I've had it happen, though, enough times to vent about, that I've moved to the left lane for some legit and transitory reason, and then ended up being there for a mile or more while a parade of cars dive to pass on my right leaving no space for me to move back. I wonder if they do it because they think they're less conspicuous, like some police radar might buzz on account of their speed and the ossifer's eyes will reflexively go to me in the left lane.
I wonder whether that's a matter of poor manners, people camping in the overtake lane, prompting bad manners, people passing on the right. Your intent was to temporarily switch to the left lane. Particularly in urban areas, highways will feature a lot of left lane campers and left lane exits for which slower traffic may have a legitimate need to be in the left lane. This prompts a tetris frame of mind in which the object is to get past any obstacle in any lane in either direction. Tangent/"cool story" - Pre-covid on may way home I came up on Chevy Bolt in the left lane doing barely more than 60mph with no one ahead of him. I flashed to pass. Nothing. He had room to yield, but didn't. I flashed to pass some more. He having made it unambiguous that he would not yield, I changed to the middle lane to pass. He was intent on being in front of me, so he changed too. Not many days later, I was coming home and came up on Chevy Bolt in the left lane doing barely more than 60mph with no one ahead of him. I didn't flash to pass, but took the middle lane and passed. It was the same car and driver, now screaming and flashing his lights. I had exhibited poor manners in anticipation of poor manners. Of course, people should have let you back in when you signaled, but their individual failures speak to a general deterioration as well.
Good lord.... overtake or passing lane! Around here it is the fast lane. The freeways are not wide enough to abandon a lane for such temporary uses.
When etiquette is observed, it's beautiful. If a highway has three or four lanes the rightward lanes can accommodate speeds under the limit and the fast, overtake or passing lane cars at 150% of the speed limit. However a culture that has people pull into the left most lane, set the cruise to the speed limit and makes that order impossible.
He's probably exaggerating just a bit, but there are some areas I can think of where 130-135% is not unreasonable depending on time of day. There's a couple sections of the 494/694 loop around Minneapolis that are posted 60 or 65. Now that's fine during high traffic periods(which is the reason for the limit), but during off-peak times it's three or four lanes in either direction with fairly minimal traffic. People will do 75-85 in the leftmost lanes during those periods and it's not really unsafe as long as everyone stays reasonably alert. In Chicago, it's not uncommon for the leftmost lane to be doing 85-90mph when the posted limit is 70-75(120-125%) The best and worst driving I've personally experienced was in Oregon. Oregonians are fantastic at zipper merging and just general onramp and offramp etiquette. But they are godawful bad at open road etiquette. I can't even begin to count the number of times I got stuck on I-5 between Portland and Eugene in a logjam caused by a single driver. You'd have a vehicle in the right lane(often a semi) traveling at exactly the speed limit. That's fine. But then you'd have another vehicle in the left lane at the speed limit + 0.0001mph. And dozens of vehicles in both lanes behind them all bunched up. That behavior is far more dangerous than accelerating to speed limit + 5mph for maybe a minute to pass the slower vehicle and then get out of the way to allow traffic to unclog. Bunched up traffic is where a one- or two-vehicle accident instead becomes a 10 or 20 car pileup. I'd be driving 1,650 miles from ND to Eugene, and those last 100 miles were far more rage-inducing than the previous 1,550 combined.
