|
Claim: Pregnant woman tries to beat carpool lane ticket by asserting her fetus counts as a second person.
Origins: In 
an effort to encourage carpooling and thereby ease freeway congestion and lessen environmental impact, many municipalities have added High Occupancy Vehicle lanes to existing highways. HOV (aka carpool or diamond) lanes are restricted to those vehicles that have a stated minimum number of occupants or (in some parts of the U.S.) bear the appropriate stickers granting them that right (i.e. certain hybrid automobiles).
Because they are generally less populated than the rest of the highway, HOV lanes pose a temptation to unaccompanied drivers snarled in the daily commute and wistfully looking over at the more free-flowing diamond lanes. Heavy fines serve to keep most of the covetous to the straight, narrow, and more crowded, but not all. Some singletons choose to brazen it out and take the risk of being ticketed. Others attempt various deceptions designed to make it appear they have passengers in their
And then there are the pregnant women who will, when pulled over for HOV lane violations, claim their unborn children as additional people in their vehicles. Early in 2006, an Arizona woman tried just that. Candace Dickinson had been fined $367 for improper use of a High Occupancy Vehicle (aka carpool) lane. She was caught driving in the HOV lane on Sgt. Norton said this was the second time in the last four years that a woman tried to use the defense against him, but the first one was a "whole lot less pregnant" than this driver. (Dickinson's son Cole was born on Dickinson chose to fight the ticket by asserting in court that Arizona traffic laws don't define what a person is, so the child inside her womb justified her use of the lane. Phoenix Municipal Court Judge Dennis Freeman used a "common sense" definition of the statutes governing use of HOV lanes 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.
Other lone drivers have attempted to avail themselves of the convenience of the HOV-lane commute without legal penalty, with similar degrees of success. In January 2006, a driver was stopped and ticketed on In November 2005, Kevin Morgan of Petaluma, California, was handed a $351 citation in Marinwood for driving in a carpool lane with a kickboxing dummy propped up in the passenger seat. The dummy was dressed in a baseball cap and Miami Dolphins windbreaker and wore a seatbelt. In March 2002, a motorist with a full-size mannequin as a passenger drove into the car-pool lane on In 2001, a policeman in Atlanta pulled over a carpool lane violator who'd positioned a dummy in the passenger seat. The mannequin in question was wearing a sports jacket, a pair of sunglasses, and a baseball hat. Best of all, he had been positioned so he was holding a newspaper. Ruses motorists have used to conceal their driving alone in car-pool lanes:
Barbara "diamonds aren't forever" Mikkelson Last updated: 12 November 2006 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
|
|
