A report in KUHF detailed that the Texas Department of Transportation is asking drivers to pay attention while they’re on the highway. According to the article, TxDOT statistics reveal that more than 180 people were hit while riding bicycles, 44 pedestrians were killed, 450 pedestrians were hit by vehicles in 2011 and 600 accidents occurred in work zones during the course of 2011. The article also features a DPS state trooper revealing an important fact about car crashes.
Crashes vs. Accidents
A state trooper quoted in the article says that the word “accident” doesn’t describe many of the car crashes that occur every day. Accidents, according to the trooper, involve situations where a driver has no control over their vehicle or where something unexpected and unavoidable happened. Crashes, conversely, involve situations where something may well have been done to avoid the entire ordeal.
Crashes frequently occur because of people not paying attention when they’re driving. They may pay attention most of the time, but, when the crash actually happens, they’ll be looking somewhere other than the direction the car is headed or otherwise distracted from what’s going on. This has become a more severe problem because of how much cellphones permeate our culture. People quite often send text massages, emails, answer phone calls without a headset and engage in other dangerous behaviors with their cellular devices when they’re driving.
When something really is an accident, no one is to blame. Many car crashes, however, never have to happen. If someone had been paying attention when they were not or if someone had exercised reasonable caution when they did not, quite a few car crashes would have been close calls and others would have never even been realistic possibilities. Too often, people are simply not paying attention and someone ends up injured, dead or having their property destroyed because of a crash.
Heed the Advice
When you’re on the road, pay attention. If you’re traveling at freeway or highway speeds, you go a long distance in a second. If you look down at your cellular phone for a couple of seconds to read a text, you can end up hurting someone or killing them quite easily. Slow down in construction zones. The workers there are frequently within 100 feet of the roadway and, if you lost control at freeway speeds, you’d be on top of them in less than a second.
If someone injures you because they were driving negligently, speak with an attorney about the matter to see if you have a good reason to sue. The attorney may be able to help you at least get compensated in a monetary sense. Some losses can’t really be compensated, but no one should suffer economic hardship on top of other hardships because of someone else’s negligence.