Car caught on camera passing on I-540 shoulder 5 times in 5 months

Ed Crump Image
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Driver caught on camera passing traffic on I-540 shoulder

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- Dash camera footage caught an aggressive driver passing on the right shoulder of Interstate 540 five times in as many months.

A Wake County man said he was driving on the interstate Friday morning when he caught the driver at rush hour.

In the video, a black Ford Fusion passes a couple of cars on the shoulder at high speed and cuts back into traffic.

Then, it pulls back onto the shoulder at the exit ramp to pass a truck that was trying to get off at that ramp.

"This morning due to the conditions I went ahead and called the Highway Patrol. They said they would alert troopers," said the man who captured the footage and wanted to remain anonymous.

He said he first captured the shoulder pass maneuver in early August just days after he installed the camera.

"It passed at a pretty good rate of speed, maybe 20 miles an hour faster than I was going. So I saved the video and didn't really think much of it."

A couple of months later on Halloween, he captured another shoulder pass.

This time the car pulled back into the roadway -- across all three lanes of traffic -- nearly cutting off a driver in the far left lane.

That night he compared the two videos.

"I went back and realized it was the same car," he said

The dashcam owner said he caught the same car on camera doing the same thing two more times in November.

"If I've captured them five times, then I can't imagine how many times they've actually done this," he said.

He notified the Highway Patrol of the first four videos and said he called in today's incident.

A Highway Patrol spokesman said the agency is grateful to drivers who send them videos of serious violations.

"That is something that we encourage them to send in to us so we can conduct a sufficient investigation," North Carolina State Highway Patrol spokesperson Sgt. Michael Baker said. "We have made charges off of video footage given to Highway Patrol in past instances."

The owner of the dashcam said he thinks officers can do more.

"I'd love to see more patrols out to get this kind of behavior stopped before someone gets killed. "The possibilities of injury or death are real high with a situation like this," he said, and he added that he will continue to try to catch the car on video in the hopes that the driver will eventually be caught.

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