Pennsylvania Injury Law Report : Pennsylvania Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Stuart Carpey Law Firm : Auto Accidents & Product Liability : Pennsylvania Injury Law Report

Anybody who reads my blog regularly knows how I feel about texting while driving. A while ago, I expressed my opinion based on personal experience in my blog post “The Importance Of Being Able to Text While Driving”.  There are now driving safety changes in the works, specifically concerning the usage of cell phones on the road.

Recently, the Pennsylvania House has passed a bill that aims to ban the use of cell phones and all hand held devices for drivers. If passed, the bill would impose a fine of $50 upon individuals who don’t use hands-free devices. The exception to this would be navigational systems (such as GPS) or calling 911 in the case of emergency. The goal is obviously to limit the talking and texting of drivers on the roads. Only 7 other states have such tough driving restrictions—California, New York, Washington, D.C., Connecticut, Oregon, Utah, and New Jersey.

Washington DC held a “Distracted Driving Summit” in September of 2009, where National Highway Traffic Safety Administrators reported 6,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries due to car crashes involving distracted drivers in the year 2008 alone. As you may expect, the majority of the distracted cell phone drivers are less then 20 years of age. The Pennsylvania bill’s lead sponsor and chairman of the Transportation Committee, Representative Joe Markosek said, regarding his reasons for sponsoring the bill, “We are all one text from eternity.”

An interesting take on this issue is from Michael Smerconish, a lawyer, Philadelphia radio show host on 1210 AM WPHT, and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His point is that business, i.e. the tech business, should be stepping up instead of government to make hand held devices, in his words, “well functioning, comfortable {and} aesthetic”, and safer when used while driving. Michael Smerconish’s article in the January 31, 2010 Philadelphia Inquirer entitled “Head Strong: Bring Tech Up to Speed” discusses improving hands-free technology as drivers are still going to be using hand helds dangerously while driving, no matter what the consequences. The government cannot stop our own stupidity. So the tech businesses should focus on manufacturing systems in cars, truck, etc, that protect us against ourselves, but still allow for the use of hand held phone devices. Better that these companies tackle America's obsession with driving while using cell phones, iPods, and other devices then have government step in at the local, state, or national level.

Maybe. But as a Philadelphia Accident Attorney, I see the tragic results of distracted driving on a daily basis and I hope the Pennsylvania Senate decides to follow the lead of the House (who voted 189-6) and approve the bill. More information on the Senate’s decision will follow.

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Anybody who is crazy enough to lie on their car insurance application about where they live in order to get lower rates has to read this article written by Diane Marshall of the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. In Ms. Marshall's words,

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett's continuing investigation into insurance fraud has resulted in another round of arrests - 24 people accused of falsely claiming to be state residents in order to obtain lower rates on their automobiles.

Using a phony address for lower rates is known as "rate evasion." Urban areas like Philadelphia have higher rates than suburban areas, because of more accidents. So, the insurance companies can charge higher rates.  In the Inquirer article, most of those arrested were from the New York City area claiming suburban Philadelphia addresses. 

A better idea for getting lower rates on your auto policy? Shop around. Start by going to the Pennsylvania Insurance Department website and taking a look at all the insurance carriers who write auto insurance in Pennsylvania. Then give them a call to see what their rates are for the geographic area where you live.

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ARE YOU CRAZY!?

That's what I yelled to a young woman driving in the left lane heading west on the Schuylkill Expressway yesterday at around 3:00. I was in the right lane. She had earphones on. I guess she was listening to her ipod.

Her hands were not on the steering wheel.

That's because she was texting while she was driving.

She was driving an '04 or '05 Honda CRV. I have an '04 Honda CRV. That's what I was driving. Love the car. It's a mini SUV without any bells or whistles and gets good gas mileage. I like that. But to my knowledge it is not equipped with a special steering device such that you can steer the car with your knees. Maybe she was experimenting with that theory. At 60 miles per hour.

I rolled my window down when I yelled at her. Her's remained up. I think I said something more than just- ARE YOU CRAZY!? I won't repeat that here. She got the point. But not right away. Because as I let her pass me I saw she was still texting. It appeared she had exceptional thumb skills. So I pulled up along the side of her again. At 63 miles per hour. I stared at her for a second. We made eye contact. She stopped texting. She wouldn't look my way again. I exited at Conshohocken and she went on towards King of Prussia. Maybe she resumed her highway texting further on down the road.

This was not the first time I've seen this. A few months ago I was in the right lane, again on the Schuylkill Expressway, and an SUV is passing me on the left. The guy driving was texting. His wrists were on the steering wheel, so his cellphone was above the steering wheel, and I could see he was focusing on the phone, and then glancing at the road. He was passing me in the left lane. I had to be going 60. He had to be going 65. He had a little boy in the front seat. Another guy was in the back seat.

How stupid are these people!

