La traffic sig8/10/2023 ![]() The Los Angeles Basin - A Huge Bowl of Sand.Can a Volcanic Eruption Occur in Los Angeles?.Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. There is much more potential for a collision when you’re splitting traffic than when you’re just in stop-and-go.” “To me,” Houston said, “it is a dangerous situation. The motorcyclist usually fares the worst in such situations. “If traffic is moving 10 to 15 mph, you don’t want a guy out there on a motorcycle doing 40 to 50 mph someone could decide to change lanes and not see the motorcycle.” “Just pay attention to all the elements on the highway out there and use your best judgment,” Houston said. “It’s kind of a commute tool now, just one of those things that occur.” “It’s just one of those things that evolved because of traffic congestion,” Houston said. So while motorcyclists can ride down the middle, they can be cited-depending on the discretion of an officer-for passing cars on either side, which, of course, is the only real reason for riding down the middle in the first place. While it is legal to ride a motorcycle between lanes of traffic, it is illegal to drive unsafely, which many CHP officers interpret in this context to mean significantly faster than the flow of traffic. The practice of “splitting” traffic, as it is called, is not addressed in the Vehicle Code and therefore is something of a gray area of law subject to interpretation, CHP spokeswoman Sandy Houston said. Since it is done all the time, I would like to know for sure. ![]() “We call them traffic jams.”Ĭould you answer a nagging question for me? A friend in a defensive-driving class was told by a sheriff’s deputy that it is illegal to ride one’s motorcycle “between the lanes” unless traffic is going less than 5 mph.Īnother person was told by a California Highway Patrol officer that it is not illegal, just stupid. “If you used SigAlert up here, I don’t think anybody would know what you were talking about,” said Jim Drago, a spokesman for Caltrans in Sacramento. Interestingly, though, it seems to have caught on only in Southern California not even our neighbors to the north have picked up the jargon. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993. Today, the CHP issues an alert whenever, in the opinion of officers at the scene, a freeway accident is likely to hold up traffic for at least 30 minutes. Since 1969, when the California Highway Patrol took over monitoring the freeways and issuing SigAlerts, however, they largely have been confined to traffic matters. One even warned a patient that his pharmacist had made a potentially deadly error in a prescription. The idea caught on immediately, engendering newspaper and magazine articles throughout the country and prompting Parker to dub the dispatches SigAlerts in honor of their inventor.Īt first, SigAlerts dealt with everything from rabid dogs to gas leaks. The SigAlert call for medical help brought so many doctors and nurses that they created a traffic jam. And on Labor Day 1955, the first alert was broadcast over six local stations when a train’s car overturned out of Union Station. Parker approved the concept on the condition that the machines be made available to every Los Angeles radio station that wanted them.
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