Drivers: Put SAFETY FIRST during the Thanksgiving Holiday

As the long Thanksgiving weekend approaches Virginia State Police are urging drivers to be extra careful when they hit the road with their friends and family.  Most of all drivers are urged to buckle up and to ensure that all of their passengers are buckled up, too.

One officer recounts a tragic traffic accident that shaped his belief in seat belt use.  A family an SUV crashed and flipped over.  A 10 year old girl who was sleeping in the cargo area without any restraints was ejected from the vehicle and killed at the scene of the crash.  The rest of the family in the SUV were not hurt in the crash.

This is exactly the type of horrific, preventable crash that police would like to avoid seeing on Virginia roads this year.  However, despite outreach and education efforts not all road users are getting the message that seat belts save lives.

There were 31 fatalities on Virginia roads for the last two four-day weekend travel periods, and 39 percent of those killed were not restrained.  This means that a disproportionate number of those not wearing seat belts are killed in crashes, and many of those deaths may have been avoided had proper restraints been used.

Other contributing factors to the number of accidents over holiday weekends are tired and distracted drivers.  Drivers are especially prone to being tired during holiday weekends, when celebrations with their friends and families sometimes leave them exhausted.

Read our holiday travel tips in our car accident & injury law library.

The Top 5 Causes of Virginia Traffic Accidents

If you’ve spent any time driving in Northern Virginia, then you probably have your own personal list of driving pet peeves, the things you think other drivers are doing to contribute to accidents. If asked, many people would cite accident reasons like aggressive driving, cell-phone use, distracted driving, following too closely and more.

Care to see how accurate you are? Here is the list of top 5 causes for traffic accidents in Virginia for all age groups:

1. Following too close: 29,551 (40%)
2. Failure to yield: 22,799 (31%)
3. Speeding: 7,217 (10%)
4. Driver distraction: 6,420 (9%)
5. Ran traffic control: 7,044 (10%)

Does this list surprise you at all? If you find tailgaters frustrating, then you have good reason to be concerned about their actions as a full 40% of all Virginia crashes are caused by tailgating. Failure to yield the right of way isn’t too far behind, and these two accident causes explain a full 71% of Virginia crashes.

Looking for more driving statistics and safety tips? Check out our law library for articles like “The Top 5 Causes of Traffic Accidents by Age Group”, “How Safe is Your Automobile?”, and more.

Is your life at risk from a medically unfit driver?

It is frightening but true.  According to recent investigations and a congressional inquiry, there are numerous bus and truck drivers out on American roads right now, driving with serious medical conditions.  Some of these drivers are even accepting money from federal government disability programs from their ailments, which supposedly are bad enough that they cannot work.  Yet, work they do, driving on the same roads that you and your family travel every day.

If you’re surprised to hear this, then you’ll be even more shocked to find out that this has been a known and documented problem for nearly a decade.  A tragic deadly bus crash caused by a medically unfit driver in 1999 resulted in a number of recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) directed at the government agency that oversees truck and bus drivers.

However this agency, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has been dragging its feet in implementing the proposed regulations.  In the meantime, drivers who should not be on the road continue to cause tragic bus and truck accidents and doctors say that the medical certificates they need to work are so easy to obtain illegally that nobody pays much attention any more.

Is this the best we can do?  Is this all the regard we have for human life?  If the federal government can’t be relied on to protect innocent members of the traveling public and if drivers themselves can’t be relied on to stay off the road if they’re unfit to drive – what is the average person to do?  You can read more about this problem in our library article, “Are Medically Unfit Bus and Truck Drivers Endangering Your Life?” and learn more about tractor trailer accidents in our article, “The Deadly Facts about Tractor Trailer Accidents”.

Getting high-risk drunk drivers off the road

Yet again the statistics have shown us the ugly truth.  Those drivers who choose to get behind the wheel of a car after having had too much to drink – for the second, third, or more times – are more likely to kill themselves or somebody else in a fatal car crash.  Not only that, but drivers who may have no prior convictions but somehow think it is okay to drive with a BAC over 0.15 are also more likely to kill themselves or somebody else in an accident.

While alcohol-related traffic deaths may be down overall in the United States according to recent numbers from the NHTSA, the number of deaths from these so-called “high-risk” drivers has gone up.  This small subset of problem drivers seems impervious to increased sobriety checkpoints, advertising campaigns directed against DUI / DWI, and tightened drunk driving laws.  What makes these drivers think they are above and beyond the law?

The only option seems to target this group and crack down – hard.  You can read more about the recent NHTSA report and ideas from MADD for cutting down on the number of high-risk drivers on the road in our law library article “The Problem of High-Risk Drunk Drivers in Fatal Crashes”.  You can also read about how Virginia is cracking down on drunk driving in our article “Virginia to Crack Down on Drunk Driving” and the impact of lowering the teen drinking age in “How Would Lowering the Drinking Age Affect Teen Drivers?”