

A: If you ask a traffic safety guy about revenue, you’re probably not going to get the answer you’re looking for. Yes, there is a fine for not renewing, and yes, our state needs money for infrastructure. But what I really want to know is, do drivers of unregistered vehicles crash more often? And to go even broader, let’s take a look at what I’m calling the ‘uns’: unlicensed, untrained, uninsured, and unregistered.

Continue reading “The Crash Risk of an Unregistered Vehicle”

Q: I saw a, I’m not sure what you’d call it. Imagine the front half of a motorcycle attached to the back half of an old VW bug. It got me wondering, how much can you modify a vehicle before you’re required to get some sort of approval to drive it on the road?

A: One good indicator that it needs approval is when you don’t know what it is. Is it a 1972 VW Beetle or a 1987 Yamaha Virago? The law would call that a homemade vehicle, described in part as, “A vehicle that has been constructed by using major component parts from one or more manufactured vehicles and cannot be identified as a specific make and model.” A homemade vehicle can also be, and this seems like it in the purest sense, “A vehicle that has been constructed entirely from homemade parts and materials not obtained from other vehicles.”

Continue reading “Driving a Homemade Vehicle”

Q: Is it just me, or is aggressive driving and road rage getting worse?

A: How bad is road rage in Washington? If you’ve been the victim of it, pretty bad, for sure. And from a broader perspective, the fact that it occurs frequently enough to have a clever name suggests that it’s far too prevalent. But it’s not as easy as you’d think to put a number on it.

You’re not going to find a Washington law called ‘road rage’. In most states it’s not a legal term; historically it’s been a journalistic one, and we don’t have an agreed-upon meaning. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines it as, “An intentional assault by a driver or passenger with a motor vehicle or a weapon that occurs on the roadway or is precipitated by an incident on the roadway.”

Other definitions include committing a crime, violent anger, or aggressive behavior. If we’re trying to track road rage events, do we count every time someone angrily shakes a fist at another driver, only when one driver assaults another driver, or somewhere in between?

Continue reading “Road Rage and Aggressive Driving”

Q: I know it’s illegal to have an open container of alcohol in a car, so why is a limo allowed to have a bar?

A: Before I answer your question, I have one of my own: Why would we craft a law that makes it illegal to have an open container of alcohol in a vehicle (assuming it’s not the driver that’s holding it, of course)? Prior to 1983, Washington didn’t have an open container law, but as Bob Dylan sang two decades earlier, the times, they were a-changin’.

Continue reading “Drinking in a Limousine”

Q: I was in the right lane of a two-lanes-in-each-direction road. An RV came up in the left lane and swung slightly right – wheels still in the left lane, but wide-mounted mirrors extending into my lane. The RV’s mirror passed over my driver’s side mirror by a few inches. If I’d been in a taller vehicle they would have clipped. It seems the driver wasn’t aware of the size of their vehicle. Is there any license requirement or training for driving bus-sized vehicles?

A: Imagine you’ve hired a contractor to build you a brand-new house. On the day of completion the contractor hands you the keys and says, “I did the absolute bare minimum to meet code requirements. Enjoy your new house.” That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, does it? I have a similar lack of confidence in RV drivers who rely only on their experience driving the family minivan in preparation for operating a 45-foot motorhome.

Continue reading “You Can Legally Drive That Motorhome, But Should You?”

Q: I drive through an intersection, almost daily, that has two left-turn lanes, while the cross-street they turn into has three lanes. There are some dots curving through the intersection that seem to suggest that the inside left-turn lane can choose from the two left-most lanes, and outside left-turn lane should go to the furthest right lane. But the markings aren’t clear and from the behavior of other drivers it’s obvious that many of them don’t agree with me. What’s the right way to turn left here?

A: The simple and obvious answer is … just kidding; how about a tricky and possibly unsatisfying answer? But as a warmup, let’s consider an intersection with a single left-turn lane. The law requires drivers to approach and complete the turn “in the extreme left-hand lane lawfully available to traffic.” Or as the Washington Driver Guide says, “Turn from the lane that is closest to the direction you want to go and turn into the lane closest to the one you came from.” Simple, right? You already knew that.

Continue reading “Confusing Left Turns – Too Many Choices”

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”