On today’s Inside Look by Brooks, Steve Brooks talks about “speed” and its deadly impact on the roadway.

Welcome

Good afternoon. Steve Brooks here, with Friday’s Inside Look by Brooks. Hope everybody’s doing great. I’m sitting here in the middle of Florida, and we were talking around the office today about car accidents. When they happen, when’s the most likely time—kind of a trivia thing.

Safest day to drive?

We did some research, and we used the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the year 2016 as our baseline. There were some really interesting statistics.

So, guess what is the safest day to drive and the most dangerous day to drive? It’s kind of logical, but the safest day to drive is Tuesday. That makes sense, because you don’t have a bunch of weekend traffic. Monday and Friday, there tends to be more traffic; people going to the beach on Friday, people going to work on Monday. So Tuesday is the safest day. It has the least accidents and least deaths. Tuesday, in 2016, there were 4,444 deaths. On Saturday, it was about a third more. There were 6,802 deaths.

Safest time to drive?

So the next thing is the time of day. Guess what the worst time of day to drive is and what the best time of day to drive is. And, again, there’s some logic to it.

One of them kind of surprised me. The safest time of day is from 7am to 10am. Now, I would have thought that would have been up there with the worst, because that’s drive time to work and there’s a lot of traffic. I would have thought 10-2pm would’ve been the least, but no it wasn’t. The absolute most dangerous time of day to drive is between 4 pm and 7pm. Now that does make sense, because you’ve got afternoon drive time, 4-7, and in addition, people are also going to bars in the afternoon. There could be some drinking involved.

Top Factors in Car Accidents

Okay, here are two interesting facts. In 2016, there were 37,461 deaths on our highways throughout the country. So what do you think are the top two types of car accidents that caused the deaths?

  1. Drunk driving
    Drunk driving, in 2016, there were 10,500 deaths out of 37,000. That’s a little less than a third. That’s huge.
  2. Speeding
    There were about 10,111 deaths out of 37,000. So again, a little less than a third.

So as consumer justice attorneys that protect people from drunk drivers and speeders, those are the kind of cases that we love to get and take to trial. Juries do not like people who are out there driving drunk, causing injury to others. People do not like speeders.

There was that recent crash, on Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, where a mother was pushing her baby across the street, and some kids were street racing. I think one of them was going 100 mph and hit and killed this young mother and her child. It was a real tragic situation. Those kinds of deaths are so horrific because they’re preventable. It’s not like you’re driving down the road and a wheel accidentally comes off, and it causes a crash.

You can prevent drunk driving by just not driving drunk, and you can prevent speeding deaths by simply not speeding. So, the juries tend to punish those types of defendant drivers. They are not well looked upon in our society.

Distracted Driving

You know, I didn’t see distracted driving, but I think distracted driving has got to be in the top five. Texting and driving, trying to eat, and trying to do other things while you’re driving. To me, distracted driving or texting while driving, is the new drunk driving. It’s something that we just shouldn’t do, because again, it’s preventable.

It’s not some mechanical failure, your brakes going out or something you don’t intend to do. When you text and you look away from your driving, and you look at your phone for 3 seconds while going 60 mph, you literally travel about the length of a football field. A football field is about 300 feet, and a lot can happen in 300 feet and in only 3 seconds. A child could run out in front of you or a car could stop suddenly for traffic. Preventable deaths are the thing we really want to focus on.

Conclusion

So that was kind of the trivia for the day that we enjoyed talking about around here. Thanks for joining me today! We are an all injury law firm with offices in the Tampa Bay area and in Central Florida (Lakeland, Winter Haven, Tampa). We do handle cases state-wide, and we handle mass torts nation-wide. If you have any questions for me, my email is [email protected], or you can shoot me a text at (800) LAW-3030 and I’ll get back with you.

I hope you guys have a safe weekend; it’s going to be a hot one out there. We’re all looking forward to July 4th here in the office. July 4th is actually going to be on a Wednesday this year, so it’s in the middle of the week, which is kind of weird. I think I’ll be in Tampa on channel-side, viewing the fireworks down there. They’re always really good. Again, thanks for joining! I’ll see you next Friday at 3 o’clock. Thank you!

Stephen K. Brooks
Author: Stephen K. Brooks

Steve was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. As was the practice for new doctors his father worked day and night during his medical residency at Charity Hospital there. Steve comes from a long line of doctors. His father, his grandfather, his great grandfather, even two uncles were all specialists and/or surgeons in their chosen medical specialties, including internal medicine specialist, obstetrics / gynecology, neurosurgery and general practice / surgery. His great-great grandfather was the Surgeon General of Ohio during the Civil War.