BOSTON (CBS) – If you have gotten sprayed by the ice and snow from an uncleared car or truck after one of this season’s storms, you may be interested in a proposal from a Beacon Hill lawmaker.
Rep. Cleon Turner of Dennis wants to fine drivers up to $500 for not cleaning all the snow off their vehicle before hitting the road.
Now, I hate those people with a blinding white passion. Following one of these self-absorbed, lazy assholes is a lesson in restraint as you swerve and dodge the large sheets of ice flaking off their car. Sometimes they're too lazy to even turn their rear defrosters on, the back window a sheet of ice the entire time you're behind them. Heck, I got to work one morning and saw a car that drove some 15 miles with a pile of snow on the trunk that actually extended over the roof of the car (I know the person that owns the car and they live in my neighborhood).
But something tells me that there's already several offenses committed by someone whose car sheds ice and snow onto other cars in the roadway. There's simply no reason for another law on the books that does nothing other than address something already covered by a law. If cops aren't enforcing the other laws broken by a car driving down the road with pieces of ice flinging off it, they're not going to ticket for this one, either. "Failure to use care and caution" is a nice catch-all that certainly fits here - someone causing others to swerve out of the way of your falling ice should cover that nicely.
Now, make it a law that ramming someone to get the snow off their car results in no insurance surcharge and I'll have to think long and hard about it...
That is all.
10 comments:
Does this include the undercarriage? That is part of the vehicle. Is it $500 fine if it snows while you are driving?
These fools want to dictate, so they legislate. End result is the same.
Heck, I just love it when Karma sheds a big sheet of ice from the top of my van onto the hood and windshield of the expensive care that is tailgating me.
Wonder what he would do to a Trucker who picked up a load that had been sitting outside during a snowstorm? Talk about snow and ice coming at you at 60+ MPH!
Not that it matters. Like gun laws, the only people who comply are the ones you don't need to worry about. They're the ones who do it now because it's the right thing to do. We have such a snow clearing law here already, but it doesn't go into effect for 2 more years.
I can almost see where this happened from my house yesterday: Driver, 3 students injured when 'ice missile' strikes school bus on I-95
Would a snow clearing law helped? I dunno, but I do know that my kid will most likely be riding that same bus route next winter. I saw pics of the bus, and it's really a credit to the driver that nobody was killed. We're talking almost zero visibility out the windshield, on an interstate highway, going over a major bridge with no shoulder.
I don't like more laws, but unless the snow/ice is obstructing a driver's vision, I don't think there is reasonable law a cop can use before something happens. I'm sure you could stretch way out there and write something like "failure to secure load" or "unsafe modification" or some crap like that. I don't think it will keep things like this from happening, but at least it gives the police the power to ticket the jerks.
My hatred for these drivers knows no bounds. I would like to set up checkpoints where cops pull over only those drivers who have not cleared the snow off and offer them the choice of cleaning the snow off with or without a ticket for obstructed vision.
"What? No snow scraper? Use your hands!"
There does not need to be a new law, there needs to be a push to get the cops to enforce the ones they already have.
Either that or they should re-write the law for assault and battery to provide that it shall be an affirmative defense that the person you beat the shit out of had snow and ice on his car and represented a road hazard.
Nahh. It's just some snow, deal with it. Besides, my Jeep has a luggage rack on top with all sorts of nooks & crannies that make it almost impossible to get everything off, and when it's ten below zero for a week at a time, I don't spend much time trying.
Sorry, too busy making sure the sidewalk is shoveled, wouldn't want to get fined for that. The trash goes down in the morning, not the night before, wouldn't want the neighborhood watch to fine for that. The dog is penned up, the pool has a gate, the mailbox is accessable, the curtans are white and I only crap once a day, wouldn't want to get fined!
As long as the proposed legislation includes a bounty on the vehicles of those who do not scrape off their snow, I could probably live with it being enacted... ;)
I am a self-absorbed lazy asshole.
In Connecticut, it's already covered, at least according to the news report I saw last week. Any load must be secured, and by the tortured definition of the snow being on top of the vehicle, it counts as a load.
Not that half the asshats in the state paid any attention...
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