Do "Move Over" laws cause as many incidents as they prevent?

I guess it is like roundabouts, not necessarily less accidents, but accidents with lower carnage. I can deal with more fender benders and less officers loosing their lives.

It often appears to me that because there is no way to enforce the “intent” of the law the “letter” of the law becomes a trap. Picayunish enforcement of failure to come to a complete stop is a particularly annoying issue.

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I’m not a great fan of more laws but one thing I noticed today on the interstate with fog and wet and possible ice, that people seemed to follow the leader. If people started to move over for a couple stalled cars, people in back saw it and moved over too. So I think it just helps to spread the word to stay away from hazards on the side of the road.

Like I said though before, here it took a couple highway patrol getting hit for the Legislature to finally figure out that they needed to do something. Of course what they do is legislate. Nobody got any pay off for it and hopefully the word has spread enough to reduce the risk. Still happens but I think it is less.

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It seems that policies and laws regarding law enforcement often worsen the situation for the public and officers. The last time I was pulled over by law enforcement I was lectured for not immediately going to the shoulder when the blue lights came on. The officer was somewhat determined to get me off the road regardless of the narrow shoulder with a muddy ditch bank to go to when in less than a mile an exit waited. I had turned on my flashers and slowed to under 45mph but the siren being bleated repeatedly demanded that I take the shoulder and hope for the best. I wasn’t ticketed but it would have been so much less dangerous if the stop had been made at a more convenient location.

Where I live the unwritten law is when you see the blue light’s come on behind you slow down turn on your flasher’s & go to a safe place to pull over.

That’s much to sensible for our law makers here in Mississippi @Renegade.

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It also make’s it safer for the officer not to have to stand in front of oncoming traffic.

Why? Tell me exactly why and you can’t say “because it makes sense” because it doesn’t

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Yeah that happened to me in Indianapolis which is why I go through Fort Wayne now if I can. I wanted the right shoulder but he wanted the left with all the crap on it. He was a little ticked. I said I had $1000 of new tires and didn’t want to drive over all that junk. Maybe it was because it was Sunday before Christmas and he had to work. Too bad but as Frau Wolner used to say “take a nice pill”.

That would seem to have been a great benefit to the officer but more and more it appears that LEOs get fixated easily, ignoring all good logic while rushing blindly toward their first notion of what to do.

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Quite a few year’s back I had just bought a 82 Dodge truck late on friday afternoon from one of my kin I did not have a tag on it yet with the bill of sale it was legal to drive 7 day’s til you have a chance to get to a the DMV to get the tag saturday morning I got pulled over on a 4 lane road with a wide shoulder with plenty of room so we both would be safe the officer got on his loud speaker & told me to go down the road to store parking lot so we could get of of the road when we got there he told me I did the right thing but he felt we would safer in the parking lot. By the way no ticket as he saw I had just bought the truck.

In MD, the law says to either move over or slow down to below the speed limit and stay in the lane. The loss of a few seconds is fine compared to possible loss of life for a LEO, IMO.

A law like this was passed in California 2 or 3 years ago. To date I have not seen any data provided to judge its efficacy. However, I strongly suspect the largest group to cause this type of accident is impaired drivers, for whom no sign will have any effect.