As of October 1, 2010, Maryland requires drivers to give an extra lane of space to an emergency vehicle stopped on the side of the road. It isn’t obvious how this law will play out for people who have been injured in automobile accidents, but it’s an important new law I wanted to bring to your attention anyway.
As an aside, a law requiring a driver to act in a certain way normally matters for a car accident case because it sets a standard that drivers have to follow. If a driver violates that standard, it lets someone that driver injured argue that the driver was negligent and at fault for any injuries.
The “Move Over” law applies whenever an emergency vehicle is stopped on the side of the road and a car is approaching the emergency vehicle from behind. When that happens, drivers are required to move over a lane if it’s safe to do so. If the driver can’t safely move over one lane, he or she has to slow down to a safe speed.
This is NOT a law that changes what happens when an emergency vehicle is coming up behind you in traffic. If you’re driving and you see an ambulance in your rear view mirror, you should get out of the way, but not because of this new law. This law just requires you to either give a lane of space to a police car or ambulance stopped on the side of the road, or to slow down so things are safer for the first-responder.
As an aside, the law specifically states that it only applies to you as a driver if you’re coming up behind the emergency vehicle. As I read it, the law does not require you to give extra breathing room to an emergency vehicle when the ambulance, say, is pulled over and facing the wrong way in traffic. Of course, giving that extra space is still the considerate thing to do.
Maryland is one of the last states to adopt this kind of law. As I understand it, the only two U.S. jurisdictions that don’t presently require you to move over a lane for an emergency vehicle are Washington D.C. and Hawaii. If you really like to legally crowd police when you drive, your options are pretty limited.