Boston Car Accident Lawyer Blog

The Boston Globe published an opinion piece by Focus Driven President Jennifer Smith that contends a state’s enforcement of its distracted driving laws will have a significant impact on whether the effort leads to a reduction in car accidents caused by distracted driving.

As our Massachusetts injury attorneys reported earlier this month on our Boston Car Accident Lawyer Blog, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported that its study found the number of distracted driving accidents actually increased in three of four states that ban drivers from text messaging. The organization suggests that drivers may be attempting to hide their activities below the dash, which could result in their eyes leaving the road for a longer period of time.

A law banning Massachusetts drivers from text messaging took effect at the first of the month.

The Institute has been critical of the amount of attention the federal government has put on the dangers of text messaging and distracted driving, saying many other forms of distracted driving and safety issues are worthy of attention.

“They’re focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it,” IIHS President Adrian Lund said. “This ignores the endless sources of distraction and relies on banning one source or another to solve the whole problem.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently reported that 5,474 motorists were killed and 448,000 were injured in traffic crashes caused by distracted driving last year.
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Motorists are likely to respond to the state’s new ban on text messaging in one of two ways: By either complying with the law aimed at reducing the number of serious and fatal Massachusetts car accidents caused by distracted driving, or by lowering their phones and hiding their activities in their laps.

It is that scenario of hiding your phone in your lap that has the Highway Loss Data Institute warning that text messaging bans could actually be increasing the risk of distracted driving accidents. The Governor’s Highway Safety Association reports that 30 states have banned text messaging by drivers. Eleven of those states have passed laws this year — Massachusetts’ law went into effect at the first of the month.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has led the charge against text messaging, blaming distracted driving car accidents for about 5,000 deaths and more than 500,000 injuries each year. Only speeding and drunk driving are blamed for more traffic deaths each year.

However the study published by the Highway Loss Data Institute, a division of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, looked at four states with a ban on text messaging and compared them to four states where no such ban is in effect. The conclusion was startling: Not only had the ban not led to a reduction in accidents, three of four states with a ban had actually seen an increase.

“It’s an indication that texting bans might even increase the risk of texting for drivers who continue to do so despite the laws,” says Adrian Lund, president of both HLDI and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

He cautioned that the study’s conclusion has no bearing on whether texting and driving is dangerous — it is. But the study’s conclusion does suggest that texting bans are not having the desired effect.

“If drivers were disregarding the bans, then the crash patterns should have remained steady. So clearly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers’ eyes further from the road and for a longer time.”

An experienced Boston car accident lawyer will carefully review your case and could be able to determine whether distracted driving or a violation of the texting ban played a roll in your accident. A careful review of the causes of your accident is just one aspect of building a personal injury or wrongful death case capable of winning the compensation you deserve.
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The Stoughton Journal is reporting that the state’s new text messaging ban could be tough to enforce.

The new law went into effect at the first of the month as the state joins 29 others that have banned text messaging by drivers in an effort to reduce the number of serious and fatal Massachusetts car accidents caused by distracted driving. As we reported on our Boston Car Accident Lawyer Blog, first-time offenders face a fine of up to $135.

Those under the age of 18 are prohibited from using all hand-held devices for any reason; a first-offense will result in a 60-day driver’s license suspension, a $100 fine and participation in a mandatory driver’s education course.

Law enforcement contend the law will be difficult to enforce but voluntary compliance could reduce the risk of accidents caused by distracted drivers.

Nationwide, distracted driving is blamed for nearly 5,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries each year and is the leading cause of serious and fatal accidents after speeding and drunk driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But Wayne Sampson, the executive director of the Massachusetts Chief’s of Police Association, foresees problems with enforcement of the law. For starters, Sampson said the state has issued no guidelines for enforcement, leaving each department to create its own.

And that is not the biggest issue: The challenge of telling the difference between someone who is text messaging and someone who is dialing a phone will be the biggest challenge officers face in enforcing the new law. “There is no way that an officer going down the street is going to be able to tell what somebody is doing when they are looking down in their lap,” he said. “We are going to have a problem in any of the actual prosecutions of these offenses.”

While telephone records will be summoned from phone companies in the event of a serious accident, routine cases will be much more difficult to prove.