As a driver witnessing this what are you supposed to do? I don't know. Call 911 on your cell phone so the State Police can be notified? I guess, but by the time the police get on the highway the crazy texting driver will be long gone. Steer clear? Sure.

Melissa Heckscher of the Paramus Post wrote the following story in November 2006. Pretty much sums it up.

But because text messaging is a newer phenomenon, having become popular in the past two to three years, drivers' safety studies have focused on using the phone to talk, not to send messages. So which is worse?Without concrete data to go on, researchers such as Steven Yantis, a cognitive psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, ventured a guess.

"Common sense would tell me that (texting) would be worse because you have to look away from the road," he said.

Yantis is an expert in multitasking. His research has centered on what happens in the brain when people try to pay attention to multiple sources of information. Yantis hasn't directly researched the effects of multitasking while driving, but the bottom line is this: When attention shifts toward one area, it drifts away from another.

"Most people think they're better at multitasking than they really are, and that's because most of the time, errors have no consequences," he said. "When you're driving, even half a second of distraction could, at the right circumstances, have disastrous consequences."

Just ask Patrick Sims. In 2005, the then 17-year-old Colorado resident struck and killed a bicyclist while tending to a text message. His sentence included nine days in jail and 300 hours of community service to be spent telling others his story."That day, that text message seemed important to me," Sims told The Denver Post. "Now I couldn't even tell you what it said."

That same year, a 26-year-old Tennessee man died after he reportedly lost control of his truck while trying to send a text message.

"When you're texting, you're having to do a manual task and a visual task," Yantis said. "That has to be worse than just talking on a cell phone."

Teenagers are at particular risk. A survey by the Liberty Mutual insurance company found that teens rated text messaging as the greatest driving distraction, followed by their emotional state and having several friends in the car at the same time.

In the words of California Highway Patrol Officer Joe Zizi, quoted in Ms. Heckscher's article: 

"People will say, 'I'm sorry, I was on my cell phone, I didn't realize how fast I was going. God forbid you crash and kill someone. Are you going to tell that to the family of the deceased?"

Is there a place for cellphones in the car? Yes, the center console or glove compartment. I know that sounds unrealistic. You get in your car. The cellphone is in your pocket or in your pocketbook. You want it out and available for all sorts of reasons. Maybe your kids are calling wanting to know what's for dinner, or they need help with their homework. Maybe you're waiting to close an important business deal.  But the statistics on cellphone use while driving leading to bad accidents are just too disturbing. Add texting? Forget about it.

Cellphones are undoubtedly a valuable tool to have in your car in the event of a mechanical breakdown, illness, or driving emergency. We want to be able to reach it quickly if we need to. But how important is that incoming call?

That young woman on the Schuylkill driving next to me thought she was safe; she thought  that she had extra skills, like some character out of the movie The Matrix. No way. She was just kidding herself.

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I have two teenagers who are driving. My 16 year old daughter has her permit.  My son is 19 and has been driving for a few years.

My method of initiating them to being behind the wheel was to take them to an empty parking lot  on a Sunday morning and have them drive in reverse, only in reverse, for the first few days. They hated that. But when they got to go forward they realized there was method to my madness. If you have never been in the passenger seat with a teen who just got their driving permit I can tell you it is a terrifying experience. My daughter's driving instructor told me it's much easier for him, not just because he has nerves of steel, but because he has a brake in the passenger seat. He has installed a few of those into some of the parents' cars of the kids that he's teaching. He offered to put one in my Honda CRV, but I declined.

Teens know about the dangers of drinking and driving. They may not appreciate the dangers because they are teens, but they are  told.

However,an equal if not greater danger to teens as drivers and as passengers in a car driven by another teen is cell phones. I insist that my daughter turn her phone off and put it in the trunk when she drives. I don't make or receive calls when I'm driving or when I'm a passenger. I just turn the phone off. It's simply too tempting to answer it. I hope my kids model my behavior.

In early April a twenty-two-year-old Pennsylvania driver pleaded no contest to homicide by vehicle and careless driving resulting in an unintentional death.  He was sentenced  to 10 to 23 months in York County Prison. I sent that story to my kids. I can only hope it sunk in.

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I recently read a few articles about lawyers in Wisconsin and Texas targeting car accident victims by scouring local police reports. They then contact the accident victims by mail. In the articles, the lawyers give their reason for doing this as trying to put accident victims on equal footing with insurance companies, who also approach accident victims immediately after an accident. Fair enough. Sort of like public service. But I guarantee the lawyers using this method to attract clients are not offering free legal services. Are the Wisconsin and Texas lawyers justified in their attempts to seek new clients in this way? Is it just another method of marketing their practice, or does it go too far?

The same thing happens in Philadelphia, although it has not been written about. Local lawyers hire “investigators” to sit in a room in City Hall where all the police reports are kept. The “investigators” scour the police reports for serious accidents where the accident victims are not at fault, for instance rear- end collisions, and once that information is obtained by the lawyers, they write to the car accident victims offering representation. A few clients of mine have told me, after they have hired me, that they have received a “strange’ letter from another lawyer, like what I’ve just described. I then explain this method that some lawyers use to try to find clients.

