Florida Highway Patrol is urging Florida residents to remember the importance of a law requiring motor vehicles to merge away from other vehicles stopped alongside the road.
The Move Over law, enacted in 2002, was designed to protect responders to accidents or disabled vehicles from being hit by oncoming traffic by decreasing speed or switching lanes.
Highway Safety Patrol Sgt. Tracy Hisler-Pace, the troop public affairs officer, said she witnesses motorists failing to move over or slow down while passing emergency vehicles on a daily basis.
“Every time you’re standing on the side of the road and traffic is traveling by you at 70-plus miles an hour, it’s always stressful and always scary,” she said.
In Florida, motorists who failed to merge or slow down caused more than 130 traffic accidents in 2013, according to a statement by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Injuries occurred in 81 crashes, and two accidents resulted in fatalities.
Under the law, motorists on a two-lane road are required to slow down to 20 mph below the posted speed limit or 5 mph on roads with a speed limit of 20 mph or less.
For multi-lane roads, drivers must vacate the lane closest to the stationary vehicle. But if drivers can’t, they must slow down to 20 mph below the speed limit.
In Marion County in 2014, three people were killed after a roadside crash off of Interstate 75, two pedestrians and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, according to a statement from the Florida Highway Patrol.
The fear of motorists not abiding by the Move Over law “always makes you more nervous until you can complete whatever task that you are doing and get off the Interstate,” Hisler-Pace said.
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 1/14/2015 under the headline “Florida Highway Patrol reinforces Move Over law"]
