That Plastic Skeleton Can’t Be Your Plus 1, Police Tell Car Pool Lane Users

A California Highway Patrol officer in the San Jose area recently cited a driver who used a Halloween-themed ruse to drive in a high-occupancy-vehicle lane.

Unaccompanied drivers have long used creative tactics to gain access to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. Mannequins and masked dummies have been known to grace passenger seats as drivers try to fool California Highway Patrol officers and shave a few minutes off a commute.

While many car-pool culprits hope they can deceive the authorities by placing lifelike forms next to them, a driver recently put a Halloween skeleton with a “Scream” mask in the passenger seat and then used an H.O.V. lane in the San Jose area.

An officer was not fooled, even though the skeleton was wearing a seatbelt. He issued a ticket.

“While #spookyseason is upon us,” a message posted to the agency’s social media said on Friday, “it’s important to remember that decorations being transported in the passenger seat do not qualify to meet carpool requirements.”

Pictures of an officer handing the driver the citation accompanied the message. The driver’s face was blurred for identity protection. But the same discretion was not provided to the passenger — a ghostly, wrinkled, bleach-white screaming face on top of a plastic human skeleton.

The minimum penalty for violating H.O.V. lane rules is $490, the Highway Patrol said. The agency did not immediately respond to questions about the driver’s identity or the amount of the fine the driver faced.

H.O.V. lanes, also known as car pool or diamond lanes, are reserved for “motorcycles, mass transit and vehicles with two or more occupants,” the California Department of Transportation says on its website. They are meant to give people incentives “to pool their vehicular resources and thereby conserve fuel and lessen emission of air pollutants,” the department adds.

Certain fuel-efficient vehicles are also exempt from the occupancy requirement.

An “occupant” is defined as any person who occupies a safety restraint device such as a seatbelt, the department adds.

In a widely covered case in 2022, a driver who had been issued a ticket in Texas argued that her fetus counted as a second occupant. Her argument drew national attention, and her ticket was ultimately dismissed, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The online discussion spurred by the recent skeletal passenger struck a light note.

“That’s discriminating against the fleshily challenged,” one commenter wrote on Facebook. Another took a jab at the infamous traffic that Californians deal with: “But officer, I was alive when we left the house!”