Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

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The tragic death last year of two teenage girls in a semi-truck accident has spurred an online petition drive organized by their family, and an advocacy movement for tighter regulation of large trucks.

“Their lives were abruptly ended and we want to see that same thing does not happen to others,” the girls’ mother said, according to Washington DC TV station WJLA, as she delivered a petition with over 11,000 signatures on it to the Department of Transportation earlier this month. The North Carolina family was driving down an interstate highway a year ago when “their family vehicle was struck, propelling it under a tractor trailer and killing the two girls,” the TV station reports.

In response, the grieving parents organized an online petition drive seeking tighter regulation of the trucking industry (you can see, and sign, the petition here). Specifically, the couple is calling for “improved under-ride guards to prevent vehicles from sliding under trucks, and also wants to require electric monitoring devices to decrease the number of truckers driving while fatigued. They also want to increase the minimum liability insurance required for drivers,” according to WJLA. The girls’ father told reporters that installing the under-guards would cost only $20 per truck.

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It is no secret that Portland has a reputation as one of America’s most bike-friendly cities, but the census bureau now has the data to prove it. According to a recent article in The Oregonian, since 2000 biking to work “has shown the largest percentage increase among all commuting modes” nationally. Portland leads the way with a significantly higher percentage of bicycle commuters than the national average.

Nationally about 786,000 people get to work using bicycles, according to the paper, up from 488,000 in 2000 (the data is for 2012, the latest year available). That’s only about one percent of commuters nationwide, but “within the Portland city limits the number has nearly tripled since the 2000 census… In fact, Portland leads all large cities with a bicycle commuting rate of 6.1 percent.”

According to the newspaper, local activists welcomed the news, but also warned about “complacency.” The head of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance called for “bolder steps” by the city to prevent Portland bicycle accidents so that commuters will feel safer. The article specifically cites initiatives to create “buffered bike lanes” – a move which often requires the removal of parking spots or one auto lane along busy streets that double as important bike commuter routes. It also cites “a long-delayed $4 million bike sharing system, which still lacks a sponsor.” Once implemented, the bike share program is also expected to increase bike commuter numbers. The Oregonian concludes by noting that “Portland’s strategic bike plan calls for 25 percent of all trips in the city to be made on a bike by 2030.”

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A story posted this week by Atlanta television station WSB has a surprising – and good – connection to Portland. The station announced that it is sending one of its anchors to Portland to examine Tri-Met’s streetcar system “to learn how (Portland) handles streetcar safety.”

According to the report, tests of a new streetcar system in Atlanta may begin as early as this month but Atlanta “streetcar leaders told (WSB) a public awareness campaign is needed to avoid hundreds of accidents or even deaths.” The announcement followed word of a streetcar-related death in Philadelphia last week, according to WSB. Atlanta is a city that has long had a reputation for skepticism regarding public transportation. Though many Portlanders sometimes have an up-and-down relationship with Tri-Met, it is good to be reminded of the fact that Portland has long been one of the country’s leaders in green energy and innovative public transportation.

The article notes that Portland’s streetcar system, at 14.7 miles, is far more extensive than what Atlanta soon plans to launch The Georgia system will initially involve only 2.7 miles of track, according to WSB.

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The Oregonian reports that a section of US-20 in Jefferson County was closed for several hours Monday in the wake of an Oregon car crash that left one person dead and several others injured. As of mid-morning one lane of the road had been reopened but police were warning motorists to expect long delays.

The fatal accident took place near Santiam Summit as the road passes through the Willamette National Forest between Corvallis and Bend. Relatively few details are available about the accident, which took place Monday morning around 9:30 am, though the newspaper does report that Life Flight helicopters were required to evacuate some of the injured. The exact type of vehicles involved in this Oregon crash have not been announced, but the location and the poor weather conditions that appear to have contributed to the accident are a reminder of the special care that trucks need to take in areas like the Willamette National Forest.

I have written frequently about the dangers that trucks face on in mountain areas. When even interstate highway travel is dangerous because of the weather and terrain it is especially important to proceed cautiously on narrow mountain roads. My past blogs on Oregon truck accidents have focused mainly on the northeast corner of our state – particularly the area around Cabbage Hill on Interstate 84. In the case of this accident, however, the newspaper’s note that “a spokesman for the ODOT said the highway has been hit with a lot of snow in the past few days” is an important reminder that the conditions on Cabbage Hill, while often extreme, are hardly unique in the more remote parts of Oregon.

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An article in Wednesday’s Oregonian raised an interesting question: how many Portlanders are aware that traffic enforcement does not take place overnight? According to the newspaper the city’s last budget cut police funding and, as a result, “the (traffic enforcement) bureau lost five full-time officer positions, and so eliminated the 9 pm to 7 am traffic shift Wednesday through Saturday.”

What this means in practice is that there are fewer officers available to enforce Oregon drunk driving laws. The newspaper quotes Portland police chief Mike Reese saying: “Traffic officers are committed to saving lives. They hold people accountable when they break the law… It’s not easy work. DUII investigations require skill to make arrests prosecutable.” The chief is asking the City Council for $300,000 in additional funds to restore four of the five overnight officer positions that have been lost.

While there are no available statistics looking at how fatal Oregon car crashes are distributed throughout the day, the newspaper notes that Washington State does keep such records. North of the Columbia River “60 percent of all fatal crashes occur between 7 pm and 5 am,” according to a Portland police spokesman cited by the newspaper. There is no reason to suppose that the pattern is not at least broadly similar here in Oregon.

