Motor Vehicle Accidents

January 24, 2012

Oregon Distracted Driving Loophole Closed

The New Year brought with it quiet news of an important development in the battle against Oregon distracted driving. Beginning this month, Oregon drivers stopped by police for using a handset while driving will no longer be able to avoid the two-year-old Oregon distracted driving law’s penalties by claiming that they were making a work-related call.

The language of the original bill passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor allowed an exception for use of a handheld cellphone by an Oregon driver if the call in question “is necessary for the person’s job,” as the Los Angeles Times writes. This was arguably intended to be a way to protect police and other emergency services personnel whose jobs often require the use of a cellphone or hand-held radio.

In practice, however, it developed into a glaring loophole. As the Gresham Outlook noted in a recent editorial, the work exception “was that annoying escape route for ticketed drivers who used the ‘I was on a work call’ defense to get out of paying fines.”

January 16, 2012

Bike Helmet Recall Alert

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a voluntary recall of “Little Tricky” kids bike helmets. See the link below for the original CPSC news release, including pictures of the helmets themselves. Parents should immediately double-check their kids’ helmets to ensure that the children are not using the affected products.

The agency news release says that the helmets “do not comply with CPSC safety standards for impact resistance.” That means that in the event of an Oregon bicycle accident the helmets might fail to offer the required protection. “Customers could suffer impact head injuries in a fall,” the CPSC warns.

According to the CPSC the helmets have been on sale since 2006. The company’s “Triple Eight” and “Sector 9” size “S/M” (for “small/medium”) models are affected by the recall. The government is urging parents to ensure that their children stop using the helmets immediately, and to return the helmets to the manufacturer for a full refund.

December 30, 2011

Oregon Truck Accident Settlement Shows Power of Courts for Justice

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A few days ago I wrote about the importance of access to our courts and the myth that Oregon personal injury lawsuits are frivolous actions designed to clog up the legal system and undercut the business community. A case settled earlier this month in the southern part of our state illustrates my point perfectly. Through a settlement announced just before Christmas a severely injured motorist has used the legal system to achieve accountability from those responsible for his suffering and, in the process, to see justice done.

According to an account by the Associated Press, the victim of a horrific Oregon car-truck accident a year ago in Central Point will receive a $1.4 million payment to account for the injuries and trauma he suffered when “a trailer detached from the rig that was pulling it and slammed into his Chevy Silverado, flattening it and trapping him inside.”

Trapped in the wreckage for an hour-and-a-half the pick-up’s driver was badly injured. Upon finally reaching a hospital “he was treated for a broken neck, spinal fluid leakage… and (multiple) fractures… as well as nerve damage in his right arm and wrist,” the news agency reports. His suit against the truck driver and the driver’s employer alleged that the truck was operating recklessly at the time of the Oregon truck crash and that the vehicle had not been properly maintained.

December 22, 2011

Oregon Train Accident Spotlights Safety Issues at Crossings

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A fatal accident earlier this month at an Eastern Oregon railroad crossing where collisions involving trains and vehicles have occurred in the past raises serious questions about corporate responsibility and road/rail safety.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (citing an article that originally appeared in the East Oregonian), a 63-year-old county worker died earlier this month “when a train struck a road grader on Canal Road south of Hermiston” in the Eastern part of the state. The worker was using the grader to spread gravel along one side of the tracks at the time of the accident. According to OPB “the train dragged the grader about 100 feet before it stopped.” The grader operator died at the scene of the Oregon train and car accident.

What makes this tragedy especially noteworthy are facts indicating it was ultimately preventable. As the article explains, at the crossing in question “motorists cannot see trains coming from the west until they emerge around a nearby curve. The crossing is uncontrolled, meaning it does not have traffic control arms.”

December 17, 2011

Government Calls for Ban on Cellphone Use by Drivers

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A pair of recent stories from Washington go a long way toward putting Oregon’s, and the nation’s, distracted driving problem in context: last week the National Transportation Safety Board formally called for a nationwide ban on “driver use of personal electronic devices,” according to the Washington Post. This came only a few days after new data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that “for all the criticism and new legal bans, texting by drivers just keeps increasing, especially among younger motorists,” according to a report filed by the Associated Press.

Both of the organizations are independent federal agencies. The NHTSA studies and promotes highway and traffic safety while the NTSB is charged with investigating transportation accidents of all types (i.e. not just cars and trucks).

The NTSB statement was particularly strongly worded, according to the Post, and followed the lengthy investigation of a crash last year in Missouri in which “a 19-year-old pickup driver sent 11 texts in the 11 minutes before the accident.” The paper adds that the NHTSA’s data show that in 2009 (the last year for which numbers are available) distracted driving resulted in 5000 deaths and half-a-million injuries on America’s roads.

