What's this all about?

So, you might ask, what is “Life in Half the Fast Lane”? Good question...

I live in Southern California, specifically in Los Alamitos. I work in Glendale. My kids (living with the Evil Ex) are in Yucaipa. For those of you unfamiliar with SoCal, these points are all over the map. Between commuting to work and going out to see my kids for dinner once a week I travel over 470 miles per week. That doesn’t include any weekend travel, nor does it include trips out and back every other week to pick my daughters up for the weekend and take them back out. (Since the Evil Ex won’t do any of the driving.)

Traveling over 500 miles per week on SoCal freeways is daunting. Traffic here sucks. My commute to work can easily take over an hour each way and the drive out to see my girls, (about 75 miles one way) can take over two hours.

So, as much as possible, I use my “alternate” means of travel: a motorcycle. California is the one state in the US where splitting lanes (legally known as “lane sharing”) is legal. Yes, those maniacs that you see screaming between cars on the freeways are doing so legally, though many motorists don’t seem to realize this.

Anyway, it’s what I call “life in half the fast lane”. It’s where I spend hours of my day every day, squeezed into half of the fast lane, splitting my way past thousands of cars.

So, why talk about it? Well, many people don’t understand why I’m willing to do it. (“That’s so dangerous, Bill!”) Perhaps I’ll be able to answer that to some degree. Also, I’ve been doing this for well over 14 years and in the last few years I’ve seen an amazing proliferation of stupidity on the part of other motorcyclists attempting to split lanes. Though I doubt any of them are willing to listen, I thought I might try and give them some advice. As you might imagine, after doing this myself for so long, and for so many miles (roughly 200,000 miles of riding in that time) I think I know how to do it pretty darn well. I’ve only been in one accident in that time and while I was on the freeway, I wasn’t splitting lanes at the time. In fact, had I been, I wouldn’t have been hit...