Effective Accident Claim
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Effective Accident Claim
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The biggest reason for car accidents: Flawed human choices

On Behalf of | Apr 18, 2019 | Firm News |

It’s easy to point fingers after a car accident, looking for reasons the wreck occurred. What were the weather conditions like at the time? How was the road designed? How old was the driver who caused the crash? Do some cars crash more than others?

It’s not that these aren’t important questions to ask. They are, and they can shed a lot of light on why car accidents are still one of the major sources of serious injuries and death in the United States. But they hide the fact that the root problem is far simpler than that. The issue is just that human drivers make mistakes.

A vast majority

In a study cited by the Stanford Law School, researchers found that human error leads to about 90 percent of car accidents. That’s an incredibly vast majority. People make mistakes, they crash their cars and they take lives. That’s all you need to know in most accidents in Connecticut.

Of course, human error is a large category. It could include things like:

  • Texting and driving
  • Running a stop sign
  • Driving under the influence
  • Merging without checking a blind spot
  • Failing to leave a safe following distance
  • Breaking the speed limit
  • Taking a turn too fast
  • Driving too fast for conditions
  • Looking away from the road

These issues often connect to other commonly cited reasons for crashes. For instance, maybe the weather was bad. It was too foggy to see well when the crash happened. That plays a role, but you could still have a driver who goes too fast for those conditions and rear-ends a car he or she never sees in the fog. A human error still played a part in that crash.

Flawed choices

Worse yet, most of these mistakes are deliberate choices made by drivers. They’re not just oversights. They choose to do things, thinking they’ll be safe, when they really make flawed decisions and put everyone in danger.

“In the grand scheme of things in saving lives, impaired drivers and flawed human choices are still the big problems we need to solve as a nation,” said an administrator with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Of course, you could argue that even that is redundant. Clearly, impaired driving is yet another flawed human choice. People think they can drive safely after drinking alcohol and using drugs, but the statistics show that they can’t. Getting behind the wheel anyway is a choice that can set off a deadly chain of events.

Your options

Have you gotten injured in an accident because of the poor decisions someone else made? If so, you have to know all of the legal rights you have to financial compensation.

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