The law on the road

Your vehicle is an ordinary vehicle

Module 8 lesson 2 covered this as a survival matter. Legally it is simpler and more absolute: you are driving a private car and every rule that applies to everybody applies to you. No exemptions, no right of way, no special permissions, no matter what is on the roof or in the report you are trying to make.

Stopping

The most common way a spotter breaks traffic law, and module 8 lesson 2 gave the procedure. The legal points are three.

• Non-emergency stopping on a controlled-access highway shoulder is generally prohibited. The shoulder exists for breakdowns and emergency vehicles. Wanting to photograph a storm is not either.
• Hazard lights do not make an unlawful stop lawful. They make you visible while committing the offence. This is the single most widely believed piece of wrong traffic law in spotting.
• Whether you may run hazards while moving depends entirely on where you are. Some states prohibit it, some permit it, and some permit it only in defined conditions such as very low visibility. There is no national answer.

The phone

The fastest-moving area of traffic law in the country, and the one that intersects most directly with what a spotter is tempted to do. The direction of travel is uniform even though the detail is not: handheld phone use while driving is prohibited in most of the country and the number of states doing so rises almost every year. Texting while driving is prohibited almost everywhere.

Many state hands-free laws carve out two-way radio operation, including licensed amateur radio, and the carve-outs are not identical and are not universal. If you intend to operate radio while driving, that is a specific thing to check in your own vehicle code rather than to assume from what somebody said on a net.

Reckless driving, and where lesson 1 comes back

Every state has an offence for driving with wilful or wanton disregard for safety, whatever it is called locally, and it does not require a specific speed. Running stop signs to keep up with a storm qualifies. So does driving at a speed that makes the road ahead unreadable in heavy rain.

Where to actually look

This is the transferable half of the lesson, and the reason it prints no numbers. Learn where the answer lives, because then you have it for every year rather than for this one.

• Your state vehicle code, published free online by every state. It is the authority and everything else is a summary of it.
• Your state DMV or highway safety office, which publishes the plain-language version.
• National compilations from highway safety and insurance research organisations, which are good for the national picture and are summaries rather than law.
• Check before each season, not once. The phone rules in particular change most years.