California Personal Injury Lawyers Blog
There have been 38,680 reported deaths on U.S. roads during 2020, according to the National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization. Many of these traffic accidents result in wrongful death claims. This is the most car accident, truck accident, motorcycle accident and other motor vehicle deaths since 2007. What is most startling about this motor vehicle wrongful death statistic is that we know that the quarantine shut-downs of the coronavirus 19 pandemic drastically reduced driving and traffic, so why would traffic accidents resulting in deaths increase?
The National Safety Council stated that this wrongful death statistic “was completely unprecedented.” It added, “We didn’t know what was happening.”
Different possibilities for this increase in car and other motor vehicle death cases include that drivers are stressed out due to all the health, financial and other problems caused by this pandemic. The National Safety Council opined that American drivers were releasing their anxieties and other problems, such as depression and feelings of isolation and loneliness, on the more wide-open roads that resulted from much less travel.
The National Safety Council further opined that wrongful death traffic collisions would decline in this current year of 2021, but unfortunately it was wrong!
The most current studies suggest that after many years of increased safety and lower wrongful death fatalities on U.S. highways and roads, the coronavirus pandemic has made drivers throughout the United States, including drivers in California, Los Angeles and Riverside, more careless and even reckless. These drivers involved in these fatal collisions are more likely to drink alcoholic beverages, use drugs, including marijuana, speed (as with less vehicles on the road it is even easier to speed than before) and not use their seat belts and shoulder safety restraining devices, causing both more serious accident collisions and more significant injuries when collisions do occur, many resulting in catastrophic injuries (with fractures, spine injuries, traumatic brain injury also known as TBI, scarring and amputations) and even death.
Some experts at the National Safety Council believe that this deadly behavior has become a habit that is likely to persist, stating, “Our roads are less safe than they were pre-pandemic.”
Causes for this increase also may include the fact that because of this pandemic the sale of alcoholic beverages has greatly increased, there are new record highs of drug overdoses, and there is an increase in homicides (the killing of a person by another person).
Some reasons for the pre-pandemic improvement in road safety included vast safety improvements and safety regulations such as enforcement of seat belt and shoulder restraining devices laws, the invention and implementation of air bags (especially for those who forgot to buckle up), vastly improved braking systems, and other safety systems.
What is quite telling is that while our population increased and more people could afford cars and other motor vehicles, so our traffic greatly increased, and even some states in the United States increased their speed limits (especially after the oil embargoes of the 1970’s), the number of drivers and others killed in car accidents, truck accidents and motorcycle accidents declined from about 55,000 in 1970 to 36,096 in 2019.
Therefore, from 2019 to 2020 there has been a 7.2% increase in wrongful death accidents (that is the difference between 36,096 traffic deaths in 2019 and 38,680 traffic deaths in 2020).
And even more startling, based on new statistics from the U.S. federal government, in the first six (6) months of 2021 the number of car accident and other traffic fatalities has jumped 18%!
The government also provided this statistic: For every 100 million miles driven last year (2020), 1.37 people died in traffic collisions, and that is an increase of 23% since 2019.
Clearly, we all must be more alert and careful while driving so we are not added to these terrible statistics.
And should anyone in your family be the victim of a wrongful death car, truck, motorcycle, bicycle or pedestrian accident, please contact us right away for a FREE consultation. There never is any obligation and should we agree to take your case we do so on a contingency fee basis, which simply means you pay NO FEE and we receive NO FEE until we WIN!
So there is no risk to you, but the longer you wait causes problems, including the loss of valuable time to investigate and preserve evidence, so please do not wait and call us now. You will be glad that you did!