You enter a work zone where workers are standing beside the travel lane and the lanes have been narrowed. How should you drive?

Why C is correct

Work zones stack three hazards that rarely appear together elsewhere: lanes narrowed to below normal width, people on foot within arm's reach of moving traffic, and heavy equipment entering and leaving the roadway. Lower speed buys reaction time against all three and shortens the distance covered before a stop. Increased following distance matters just as much, because the vehicle ahead may brake suddenly for a worker or a machine, and a narrowedlane may leave you nowhere to swerve. Flaggers direct traffic with legal authority that outranks signs and signals at that location. Treat every orange marker as corresponding to something real behind it, because generally it does.

Why the other options are wrong

A. Move into the closed lane to put distance between you and the workers

The closed lane is closed for a reason, whether that is a drop-off, a missing shoulder, equipment, or a crew working within it. Entering it puts you somewhere no driver has been cleared to be.

B. Sound the horn before passing anyone working near the road

A horn means almost nothing to someone wearing hearing protection beside a running compactor. It neither warns nor clears the way, and it adds noise to an environment already full of it.

D. Hold highway speed so you clear the zone as quickly as possible

Clearing the zone quickly is the instinct that removes the very margin protecting the workers. Their tasks demand attention elsewhere, and the extra few seconds you save costs them the reaction time your speed was providing.

On the road

A flagger holds a Stop paddle at the head of a lane closure on a suburban arterial. The first four cars slow patiently; the fifth rolls through at forty-five because the driver decided the workers were a little too far off the road to warrant it. That is the car the flagger remembers.

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