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On Friday General Motors announced yet another expansion of the widening recall of its small cars. According to the New York Times, the company “is expanding its ignition-switch recall to include an additional 971,000 small cars worldwide, including 824,000 in the United States, that may have been previously repaired with defective switches.”

As I noted in a post earlier this month, well before today’s announcement GM had already recalled more than a million cars built since the 2003 model year because of a defect that may lead the ignition switch to cut off. That, in turn, could mean that air bags fail to deploy in the event of a crash. As the latest developments indicate it is now clear that many cars had the faulty switches added to them when they went in for repairs.

More disturbing, however, are the continuing revelations about the way in which GM has handled this scandal. In a move that may yet lead to wrongful death lawsuits, company documents have shown that GM misled grieving families for years, telling those who had lost loved-one in crashes linked to the flaw “that it did not have enough evidence of any defect in their cars, interviews letters and legal documents show.” This happened even as the company was internally debating the best way to fix the problem, the newspaper reports.

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A reckless and dangerous driver caused problems on I-5 this afternoon but is now in jail, according to The Oregonian. The newspaper’s website reports that a 26-year-old Portland man is being held in the Marion County jail on charges of reckless driving and “18 counts of recklessly endangering another person.”

According to the newspaper, witnesses said the driver “was speeding, passing cars on the shoulder and weaving across all three lanes of traffic in a 1999 gold Ford Taurus… Oregon state police caught up with him right before 1 pm as he exited I-5 toward Salem Parkway Avenue.”

It goes without saying that incidents like these can cause serious, sometimes fatal, Oregon car accidents. In some instances these can lead to serous traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries or even deaths.

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A disturbing article published this week in the New York Times outlines a series of failures by both corporate America and the federal government. Its focus is General Motors’ recent recall notices involving well over a million vehicles manufactured since the 2003 model year (click here for GM’s latest news release with full details of models and years effected). The vehicles have a defect in the air bag system that in some instances means the air bags will not deploy during a crash because the ignition switch has been cut off.

According to the Times, GM now acknowledges that at least 13 deaths can be tied to the defect. What is disturbing is the paper’s report that the automaker’s engineers were aware of the issue in 2004 – more than a year before the first of those 13 documented deaths. Equally bad is the record of federal regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the paper, “after two of the (Chevy) Cobalt crashes, the regulators took a close look at the cause, each time raising the possibility of a defect. They also met with GM about the issue. But despite the red flags, they never opened a broader investigation into whether the car was defective.”

As the paper goes on to report, a number of lawsuits related to the documented deaths have already made their way through the court system. Class action law was created precisely to enable ordinary Americans to defend their rights in cases of this sort of willful and negligent misconduct, especially when it results in wrongful deaths. The recall notices are still new and are still sinking in for many people (the initial recall was issued on February 19 and was later extended to hundreds of thousands of other vehicles) so it is also important to note that the full impact of the situation is not yet clear. It is clear that the court system will probably hear much more about these vehicles in the months and years to come.

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New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, unveiled a plan yesterday designed to eliminate pedestrian traffic deaths in America’s largest city. His proposals are worth looking at here in Oregon because they may contain lessons we can learn from here in Portland.

According to the New York Times, the focus of the initiative is stepped-up enforcement of existing laws combined with a proposal to lower the city’s speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour. “Our lives are literally in each other’s hands. Our children’s lives are in each other’s hands,” the mayor told a news conference Tuesday.

The strategy is called “Vision Zero” and is “adopted from a Swedish traffic safety approach that views all traffic deaths as inherently preventable,” according to the Times. De Blasio advocated these measures during his campaign last year, but they took on special urgency when New York “experienced a spate of traffic deaths, including three pedestrian deaths last month in fewer than 10 days” in the first weeks after the new mayor took office.

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Two former Portland-area prosecutors made headlines in The Oregonian this week with their advocacy of marijuana legalization. According to the newspaper Norm Frink and Mark McDonnell both believe that legalization is inevitable and, as a result, are trying to focus public attention on getting the details right.

“This is just a political fact in Oregon, even if some people don’t want to admit it,” the newspaper quoted Frink saying. “As a result,” the paper went on to note, “Frink and McDonnell, who headed the district attorney’s drug unit before retiring, on Tuesday announced that they wanted legislators to refer a marijuana legalization measure to voters in November.” The key to their idea is combining a voter referendum with legislative action. Oregonians would be asked to approve marijuana for personal use, but would charge the legislature with working out the details before the new law went into effect. “The two want to put off allowing legal possession of marijuana until after the legislature figures out how to set up a regulatory system,” The Oregonian reports.

The experience of Washington and Colorado would appear to validate this idea. When the two states became the first to make the possession and use of marijuana legal for personal recreational use the result was an immediate legal conundrum. At the most basic level, legalization puts state law in conflict with the federal government, but there are a number of equally serious – and in some ways more immediate – issues. Take drunk driving, for example. It ought to be relatively easy to agree that impaired driving brought on by pot use is just as dangerous as driving while drunk. Any state legalizing marijuana, however, will need to figure out ways to measure and assess the drug as part of a drunk driving arrest: what level of marijuana impairment crosses a safety line? What is the best and most efficiently to measure it? How should the use of marijuana and alcohol together be treated (presumably the two in combination could cross an impairment threshold at a point when neither, by itself, does so)?

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