While I despise those driving 55 or below in the fast lane and insist on merging all the way to the fast lane while doing 45 or below, requiring these drivers to pull to the right to allow faster vehicles to pass creates a dangerous situation. Requiring drivers to move to the right or left to provide an additional empty lane buffering emergency vehicles will also create a dangerous situation. I’ll explain:
My personal experience with the ‘slow drivers in the fast lane’ is that they are so ‘out-of-it’ that they are completely oblivious to their surroundings. Coming up behind them, one wonders when and if they are going to move to the right. If they do move to the right, they often do it when you have already changed lanes on the right to avoid them. Their driving behavior is so unpredictable that I end up ‘praying’ that they just stay in their lanes.. and I’ll move to get around them. Japan actually did a study along these lines. It turns out that in Japan, if an emergency vehicle approaches from behind, you are to stay in your lane unless the vehicle has no other way to get past. Changing lanes can result in a traffic ticket. It makes traffic flow predictable for the faster emergency vehicle approaching from behind.
The problem with reserving the far left lane for passing as well as requiring an additional lane between emergency vehicles and traffic, is that it reduces available lanes for traffic as much as 50%(2 lane cut to 1, 30% for 3 lane highway, 25% for a 4 lane and 20% for a 5 lane). So now instead of just dealing with some ‘looky-loos’, you also have to deal with merging to the left(or right), ‘looky-loos’ and a traffic bottleneck. I wonder how many accidents this will cause as traffic comes to a grinding halt with just one emergency vehicle on the side.
Highway traffic has an interesting behavior. At normal speeds, you can slowly add cars (increasing traffic density) up to a certain ‘tipping point’. Once this tipping point is hit, congestion increases very rapidly and speeds drop dramatically. It is almost like that additional car is a catalyst to the change. This process also works in reverse. If one has driven enough freeway miles, they can attest to driving in slow and heavy traffic and then all of a sudden, traffic start traveling faster and is less congested without many vehicles leaving the highway or passing an emergency vehicle on the side. To control this is the purpose of all of those stoplight-controlled on-ramps.
I don’t know if the those placing the law on the books had the purpose increasing ticket revenue, or for a more benign purpose of making it safer for emergency personnel. What I can say is ‘Beware of unintended consequences’. I suspect it will actually make it more dangerous, not less. Very severe traffic jams where there is an emergency vehicle present – not necessarily because there is an accident, accidents caused by the ‘barely aware’ as they cut across in front of traffic to leave the lanes near the emergency vehicle clear – or slamming on their brakes in the middle of traffic when they realize that they should be over one lane.. etc
