There’s A New King In Car Accident Causes
Brian O Sutter
Traffic Accidents
For decades traffic accident have been just another part of life that some of us have to face as drivers. It wasn’t always that way, of course. The very first traffic accident fatality took place in 1896, and at that time, the coroner overseeing the accident wrote, “This must never happen again,” naively believing this would be an isolated incident.Unfortunately, millions of deaths later, that coroner has been proven spectacularly wrong. Perhaps even more worrying, despite all the advances in road construction, car construction, car safety, and driver education, car accidents within the United State are still on the rise. In fact, by the conclusion of 2016, that year had proven to have a higher traffic accident rate nationwide than in the previous nine years. So how, with all of these improvements in knowledge, experience, technology and manufacturing can traffic accidents still be on the increase?
The answer is human error, and, at least in Florida, there’s not much that even the police can do about it.
Speeding
In the past, there have been different causes for car accidents that were the leaders in both injuries and fatalities. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that speeding has often been #1 cause. The only people who are truly comfortable precisely controlling a car at high speeds are professional race car drivers. For everyone else, driving a car faster means less control and less ability to predict how the car will behave, as well as less time to react when the unexpected happens.
Fortunately, speeding is against the law, and is easy enough for the police to catch and measure. So while speeding certainly causes its fair share of accidents, even today, the police are on it. The moment that they see a person speeding, they have full authority to stop them, pull them over, and issue a ticket.
Aggressive Driving
This one is another cause that, unfortunately, is very easy for police officers to spot. Aggressive driving is a mix of both unskilled driving and extreme emotion. People may drive either in anger, or with enough ego to believe that no one should ever interfere with their driving. As a result, they take many chances, may even pursue people who they believe have wronged them on the road, and break numerous traffic laws in their efforts to either maintain “driver superiority,” or punish those that have interfered with their driving.
As with speeding, there are numerous ways that the police can spot and put a stop to aggressive driving. Multiple traffic laws are often broken by angry, aggressive drivers, including speeding, ignoring signs and traffic signals, cutting others off, illegally passing and overtaking in lanes, and even trying to run people off the road, or force them out of their vehicles in order to fight them. Any of these is more than enough cause for police officers to stop the aggressive driver, charge them, and have them either pay fines, or go to court to contest the charges.
The New Leader: Distracted Driving
People glued to their phones, using social media, sending text messages, watching videos, talking to people, or even shooting photos and videos of themselves is the new #1 cause of traffic accidents and fatalities in both America and the state of Florida. Tragically, distracted driving as a result of phone use has overtaken even drunk driving for causing injury and death on Florida’s roads.
However, the police can’t do anything about it. It’s technically legal. Distracted driving is considered a secondary offense in Florida traffic law. This means that a driver can only be charged and fined with distracted driving if it is caught in conjunction with some other traffic violation, such as speeding, or a collision. If a driver is currently obeying all traffic laws, but drives right past a police officer, clearly paying more attention to the phone than the road, that police officer can do nothing until that driver makes another illegal mistake.
However, even if the law can’t do anything about a distracted driver, you can. An experienced car crash lawyer can be an indispensable advocate for you in auto accident case. Make sure you get professional help if you have an unfortunate encounter with a distracted driver.