This happened to a friend a week ago. She had bought an M800 recently and has been driving only for the past 3-4 months. While not a perfect driver yet, she drives pretty well for a new learner.
She is coming on Sardar Patel Road (S.P.Road) from IIT side and just after Raj Bhavan, traffic from Little Mount also merges into the 1-way road. She is on the extreme left of the 4-lane road and driving at maybe 40kmph. There is another car on her right at more or less the same speed as her, plus a few bikes before and after her.
The cops standing after Raj Bhavan flag her down and first ask for papers. Being a new car, all Tax, Insurance etc is in order. So the cop fails to find anything amiss and since she wears the seat belt, there was no scope for fining her on that count also. So finding nothing to charge her with, he says that she is fined Rs450 for overtaking from the left.
Since she is not much aware of laws about overtaking and is not sure what to do, she calls her husband, who tells her to give Rs100 and move on. She tells the cop that she has only Rs300 and Rs100 is the maximum she can pay. He takes the money and asks her to go - no receipt nothing.
Now coming to my queries :
1) I know that overtaking from the left is not right. But is there a law for this, with a specific fine for this violation ?
2) In her case, she was not overtaking anyone and neither driving fast. So what is this thing about wrong overtaking ?
3) In a 1-way road, can't we drive on any of the lanes ? Especially the ones that would lead to the direction that we eventually plan to take ?
For eg. on S.P.Road, if I wanted to take a left to Velachery, I would take the left-most lane. And if I wanted to go to Guindy, I would move to the centre lane and take the left after the Velachery left. And those going to Saidapet, would take the rightmost lane and take a right where this road joins Mount Road.
I think that the dishonest cop just made money out of her ignorance here.
Or did he really have a point that I missed ?
P.S. : Just uploaded a crude drawing for those that are not aware of Chennai roads.