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Rural Lawmaker Wants to End Life in Virginia's Fastest Lanes 

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2001; Page C01 

RICHMOND -- Rural lawmakers incensed by slowpokes who swoop 
to the left side of a highway and refuse to budge have pushed a 
bill through the Virginia House of Delegates that would resolve 
once and for all who owns the fast lane.

If the bill becomes law, drivers could not merely motor in the 
left lane. They would have to use it for passing only.

"People can't get by. They blow their horns. They blink their 
lights. They take chances," said Del. Joseph P. Johnson Jr. 
(D-Washington), the bill's co-sponsor and a self-described 
country lawyer from the town of Abingdon, pop. 7,400, 14 miles 
from the Tennessee line. "It creates what we refer to as driver 
rage."

Did he say rage? Try telling commuters in Northern Virginia 
they could soon be denied the right to travel millions of 
precious cubic feet of asphalt on their slow crawl to the office 
and some road rage will follow.

"That sounds pretty crazy," said William Weaver, as he pumped 
gas at a station off Interstate 66. Weaver knows from traffic 
on his daily journey from Capitol Hill to his Tysons Corner 
car dealership. "Don't they know the passing lane is an available 
lane for drivers?"

In the Old Dominion, where the 1,118 miles of interstate 
highways connect suburbs, with their daily horror stories of 
traffic congestion, to sleepy regions dotted with dairy farms, 
one man's quest for driver courtesy is another man's lifeline 
to sheer survival.

Rural drivers may say they have nowhere to go behind a dawdler 
hogging the left-hand lane on a four-lane highway. But drivers 
who use the Capital Beltway, I-95 and other parking lots that 
Northern Virginians call highways during rush hour say that 
being shut out of the lane unless they are passing would leave 
them with nowhere to go -- literally.

"Now you've got everybody in the right two lanes, and you're 
going to create a madhouse," opined Mark Davis, a long-haul 
trucker from Stafford County, at a rest stop off I-95 in Dale 
City. "It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

House Bill 1646 will go before a Senate committee this week. 
It would prohibit use of the left lane on limited-access 
highways for anything but passing other vehicles traveling in 
the same direction. Lawbreakers would be cited for a moving 
violation. The bill also would make it illegal for cars to pass 
on the right, a practice now allowed on Virginia roads and highways.

The travel ban would apply not only to the interstates that course 
through Northern Virginia -- I-66, I-95, I-395 and I-495 -- but 
also to the smaller Fairfax County Parkway, Route 28 and Dulles 
Toll Road in Fairfax and the Route 234 Bypass around Manassas.

The bill sailed through the House 63 to 32 last month after winning
unanimous approval in the Militia and Police Committee. Gov. James S.
Gilmore III (R) has not taken a position on the measure, 
spokeswoman Lila White said.

Most highway drivers have watched a passing-lane lingerer hold 
up the flow of traffic -- and felt their own temper rise. 
Twenty-one states, from Utah to Rhode Island, have some 
passing-lane restrictions. In Kentucky and Maine, the ban on 
continuous left-lane travel is limited to rural
roads where the speed limit is 65 miles per hour. Illinois 
allows only cars traveling at or above the speed limit in the 
left lane.

The American Automobile Association, in a poll of Northern 
Virginia motorists last year, found overwhelming support for 
regulations that would ensure that slower drivers keep to the 
right lane. And one rural Maryland lawmaker exasperated with 
left-lane stragglers has tried to push a far less-restrictive 
measure through the General Assembly two years in a row. The 
measure would have required cars to move to the right
when a faster car came up behind them.

Del. Kevin Kelly (D-Allegany) was 10 miles out of Annapolis on 
his way home one weekend three years ago when he got stuck 
behind a driver clocking 50 mph. "I picked up my cell phone 
and said to the staff, 'Draft me a bill!' " he recalled last 
week. But his bill was torpedoed by suburban and urban 
legislators, and he did not bother to submit it this year.

"The best way to summarize it is, the rural guys viewed this 
legislation as common-sense courtesy. The urban guys viewed it as
advocating speeding," he said.

Seventeen years ago, the same kind of rage incited a pillorying 
in print of Arlington doctor John O. Nestor, who wrote in a 
letter to the editor of The Post that he liked to set his 
cruise control at 55 mph and drive in the far left lane of 
the Beltway. His idea, which he described as a kind of
vigilantism of the road, was to slow down speeders.

Washington area drivers exploded in a torrent of Nestor-bashing, 
saying he was interfering with their rights. The doctor's name 
entered the local lexicon as a verb for loitering in the left lane:
"Nestoring."

That was 1984. Passing isn't even an option on today's suburban 
highways at certain times of day. Take a recent Saturday 
afternoon on I-66 at 4:35 p.m., where weekend traffic from the 
malls at Tysons Corner crawled past the Nutley Street 
intersection. It's the busiest stretch of the
highway, crossed by 200,000 cars every day. The left lane 
was a sea of brake lights. 

Back in Southwest Virginia -- Johnson's home -- 40,000 cars 
a day pass over the junction of I-81 and Route 611, Washington 
County's busiest intersection.

"We have intersections that handle 400,000 cars a day," said 
Del. John A. "Jack" Rollison III (R-Prince William), the 
lone lawmaker to speak against the bill when it came to the 
floor of the House. "All of a sudden, we're going to legislate 
that people have to drive single file. Wait until
this law becomes effective. Then you'll see real road rage."

While there appears to be no hard-and-fast data to document 
the effect of slow cars traveling in the left lane, traffic 
engineers and state police agree they can create a safety 
hazard. Angry drivers behind them start weaving into the lane 
to the right to pass. And the so-called lane discipline that 
promotes safe travel can become very undisciplined.

But critics say that the law would be close to unenforceable.

"How is the trooper supposed to figure out how long you were 
in there, 30 seconds? A minute?" asked Hayward Corley, a parks 
worker who commutes to Arlington County from Upper Marlboro.

Drivers could always say that they were intending to pass when 
they were pulled over. 

Virginia and Maryland have both passed laws making it illegal 
to drive too slowly, especially when a faster car in the 
passing lane honks or flashes his lights. But the laws rarely 
are enforced.

"We encourage motorists to travel at the speed limit" and not 
too far below it, said Lucy Caldwell, spokeswoman for the 
Virginia State Police. But she acknowledged that troopers 
rarely write violations for the little-known violation known 
as impeding traffic.

"It's interesting this had to be made into a law," said Lon 
Anderson, director of public and government relations for 
the AAA's mid-Atlantic chapter. "This used to be known as 
driver courtesy. What these people are attempting to legislate 
is good manners on the road." 

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http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54605-2001Feb10.html
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