Do you have a right to drive while your windows are obstructed in Washington?

Q: Aren’t drivers supposed to have a clear view out the rear window of their car? I saw someone driving with their entire back window covered in snow. The inability to see behind you is a serious safety issue. They drove past a police car and the officer didn’t do anything. Even if they’re not breaking the law, if I was that officer, I’d have at least pulled them over and told them they should clean the snow off.

A: Snow blocking your view is a problem, and we’ll get to that in a moment. First though, I want to address your proposed violation of a driver’s rights. Let’s pretend for a moment that driving with an entire back window covered in snow is not prohibited by law. The police can’t make a traffic stop just because they don’t like something about the driver’s vehicle.

Consider lifted pickups. Lift kits and bigger tires are great for off-roading, but empirically worse for driving on the street. The “worse” list includes decreased handling, increased stopping distance, greater roll-over risk, and reduced pedestrian visibility. Yet within limits, it’s legal to jack up your pickup. Should a police officer be allowed to pull over a pickup driver because they know lifted trucks are less safe? There’s an argument to be made that vehicle modifications should only be allowed if they’ve been engineered to meet the original safety standards, but that’s not the law we’re living with.

In a society that values freedom, limitations on police powers are part of the package. The Revised Code of Washington has a long list of things worthy of a traffic stop, and they can be mostly summarized in four categories:

• An officer knows that you’re not licensed to drive.
• An officer observes an equipment or vehicle licensing violation, like a burned-out headlight or expired tabs.
• An officer observes you violating traffic law.
• An officer has reasonable suspicion to believe that you or someone in your car committed a crime.

You might reply, but what about those police departments that stop drivers to reward them for safe driving by giving them gift cards? It’s might seem like a nice idea until you think it through. There’s something called the exclusionary rule, which provides that “otherwise admissible evidence may not be used in a criminal trial if it was obtained as a result of illegal police conduct.” That would include an unjustified traffic stop. Imagine an officer stops a driver to reward them for using their turn signal and sees a crow bar, hand gun, ski mask, and a dozen Playstation 5s in the back seat. Now that’s a pickle.

Plus, if you’re running late, but still obeying all the traffic laws, it feels more like a punishment than a reward to get pulled over for safe driving.

But your question is really about snow on a window. The law is clear (even if the window isn’t); no person shall drive a motor vehicle with any nontransparent material on a window that obstructs the driver’s clear view. And I’ll go one further. The same law that requires drivers to secure their load also requires drivers to remove any debris from the vehicle before driving. If any of that debris (like chunks of ice) flies off and injures someone or causes damage, it moves from a traffic infraction to a crime.

Visibility is fundamental to driving, and ice chunks flying off your car are no joke. To anyone who needs to hear this, take a couple extra minutes on frosty or snowy days to make sure all your windows are clear.

Doug Dahl is the director of communications for the Washington Traffic Safety Commission.

This story was originally published December 4, 2023 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Do you have a right to drive while your windows are obstructed in Washington?."