November 17, 2011

Oregon Auto Crashes Have Nearly $3 Billion Economic Impact, According to AAA

by Matthew D. Kaplan

It is simple to understand the idea: the time we spend stuck in traffic takes an economic toll (lost wages, lost sales, etc). Those expenses, in turn, are part of a broader cost to society that we all bear as a result of gridlock (lost productivity, air pollution and its associated medical costs, etc). A recent study by AAA, however, puts forward a, perhaps, more startling idea: that the societal cost of auto accidents is far higher than that of mere congestion.

As outlined in a recent article from The Oregonian, the study put the overall “cost to society” of traffic congestion at $958 million per year for the Portland-Beaverton-Vancouver metro area. An eye-popping figure, to be sure. Using the same data, however, it concluded that “the annual societal cost of traffic crashes… is $2.74 billion.” The analysis was based on 2009 data (the newspaper article, accessed through the link below, includes, in turn, a link to the original report in pdf form).

The article goes on to note that these Oregon car crash figures are roughly in line with national averages. On a national basis the spread between the true cost of vehicle crashes versus the true cost of congestion is $300 billion versus $97.7 billion, making the ratio roughly 3-to-1 at both the state and the national level.

November 11, 2011

Oregon Car Crash Kills Teen, Injures Four

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A tragic central Oregon car crash has left a teen driver dead and injured four others according to reports in The Oregonian.

The crash took place on US route 26 near Madras, Oregon. According to the newspaper, a 17-year old driver traveling toward the east “drifted off the north shoulder of the road, according to state police. The 17-year-old driver then overcorrected the car and it crossed into the westbound lane where it collided with a westbound 2006 Chrysler van.”

The teen driver was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident. Her passenger, also a 17-year-old girl, was transported to a hospital in Madras with what the paper describes as serious injuries. The driver of the van, a 38-year-old Portland man, and his two children all suffered what were described as minor injuries in the Oregon car crash and were released after treatment at the area hospital.

November 4, 2011

Oregon Distracted Driving Questions Raised by New Technologies

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A fascinating article published in Slate a few days ago raises some intriguing questions regarding Oregon distracted driving laws and some of the latest technologies making their way into our cars and onto our cellphones.

The article focuses on Siri, the computerized ‘assistant’ bundled into the latest version of the iPhone. As the author notes, “Apple advertises Siri as a way to get stuff done while you’re otherwise occupied,” and notes that the company’s videos show people using the application while, among other things, driving.

The legal question for Oregonians and others raised by the article is simple: do distracted driving laws, like Oregon’s, which ban texting while driving extend to a text-by-voice service? “Voice texting could be illegal in many places,” the piece notes, because of wording in the relevant legislation that makes “it illegal to ‘send’ texts,” or, in some cases, prohibits any form of electronic communication. “Each of these versions would make Siri-based texting verboten, because even if you dictate a message, you’re still, technically, sending some kind of electronic communication.”

October 28, 2011

Reckless Oregon Driver Closes Area Road With Four-Car Crash

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Reckless driving charges are now on the books for a Portland man after a four-car Oregon car accident allegedly caused by his reckless driving, The Oregonian reports. The crash took place in Sherwood, near Beaverton, Oregon.

The newspaper reports that the Oregon car crash on Route 99W took place Wednesday. “Witnesses told investigators an Audi A4 was speeding and weaving in and out of traffic for several miles” along the road before it “crashed into a line of cars stopped at a red light,” the paper notes. The Audi, driven by a 31-year old Portland man, was reportedly traveling at more than 50 miles per hour when it hit a car driven by a 19-year-old Newberg woman. That collision, in turn, set off a chain reaction that damaged two other cars and left the affected stretch of road closed for more than an hour.

The drivers of both the Audi and the car he struck were taken to an area hospital with what The Oregonian describes as “non-life-threatening injuries.” The driver, meanwhile, “was arrested on charges of reckless driving” by Washington County law enforcement officials.

October 26, 2011

Portland Bicycle Accidents and Following the Traffic Laws

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An excellent piece by The Oregonian’s traffic and commuting columnist raised an issue that all of us who care about the Portland cycling community need to think about: how important is it that cyclists observe the traffic laws?

The Oregon bicycling accident article focuses specifically on the question of red lights. We all know, of course, that bicycles are vehicles just like a car or truck. Cyclists have the same right to use the road (with a few exceptions, such as interstate highways) as any car or truck, but with that right comes an equal set of responsibilities. We have all seen bikers who blow through red lights or stop signs or weave through traffic.

Leaving aside the obvious observation that such behavior is incredibly dangerous it is also illegal. As the newspaper notes, “the potential risks are known: a hefty ticket, hitting a pedestrian, possibly even getting killed.” What the column then goes on to do is address head-on, and effectively demolish, the excuse offered by many cycling scofflaws: the idea that they are saving time by ignoring the rules of the road. Just as we have all seen drivers weave dangerously through traffic only to find them sitting beside us at a red light a mile up the road, so the author carefully charts the progress of a Portland cyclist he observed riding dangerously, versus a law-abiding group whom the scofflaw passed when running a red light. The lone rider did not, in fact, get anywhere noticeably faster than the safe, law-abiding cyclists.