The slow lane to the right is for exiting the freeway (with some exceptions when the exit is on the left), and the middle lane is where you drive with the rest of traffic, but there is no rule against passing in any lane if the car to your side is slower than you are. We get a few careless lane-changers, but generally they don't cause a problem because we just watch out for them. They are usually spotted very easily as they weave in and out. (They can get ticketed for what they are doing, but I haven't seen that happen all that often.) It works well.
In fact, watching people drive on our freeways proves to me that people can get along, flow along with each other with surprisingly little friction. I love watching how the traffic seems to function in a sort of harmony. But it just may be me. A lot of people find driving with others in this sort of natural formation to be frustrating I guess.
Could it be that the British have a problem because their rules make no sense. If a lot of people are "hogging" the middle lane, it may be because that lane should be hogged and people should use the other lanes for passing. How is the oblivious person who is "hogging" a lane to know that maybe he should move into a slower lane if the traffic just politely piles up behind him and never simply does the logical thing -- politely pass and move ahead of the slow traffic.
How can such a simple, obvious thing be made so complicated and so expensive.
Parking tickets are the problem in LA. Raised to $73.00, yes, $73.00 per offense in 2012.
Parking tickets are a big deal in Los Angeles. For years, the city has been jacking up fines, which slams many low-income renters and young people who live in tightly packed neighborhoods where they have to fight over street parking.
Most politicians don't want to talk about it because parking fines are a big part of the city's revenue. Those tickets bring in $150 million a year. When the city runs into money problems — as it always does — it's the easiest thing in the world to raise fines instead of running afoul of unions, developers and political donors.
For the sixth time in seven years, the City Council voted last year to jack up parking fines by $5. The latest hike boosted the penalty for a street sweeping citation to $73.
That's a heavy price to pay, and it's $30 more than what violators pay for the same offense in neighboring cities, such as Torrance and El Segundo. In neighborhoods like Koreatown and Pico Union, which were built before garages and carports were needed, there is nowhere to park for blocks and blocks when the yellow dirt-sucking trucks lumber by.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/15/local/la-me-holland-parking-20130216
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