Fines for adults caught repeatedly violating the new law will increase to $250 for a second offense and $500 for subsequent offenses. The violation will not count as a moving violation and so should not lead to an increase in insurance premiums.
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The day is finally here for a storyline our Boston car accident lawyers have been following for months on our Boston Car Accident Lawyer blog. As of Sept. 30, the Massachusetts Safe Driving Act – which forbids texting while driving for adult drivers and bans completely the use of cell phones while behind the wheel for 16- and 17-year-old drivers – goes into effect, the Boston Globe reports.

Under the new law, adults caught texting for the first time will face up to $135 in fines. For drivers under the age of 18 caught using a handheld or handless electronic device, first time offenders will earn a 60-day license suspension, a $100 fine and be required to attend a driver education course. For a second offense, young drivers will lose their license for 180 days and face a $250 fine.

But for a generation raised on cell phones, accustomed to sending 50 to 200 texts a day and responsible for logging billions of minutes chatting on their phones each year, are the penalties stiff enough to lead to behavior change? Experts and safe driving advocates simply say, no. Rather, it is how mom and dad adapt to and adopt the new law that will determine how a kid acts behind the wheel.

After tracking the exploding numbers of cell phone and texting-related serious and fatal car accidents nationwide since 2005, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has hosted a series of annual meetings to combat what he calls “an epidemic of distracted driving in America.”

On Sept. 21, his agency sponsored a day-long national Distracted Driving Summit in Washington D.C. with one goal in mind: “With the help of experts, policymakers, and safety advocates we’ve assembled here, we are going to do everything we can to put an end to distracted driving and save lives.”

As Massachusetts becomes the 30th state to implement a law limiting the use of mobile electronic devices while behind the wheel, it appears that many state lawmakers and voters stand behind him in this effort.
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As a Washington D.C. distracted driving day-long summit drew to a close Sept. 21, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration prepared to release a pair of glowing reports tracking ongoing seat-belt usage and minimum age drinking law efforts. But pre-empting the publication of those reports, a controversy erupted over a pair of studies that question the effectiveness of anti-texting laws, much to the ire of the U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Considering Massachusetts is the 30th state to ban texting while driving as of Oct. 1, our Boston car accident lawyers have been monitoring the uproar over two recent distracted driving studies published by the Institute for Highway Safety and its sister organization, the Highway Loss Data Institute.

The IIHS and HLDI reports suggest that the state-by-state adoption of laws banning texting while driving has had, at best, a negligible impact on the number of car accidents nationwide. In response, Secretary LaHood, whose department has been aggressively pursuing a multi-layered, multi-agency approach to curbing the use of handheld electronics while driving, angrily blogged about the findings, calling the IIHS claims “misleading” while saying the HLDI report included “numerous flaws”.

And a handful of national agencies are backing his criticism, from Allstate Insurance to the American Automobile Association to the National Safety Council. Each organization generated their own press release questioning the findings of both studies while expressing support for texting bans while driving as an effective tool for safer driving and saving lives.

With that said, two NHTSA reports released this week addressed those very topics. The dual reports revealed that more than 12,500 lives were saved in 2009 just by passengers and drivers buckling up, and 309 toddlers were spared thanks to proper child restraint use. Statistics further indicate that more than 600 lives were spared in 2009 through the enactment and enforcement of minimum drinking age laws.
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According to the National Sleep Foundation, 103 million drivers admit to falling asleep behind the wheel and 168 million say they’ve driven while drowsy. Of these, 11 million drivers admit they’ve either had a car accident or narrowly avoided one after dozing off behind the wheel. It is estimated that driver fatigue is responsible for about 71,000 injuries, 1,550 fatalities and comes with an annual price tag of about $12.5 billion annually.

With that said, what role sleepiness or driver fatigue plays in car accidents and near misses is difficult to calculate since few drivers attribute hazardous driving to fatigue, and field testing for driver exhaustion has yet to be invented.

In 2008, NSF issued a nine-question survey to all 50 states and Washington D.C. The survey ranked each state according to drowsy driving legal provisions, law enforcement training, sleep-disorder medical and driver restrictions, and public awareness and education efforts. Massachusetts was one of 33 states (Washington D.C. included) to earn a C and Mississippi was the only state to earn a B. The NSF issued 14 states a D grade, and 3 states earned an F.

NSF offers a handful of simple warning signs that indicate a driver is fatigued enough to be dangerous on the road:

~ Frequent blinking paired with heavy eyelids.

~ Realizing you are drifting, hitting rumble strips or suddenly swerving.

~ Missing exits, failing to properly respond at traffic signals and signs, momentary feelings of blackout.

~ Literally nodding off.

~ Blasting the radio or fussing with raising/lowering your windows.
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