There are many scenarios in which someone can get involved in a car accident. There are millions of car accidents around the world each year, and there are 3 million people in the world each year that suffer from injuries in car accidents. And there are hundreds of thousands who die.
There are three major causes of car accident deaths in the United States. They involve a driver who was grossly negligent, broke laws, and caused damages while either recklessly mad or distracted from the road. The three major causes of car accident deaths in the United States are drunk driving, distracted driving, and aggressive driving.
Drunk driving is defined by law as someone who drives with a blood alcohol content of over the legal limit. For many jurisdictions, the legal blood alcohol content is .8, meaning that a person needs to have less alcohol than a standard beer in their system to be able to drive. This sometimes is enough to stop people from driving. But many times it is not.
Drinking can cause a certain amount of euphoria in the person who drinks. They became more confident, think they can take on more tasks than they can really do. Some become more talkative. Generally, people lose their inhibitions and make decisions that they may regret later.
Because of this, people who drink may feel it is okay to drive, because of that feeling of confidence. And the effects can be damaging if that person causes an accident, hits a person walking on the street, or causes property damage by hitting a building or other inanimate object.
There are statistics about drinking and driving. They are in the following section.
- Drunk driving costs the U.S. $199 billion a year. (MADD)
- Each day, people drive drunk almost 300,000 times, but fewer than 4,000 are arrested. (MADD)
- An average drunk driver has driven drunk 80 times before the first arrest.
- Every two minutes, a person is injured in a drunk driving crash.
- Every year, 30,000 deaths in car accidents are caused by drunk driving.
Distracted driving is the second leading cause of car accident deaths in the United States. The picture in people’s heads of the distracted driver is the driver who is playing on their cell phone, eyes off the road, hands off the wheel. There are actual definitions of distracted driving as well. And that image fits all of them.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), distracted driving is defined as three different categories. There is visually distracted driving, which amount to someone taking their eyes off the road. There is manually distracted driving, which is when someone takes their hands off the wheel.
And then there is generally distracted driving, which occurs when someone is generally distracted and struggles to focus on the road. Each category of distracted driving means someone isn’t paying attention to the road. And it can have serious consequences.
- At any given daylight moment across America, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cell phones or manipulating electronic devices while driving.
- Of all car crash fatalities, 32% are from drunk driving, 31% are from speeding, 16% are from distraction, and 11% are from weather.
The third leading cause of car crash fatalities (and that statistic above may be off slightly) is aggressive driving. Aggressive driving is often found in the form of speeding. A person may be speeding rapidly, often going in and out of lanes, weaving through traffic, and that can lead to an accident.
There are also cases of road rage, where a person will deliberately attempt to harm someone on the road out of rage of a perceived slight. This happens in many places in America.
In all these cases, it is possible for someone to hire a car accident attorney. A car accident attorney is there for personal injury cases, which happen when someone is in a car accident in which another driver was negligent. A car accident attorney can help someone get money for the damages caused to the car.
A car accident attorney can also get a client money for medical bills.
There are many terms that go along with the issues of driving, car accident deaths, and the car accident attorney. They include DUI lawyer, DUI lawyers, drug lawyer, law firm, law firms, law help, lawyer, and more.