I was minding my own business, driving south on I-15 in Nevada, returning from the WSOP.
I saw flashing lights on the side of the road up ahead, so I made sure I was driving the speed limit. Cars were still zooming by me, so I decided to move over to the right lane and drive very close to the speed limit (70).
I passed the scene driving at 69 MPH, one mph BELOW the speed limit. I saw a car pulled over, with two cop cars there.
Then, to my shock, right after I passed by, one of the cars jumped away from the scene, and pulled ME over.
What?!
I couldn't imagine what I did wrong.
I was not speeding. I was not on my phone. I was not driving erratically. There was nothing wrong with my car itself.
After the Nevada Highway Patrol trooper took my license and registration, I asked him why he stopped me.
"You violated the Move Over Rule", he told me.
What?!
He claimed it was against the law to drive in the right lane when police or other emergency vehicles are stopped on the right shoulder, unless you slow down far below the speed limit.
What?!
Was he seriously claiming that the entire right lane was off limits when police are there? I had never heard of such a thing, nor had I ever seen such a thing enforced.
He claimed it was a fairly new law passed in both California and Nevada, in order to protect officers from being hit by cars speeding by,
He then wrote me a $198 ticket, which is a moving violation.
I could not talk him out of the ticket. He was very insistent that I should have known this.
Most people I've spoken to had no idea about such a law.
The trooper conceded that I was not speeding, not driving in a reckless manner, not on the phone, and not committing any other violation.
I was ticketed simply for passing by at the speed limit (actually 1mph below) when they were on the shoulder of the freeway.
He claimed that the only exception to this is if vehicles are in your way, and there's no way to move out of that lane. Since the freeway wasn't all that busy, he claimed I could have moved over.
Is this bullshit, or what?
Keep in mind there were tons of people speeding and on their phones (who I saw being aggressively pulled over as well), so it's not like they had a shortage of people to nab to hit their quota.
This sort of thing was totally against the spirit of the law. I was driving the most safely of anyone on the road at that time, and they grabbed me over this BS technicality.
Something else came to mind:
Why were there two cops present at the traffic stop I passed?
My theory was that the second cop was there specifically to set this trap, and to pull over basically anyone passing them by in the right lane.
I had never in my life called the superior of an officer who pulled me over, but yesterday I decided to do it. I thought there was an outside chance that the boss of this officer didn't know they were intentionally satisfying their quota this way, and would take some pity on me and reverse the ticket.
As expected, he didn't help, and knew all about what they were doing. In fact, the boss was actually the other cop at that first traffic stop, so obviously he knew about it.
I asked him, "Why were there two of you there?", and he conceded that the first stop was for a cell phone violation, and obviously didn't need two officers there. He said that the other officer was just passing by, and basically stopped to check if everything was okay.
Right.
Dude was all ready to pop out and grab me the second I went by. Definitely a trap.
I can probably get this changed to a parking violation and maybe a reduced fine, but seriously, this is a fucking scam.
Regarding the legality, here's what it says in the Nevada DMV Driver's Handbook:
So technically it does say you should "drive in a lane that is not adjacent to the lane in which the emergency vehicle is stopped", but it seems like more of a suggestion than a hard law when it begins with "If possible". It definitely doesn't say that driving in the lane adjacent is a hard violation of the law which would get you ticketed.
Regardless, this is something most people don't know. Everyone knows that you have to pull over and move out of the way when emergency vehicles are moving, but not many people know that you're prohibited from driving in the right lane when emergency vehicles or disabled vehicles are on the right shoulder.
If there was ever a time to just give a warning, it was this. However, as I said I'm pretty sure this was a trap.
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