Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

I have blogged about the new driver-less automated cars before, and how they will dramatically reduce car crashes and fatalities. This future is not far off. The first true self-driving vehicles are expected before the end of the decade. A fleet surpassing 50% of all vehicles on the road could be here within 20 years.

We will be much better off with them for sure! But what I never really considered – until I read a recent article – was the profound effect driver-less cars will have on our economy. That’s what I’ll consider in this blog post.

To recap about driver-less cars, human driven cars will soon be going the way of the horse and buggy. An automated self-driving fleet of vehicles will almost certainly replace the current human-driven one within the next 25 years. The new fleet will have many advantages over the present one, but one of the most notable is that they will hardly ever crash. A study by the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) predicts that a self-driving fleet could eliminate 93 percent of crashes attributed to human error. This means, among other things, that we will be able to drink ourselves senseless without worrying about criminal penalties of “driving” drunk.

I was glad to read in the news today that the condition of a 15-year-old girl who was struck on Monday by one car and then run over by another, in Auburn, New York, has improved. The girl’s condition has been upgraded from “life-threatening” to “fair” at Upstate University Hospital, according to police.

It doesn’t surprise me that this accident happened on Grant Ave, one of the busiest — and most accident prone – roads in all of Cayuga County. We have represented many car accident victims who were hit on that busy arterial.  The posted speed limit is rarely obeyed there — motorists are in a hurry, rushing between Auburn and Syracuse and all the places in between.

The girl was trying to cross Grant Ave in a rain storm shortly after 9 p.m., near the Metro Mattress store. She was apparently trying to reach the MacDonald’s on the other side of Grant Ave. A driver trying to make a left turn from Grant onto McIntosh Drive struck her. Then, to make matters much worse, a second car ran over her as she lay in the road.

Who says nothing in life is “free”? Here’s some free legal advice from your Central New York injury lawyer:

Do not — I repeat, do NOT – drop the F-bomb on a cop while he is arresting you for homicidal drunk driving after you have just killed a teenager.

That’s exactly what a Syracuse homicidal drunk driver did at Destiny USA. The crash happened at Hiawatha Boulevard and Solar Streets, at the entrance to Destiny USA. He had just gone through a red light and struck the side of a car carrying two teenagers. The teenage driver was killed and the passenger wounded. When the cops arrived on the scene, he explained the accident – in a drunken stupor – like this: “they pulled out in front of me, (f-bomb) them”. He also told the officer to “go (f-bomb) yourself” when asked to submit to a blood test for alcohol content. He is facing up to 25 years of prison if convicted, but I say they should tag on an extra ten for hubris. The guy has had three drunken driving charges in the past five years.

As a recipient of more than a few speeding tickets within the last few decades, I took an interest in this NY Times article about a $58,000.00 speeding ticket in Finland.

The offender was clocked at 64 miles per hour in a 50 mile per hour zone. Doing the math, that works out to $4,143.00 for every mile per hour above the limit.

Why so high? What determined the high price was not so much the offense as the offender. The speedster was a multimillionaire in one of the few countries in the world where fines for traffic infractions are calculated based in large part on your income. The mindset in this Scandinavian country is that the sting of the fine should be felt equally by rich and poor. The sting of a $100 fine is felt by the street sweeper but not by the banking tycoon. Thus, in Finland Fine-land the government calculates your fine based on half your daily net income multiplied by the number of days of income you should lose according to the gravity of the offense. This particular $58,000 ticket represented a half-a-day’s income of the wealthy offender.

This is not easy to stomach. Not for you. Not for your teenager. But watch it. And then make sure your teenager watches it. The driver of the car in the photo was texting and did not see the tractor trailor stop to turn left. The video below is very graphic. Don’t text and drive!

video of texting while driving accident

Keep safe!