Well actually, the sign is for the MAXIMUM speed limit. In a perfect world, everyone would be travelling in the right lane at less than 55.

You guys are still implying that the two laws (speed limit and keep right) are somehow related. They're not. They are totally independent, and the keep-right law deliberately makes that clear.

Let's assume for a moment that a cop would ticket you for breaking the "keep right" law. I've never heard of anyone getting busted for this, but just for the sake of argument, let's say a cop wanted to.

If the speed limit were 55, and you were doing 65 in the fast lane, and you didn't pull over for faster traffic, technically, the cop could pull you over and ticket you for both exceeding the speed limit and not yielding the right-of-way to faster traffic. Yes, it sounds crazy and self-contradictory. Which is why I've never seen anyone ticketed for this. But that's the way the laws are worded. And that's the right way to do it.

One of the reasons that this is my pet peeve is because I believe that we'd have fewer traffic jams if the "keep right" law were more strictly enforced. I've seen left-lane slowpokes cause problems that snowball into real traffic jams. Here we are spending millions to add more lanes to our freeways, when simply following the rules of the road would be enough for many areas. My dream project is to do a large-scale software simulation that proves this theory.

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Tony Fabris