This is a pet peeve of mine. I try to turn left onto a 4-lane highway in Moscow, and all the drivers are camped out in the left lane, making it impossible to merge.
A friend of mine who is a California transplant said that in California, drivers have to work together (letting people merge, etc), otherwise you’d never get anywhere.
Not so on the Palouse, where you just wait it out.
Law enforcement remind drivers the left lane is not for ‘camping’
Drivers on the Pullman-Moscow Highway often break the law and may not even realize it.
That is according to local law enforcement when discussing a common occurrence on State Route 270 as well as other multiple-lane highways — motorists traveling in the left lane for extended periods of time.
“It really comes down to the fact that a lot of drivers don’t know it’s a law; they don’t know they’re doing something wrong,” Pullman Police Department Cmdr. Chris Tennant said.
Tennant said this act of “camping” in the left lane is illegal, as the lane is only meant for passing cars on the right.
According to Washington state RCW 46.61.100, “It is a traffic infraction to drive continuously in the left lane of a multilane roadway when it impedes the flow of other traffic.” A similar law took effect in Idaho on July 1.
Some drivers, however, are content to stay in the left lane, causing “a lot of frustration” from the drivers behind them, Tennant said.
He said not every driver is familiar with the rule. When officers do pull over a driver for camping, the driver’s reaction is often confusion.
“Generally, the response we get is, ‘Why are you pulling me over? I’ve done nothing wrong,’ ” he said.