I took a long drive to Philly on Monday night in order to exhibit at the Manayunk Arts Fest this weekend and on the way there my darling girlfriend and I had a driving question – what’s the difference between a solid white line marking and a double solid line marking? Checking the Virginia driver’s manual confirmed what we thought about the solid single white line: lane changes are discouraged, but not prohibited. No mention of double white lines, but then again we saw them in Maryland – in Fort McHenry Tunnel, to be exact – so perhaps the MD driver’s handbook is the place to check.

Well, I came up with a goose egg on that one too, but not before noticing something annoying. I opened up the PDF and searched for “white line” and got no results. Okay, “white” then. Zip. Hmm. “Yellow” was also zero, as was a word I could see in front of me on the page I was looking at. They’ve published the handbook with no search ability at all. Hope you want to read it front to back, not find something specific.

Anyway – anyone have a definitive answer on the double white line? I assumed it meant lane change prohibited but it would be nice to have a canonical answer…