January 12, 2006
Does a Fetus Qualify you for the HOV Lane?
Doug at Below The Beltway brings us the story of a quite innovative legal argument:
Unborn children don’t count when it comes to carpool lanes, according to a judge’s ruling.
Even after being fined $367 for improper use of a High Occupancy Vehicle lane, Ahwatukee Foothills resident Candace Dickinson stood by her contention that Arizona traffic laws don’t define what a person is, so the child inside her womb justified her use of the lane.
“To follow her philosophy would require officers to carry guns, radios and pregnancy testers, and I don’t think we want to go there,” said Sgt. Dave Norton, the Phoenix police officer who cited Dickinson on Nov. 8.
Yeah, that’s not going to work in Phoenix. Try that one in Mississippi; you might have a shot. But this does bring up an interesting question:
Sole occupant vehicles aren’t allowed to use the carpool lanes during morning and evening rush hours Monday through Friday.
The idea is to lessen traffic congestion, Norton said, citing federal guidelines for creating the lanes.
Norton said when he stopped Dickinson’s car on Interstate 10, only one person was visible in the car.
When he asked Dickinson how many people were in the car, “she said two as she pointed to her obvious pregnancy,” Norton said.
The case set off a firestorm of opinion but Phoenix Municipal Court Judge Dennis Freeman used a “common sense” definition in which an individual occupies a “separate and distinct” space in a vehicle.
“The law is meant to fill empty space in a vehicle,” Freeman said.
Is this law intended to reduce congestion, or fill empty space? The idea of carpool lanes, at least as I understand it, is to encourage people to carpool to and from work. If reducing congestion is the goal, shouldn’t we only allow people to drive in the carpool lane if there are two licensed drivers in the car? After all, a mother with her four-year-old son can drive in the carpool lane, but unless Arizona has started allowing four-year-olds to drive, it won’t reduce congestion one whit.
Good thing this judge decided to use “common sense”.
PS – I just wanted to thank Doug for a very helpful shout-out in this interview. Knowing that anyone reads my blog that readily makes this just that much more rewarding of a hobby. Likewise, in my RSS reader, I have a folder designated for “Friends”, the people I hold in high esteem as friends in the blogosphere. Doug’s blog is in that group.
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Judging from the mess I see here on the roads in the D.C. area every day, I would say that HOV lanes most emphatically do not work. The biggest argument in favor of this that I’ve seen is the fact that every time there is a major problem on the roads during rush hour around here (i.e., road closures, etc), VDOT will suspend HOV enforcement to help relieve traffic on I-395 and I-66.
The fetus argument is unique, but the funniest one I ever saw occurred a few months after I moved here in 1990 — the Virginia State Police caught a guy using the HOV portion of I-66 (which was HOV-2 at the time) with a department store manequin in the passenger’s seat. He later confessed that he’d been doing this for about two years before finally getting caught.
Can you imagine the charges against this guy if it had been a blowup doll.
But consider a school carpool. Mom A takes her child to school, but picks up Mom B’s kid, and Mom C’s kid on the way. If she gets pulled over, there’s not a second licensed driver in sight, and yet the traffic would have been lessened by two vehicles.
So you write an exception. We’ll call it the “soccer mom” exception. If you have 3 or more kids in the car, it’s still a carpool
Brad, Any child, in addition to the mother’s, that is going to school and is picked up by the mom, should be considered as less cars on the road. Did I say that right? I have picked up numerous children on the way to school. When Bonnie started driving, she would pick up friends on the way to school. Of course we are not talking about contraflow lanes here are we, not in this instance.