How Texting While Driving May Impact Workers Compensation

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Stuart A. Carpey

From time to time I have guest articles on my blog from other lawyers around the country. The following article refers to North Carolina law, not Pennsylvania. Despite the different jurisdictions, this article still provides important information pertaining to texting and driving.

 

Worker’s Comp Insurers and Employers are beginning to take notice of a disturbing trend in society today… more and more work-related fatalities that are caused by, you guessed it, texting while driving.  This recent article by Ira Leesfield cites a statistic from the National Safety Council that an estimated 200,000 traffic accidents per year are caused by drivers who have been texting.  Also cited in the article was a study by Car & Driver Magazine which “found that texting and driving was more hazardous than drinking and driving, with texting drivers three to four times slower in their response rates than drunk drivers.”

How does this impact Worker’s Compensation Insurance?  Many employers provide their employees with mobile devices, and require continued contact with them through email or texting – even while those employees are on the roads.  The problem with this, and the reason that employers and the insurance companies are taking notice, is that when an employee is involved in a traffic accident while texting, not only could the insurance company/employer be on the hook for paying the workers compensation claim, but they could also be responsible for paying the claim to the victim of the accident under a theory of respondeat superior or direct negligence.  And because more and more accidents are caused by texting while driving, that means that the insurance companies are going to have to pay out more and more money for these workers compensation and other claims.

A prudent employer would be smart to adopt written policies banning texting while driving for all employees, and make sure that these policies are frequently and adequately communicate  to employees.  The problem arises when an employee is sent out for an isolated errand – but they don’t normally drive for that employer. If the errand was for company business, than the employer could be liable under the Worker’s Comp statute.  (I’ve frequently thought about what might happen if my legal assistant was injured in an accident while driving to the courthouse for a last minute filing or to pick up office supplies.)

Since North Carolina has a “no-fault” workers comp system, an accident caused by an employee who was texting while driving would still generally be compensable – even though it may have been the employee’s fault.  Ultimately, the courts and/or legislature will decide whether employers are responsible to pay out workers compensation claims for an employee that was injured in a traffic accident, even though they may have been texting at the time of the accident.

In the meantime, I would advise anyone who drives for a living to shut the phone off and pay attention to the road.  If your employer requires you to text and drive at the same time, then you may want to consider whether this is someone you want to work for.  Whether the employer likes it or not, your safety is more important than productivity.

James W. Hart is a North Carolina Workers Comp Lawyer, who restricts his practice to Workers Compensation and Collaborative Divorce. The Hart Law Firm P.A. is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.  If you have been injured at work in North Carolina, call 919.460.5422 for a free workers comp consultation.

 

 

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The Importance Of Being Able To Text While Driving

Posted on October 24, 2009 by Stuart A. Carpey

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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