Is this illegal? No. Is it unethical in terms of the standards lawyers must adhere to? Not technically. Lawyers have the right under the 1st Amendment to contact prospective clients in writing, not in person or by telephone, and offer their services. Does it undermine the legal profession and personal injury lawyers in particular? It certainly does.

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The quality of bumper design systems in cars these days has a direct effect of the severity of the occupants in rear and front end accidents. A high quality bumper system is designed to absorb the force of the impact by “compressing.” A low quality bumper system fails this test and the forces of the impact are passed through the vehicle to the occupants. Many cars on the road today have the lesser quality bumper.

Insurance companies who evaluate property damage and personal injury claims as a result of rear end collisions and front end collision are adept at minimizing the extent of the presumed damage to occupants if minimal damage is visible on the bumpers following an accident. They have stables of “biomechanical engineers” ready to testify in court. The insurance company experts equate minimal visible damage to a bumper to little or no physical injury to the occupants of the car. This is just a trick, however. It takes common sense, a basic knowledge of physics, and opposing expert testimony to defeat the insurance company experts in this regard.

Rear end car accidents are the most common type of car accidents in Pennsylvania. With the advent of cell phone use in cars and other devices that auto manufacturers continue to place in new models(for example, GPS devices) these type of car accidents will continue to rise.

Federal vehicle safety standards regarding bumpers go back to 1978. The standards were not intended to reduce potential injuries to occupants. Rather, the standards were designed to protect the vehicles. Lower speed impacts frequently result in minimal deformation of plastic/polyurethane bumper parts. However, this results in a greater proportion of force directed to the occupants of the vehicles.

Insurance company rely on experts who supply reports which may contain the following type of language: “since the impact speed of the striking vehicle was extremely low almost no energy was transferred to the occupants of the vehicle which was struck.”

Such a position of an expert for an insurance company would be in violation of Isaac Newton’s second principle which basically states that if you place force on an object it will accelerate. And, an object accelerates in the direction that you push it. The acceleration is directly proportional to the force. In other words, if you push twice as hard, it accelerates twice as much. The greater the mass, the more the object that is struck will move. For instance, twice the mass of an object behind pushed into an object in front equals twice as much acceleration. So if a small car is struck in the rear by a larger car, being of more mass the larger car will force the smaller car to accelerate more then if the smaller car had been struck by a lighter car.

Newton’s laws are common sense. They are taught in high school physics classes. Impact causes motion. There can be no disagreement about the fact that when an object is struck it will move.

Bottom line- low speed impact or plastic bumpers do not mean the occupants of a car sustain no injury where bumper meets bumper. The transfer of energy must go somewhere, and it is carried through the car into the occupant’s body.

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Personal injury lawyers in Pennsylvania know too well that their clients get shortchanged when purchasing car insurance coverage, whether directly from an insurance company (ie: Progressive or GEICO), or from an agent. The difference between full tort and limited tort is rarely if ever explained, nor is uninsured (UM) or underinsured (UIM) motorist coverage.

Full tort coverage means that you and your family members have unlimited access to the court system to seek compensation for personal injuries from a car wreck.

Limited tort means that for a lower premium, usually about $100-$200 less per year, you and your family members have a very limited access to the court system if you are claiming compensation for personal injuries following a car wreck.

In real terms, if a person who has purchased limited tort coverage does not have debilitating and disabling injuries, e.g; broken bones requiring surgical repair, herniated disks in the spine requiring surgical repair, then they have no claim. There are very few exceptions to limited tort coverage. Full tort coverage is not limiting at all. Full tort coverage is the better coverage, hands down, and should be the only choice when purchasing auto insurance in Pennsylvania. Uninsured motorist coverage protects you and your family in the event you or your family members are injured in a car wreck by an "uninsured motorist.” Underinsured motorist protects you and your family in the event you are injured in a car accident by a driver who did not have enough insurance to pay for your injuries. Full tort, UM and UIM are absolutely necessary.

I felt it was so important that my clients understood the value of these coverages that I wrote a book on the subject called Purchasing Auto Insurance in Pennsylvania. You can purchase it at Barnes and Noble, or Amazon, or you can get it from my office for free.

Maybe you’ve seen the Progressive television commercial depicting a Progressive insured going into a Progressive store (they do not exist because Progressive sells its coverage online) gleefully surprised that his insurance company is quickly paying for the damage to his car after an accident and also providing the insured a rental car.

“It’s all part of the price” the Progressive employee says. No kidding! That’s what you pay for when you buy insurance coverage. I don’t mean to single out Progressive. State Farm is not there, despite their ad that says “State Farm is there.” We all recognize the jingle. That’s just effective advertising. State Farm will make it extremely difficult on you if you have an auto claim. And if you’re insured by Allstate you are not necessarily in good hands.

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