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A motorcycle officer spotted a pickup truck swerve out of the carpool lane on State Route 57 in Brea on Wednesday at about 5 p.m., KTLA reports. The officer drove his motorcycle up to the truck with the intention of the telling the driver to exercise more caution when changing lanes via the driver's open window. That's when the officer noticed something odd. According to a post on the Brea Police Department's Facebook page:
He was surprised to see that the passenger in the vehicle was actually a mannequin. The officer stopped the driver and issued him a citation for being solo in the carpool lane. The driver admitted to having done this for quite some time, and related that he would now just accept the fact he needed to sit in traffic like everyone else.
Trying to sneak into the carpool lane with an inanimate object as a passenger is not entirely uncommon. In September of 2015, CHP told drivers to stop using dummies as passengers, and that included fake babies. In one incident in Oakland, police actually tried to rescue what they thought was a real baby trapped in a hot car, only to discover it was just a doll.
