Imagine that you have just been involved in a horrendous accident. Your life hangs in the balance and you must have emergency surgery to survive. Now imagine that you are at a rural hospital with no surgeon on staff. The closest on-call surgeon lives 20 miles away. Do you really want the surgeon to travel 35 mph on winding country roads to get to the hospital? If the surgeon has to get dressed, run to the car, drive the speed limit, and then run to the operating room before helping you it could take as much as 45 minutes for you to get help.

California Motor Vehicle Code 21058 is designed to prevent this scenario. Read the specific code language on this and other vehicle laws at California Motor Vehicle Code. Many rural hospitals do not have a full time staff overnight. They get by with local on-call surgeons who wake up in the middle of the night, throw on a pair of scrubs, and race to the emergency room. As long as the doctor displays the necessary California Medical Association sticker on his or her car, and drives with a reasonable sense of safety, then they are free to break the speed limit laws in the case of an emergency.

Here's an example situation. The Kaweah Delta Hospital in Visalia, California is a rural hospital that has no overnight surgeons on duty. When they receive a trauma patient, or have another emergency that requires immediate surgery, they must call the on-call doctor who could be 10 to 20 miles away. The staff at the hospital will do their best to stabilize the patient, but until the physician gets there, there is little they can do for the trauma victim. This vehicle law is old, but it is still needed in the rural parts of California where help may not always be just around the corner.

In bigger cities where the hospitals are fully staffed 24 hours a day, this law will most likely not be an issue with local cops. There is no reason for a doctor to speed to the hospital when the on-duty team can prep the patient for surgery and keep them stable until the doctor arrives. Outlying, rural areas are where the need for this law really exists, and officers in those areas will have to determine if they want to risk lives by pulling over a physician who is driving over the speed limit.