No, I don’t mean a drinking establishment.
At major traffic intersections there are double parallel white lines to designate a pedestrian walkway called the ‘grade crossing’. Before that there is a thicker white line called the “Stop Bar”. [Texas Transportation Code 471.009 (3) which states, “Stop bar" means the marking that is applied or attached to the surface of a roadway on either side of a grade crossing and that indicates that a vehicle must stop at the grade crossing. Emphasis mine.]
In other words, you must stop your vehicle before the vehicle’s front crosses the stop bar. I have had several DWI clients who were stopped by law enforcement, who stopped over, or even completely passed the stop bar. This failure is often used by the authorities to stop a motorist for the officer to ‘go fishing’! Once a vehicle is stopped and the officer approaches the driver and smells alcohol, the DWI field sobriety testing begins. The way the field sobriety tests are made, they’re set up to fail! (This failure will be discussed in a later blog.)
So, the next time you come to a striped intersection, look for the stop bar and come to a stop before the front of your car goes over the thick white bar.