What should I have done?

SidecarFlip wrote:
Sounds to me like you were following the tractor trailer too closely (tailgating). You should allow at least one vehicle space (your length) for every 10 miles per hour of speed. If you had abided by that rule, you would have saw the trooper in plenty of time to reduce your speed accordingly (move over or slow down) means slowing to 45 mph. which is the legal MINIMUM speed on any Inter-Intra state highway or Federally funded 2 lane road.

Accept the ticket and pay the citation and consider yourself lucky he didn't arrest you. He could have. You put his life in danger by your inactions.

I always slow down or move over for stopped emergency vehicles but that means not following so closely, the vehicle in front of you that you cannot.

Following too closely (assured clear distance) is one of the biggest accident contributors.

I know, the patent answer is, if I allow sufficient distance between the vehicle in front of me and me, someone will move into that space. Easy answer to that. Assume that distance from the vehicle that got in front of you instead of the vehicle you were initially following.

Remember, move over or slow down and slow down means slowing to the Federally mandated minimum speed of 45 mph.

And where is it that you are able to leave 240 plus feet of space between you and the vehicle in front in traffic and not have 7 cars pull into it? If you try to abide by the vehicle length per 10mph, you wind up going backwards!

About the only point here that is valid is to lay on the brakes as much as you safely can. Every place I've seen this law it states Move over OR Slow down. If the OP did not brake and was not obviously braking then pay up, but if he was on the brakes and say down to 45 or less then the trooper was in the wrong to ticket him. You can't pull over into another vehicle and you can't be expected to smoke the tires stopping.