Dangerous roadways and natural disasters cause a handful of car crashes. But human error causes about 93 percent of the car wrecks in Florida. Many of these incidents involve excessive speed, improper lookout, and/or driver inattention. There’s often an underlying cause as well, such as alcohol impairment or fatigue. Damages in car wreck cases often [...]
For as long as there have been negligence claims, insurance companies have tried to shift blame onto the victims. This trend began around 1900. As there were no federal safety standards at the time, many factories and cars were very dangerous. Defendants started calling job injuries and car crashes “accidents.” The word shifted focus away [...]
In Florida, human error causes over 90 percent of the car crashes. Momentary lapses cause a few of these wrecks. A few others happen because the driver was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the vast majority involve either negligence, which is a lack of ordinary care, or negligence per se, [...]
Every year, car crashes seriously injure or disable over two million Americans. Nearly all of these incidents trigger some kind of legal proceeding. Contrary to the message in TV ads, the insurance company is not “on your side” in these proceedings. In fact, their lawyers use every means at their disposal to reduce or deny [...]
The Sunshine State has the highest number of uninsured drivers in the country. Over a fourth of Floridians have no auto insurance at all. Moreover, Florida has one of the lowest auto insurance minimum in the country. So, thousands of other drivers in the state are dangerously underinsured. When these individuals cause accidents, there may [...]
A new study indicates that the distracted driving problem may be more serious than first believed, and that the solution may be multi-faceted. It seems that restrictive laws have an impact. The states with tougher cell phone laws, such as Montana and Idaho, had much lower crash statistics than states with weaker laws, such as [...]
Some lawmakers are worried about the possible consequences of distracted driving from the four-legged friends that often ride unrestrained in passenger vehicles. Currently, Hawaii is the only state that bans unrestrained animals, and so far this year, peace officers have only issues thirteen citations for violating the law. But a number of states are considering [...]
Spring arrives in just a few more months. When it does, in addition to the normal cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs, many Florida roads will be dotted with U-Haul trucks and other do-it-yourself moving trucks of various sizes. Even the smaller trucks are difficult enough to drive on wide and straight freeways. They are almost [...]
Over the last several decades, police have developed aggressive new tactics and began using advanced technological tools to combat drunk driving. At the same time, legislators have passed strict new laws which are designed to do the same thing. Florida’s controversial refusal-to-submit law is one of the more recent examples. Yet despite all these efforts, [...]
Now that House lawmakers have rejected a last-ditch effort to delay the Electronic Logging Device rule, can a similar provision for passenger vehicles be far behind? Since lawmakers voted down the ELD Extension Act of 2017 by a 246-173 count, the ELD rule will go into effect as scheduled in December 2017, absent an extremely [...]
