New Jersey Accident and Injury Law Blog : New Jersey Injury Lawyer & Attorney : The Grossman Law Firm : Serving Monmouth County, Bergen County

A highway safety group has awarded top marks to the state of New Jersey for its adoption of highway safety laws that can prevent injuries and minimize fatalities in accidents.

The group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety has released its 7^th Annual Road Map to State Highway Safety Laws report. The group reviewed 15 basic laws that will contribute to a reduction in fatalities and injuries in highway accidents. All 50 states and the District of Columbia were reviewed based on whether they have adopted all these laws.

States were awarded credits, and given a rating of green, yellow and red. Green signifies that the state has sufficient basic laws in place to prevent highway deaths and injuries, while yellow signifies that the state still has to make more progress, and a red rating denotes failure to adopt basic safety laws that continue to place citizens in danger.

New Jersey, I was very encouraged to note, received 13 credits, the highest among all states.  Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety has some recommendations to further bring down fatality rates and injuries in the state. The group recommends nighttime restrictions and between 30 and 50 hours of supervised driving for GDL holders. It also recommends ignition interlock laws for all DUI offenders in order to minimize drunk driving accident fatalities in the state. The group recommends these devices for all offenders, including first time offenders.

As a Bergen County auto accident lawyer, I have been a strong supporter of ignition interlock laws because of their potential for preventing repeat drunk driving. Too many DUI offenders in New Jersey are able to get back behind the wheel in an intoxicated state, posing a serious danger to other motorists on the road. With an interlock device on all their vehicles, such motorists could be kept off the streets.

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Image Courtesy: Flickr-Timbishop01

The parents of a teenager who was killed in a car accident in Southampton Township, Burlington County are channeling their grief into effecting real change in New Jersey law. They want legislation that will make it mandatory for drivers in fatal car accidents to undergo testing for alcohol and drugs.

In July 2007, seventeen-year-old Anthony Farrace was in a Mercedes Benz driven by his girlfriend, Danielle McLaughlin. She seems to have lost control of the car as she attempted to pass a big rig, crashing the Mercedes into a tree. Farrace died almost instantly. McLaughlin suffered injuries. Over the next few months, she pleaded guilty for charges of careless driving, and ended up paying a fine of $200 dollars and having her license suspended for about six months.   Anthony’s parents John and Claudia Farrace believe that McLaughlin should have been tested for alcohol and drug use. 

Under New Jersey law, a person in an accident may be tested under two conditions:

• He or she must agree to be tested.
• Police must furnish a search warrant to test for alcohol and drugs. To obtain a search warrant, officers must have evidence or reasonable suspicion that the motorist is intoxicated.  For instance, the smell of alcohol on a person’s breath, slurred speech, or disoriented or incoherent behavior could qualify as reasonable suspicion.

The Farraces are pushing for Bill 3838 introduced by Assemblymen Nelson Albano (D Cumberland) and Paul Moriarty (D Gloucester). The bill will mandate drug and alcohol testing for motorists in all fatal accidents. The legislation also has its critics, including those who believe that the law violates the Fourth amendment. Moriarty doesn’t agree. According to him, a person could always refuse to take a drug or alcohol test, and be slapped with license suspension for at least seven months.

Motor vehicle accidents are the number one cause of death for teenagers across the country. It's an incredible waste of potential and promise when a teenager loses his or her life due to reckless or negligent driving, and we seem to be seeing more of these crashes.  I recently read a post about teen accidents in Georgia by Atlanta personal injury lawyer Lisa Seigel of the Katz Law Firm. It includes a letter written by a coroner who speaks of his sadness at the number of dead teens he has seen in his job over the last few years.

As the post points, our law enforcement officers and Monmouth County personal injury lawyers can only do so much to grapple with the problem of teen car accidents. Parents must play a bigger role in promoting safe driving practices in their teenagers.

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Automobile accident fatalities around the country, including in New Jersey are on their way to "significant" lows, a survey shows. In at least 40 states out of the 44 surveyed, the decline in the numbers of  accident related deaths  is up to 10.7 percent on an average.

According to the Governor's Highway Safety Association, the declines can be traced to a widespread use of seatbelts. The practice of buckling up in 2008 stood at close to 83 per cent of the driving population, and this has contributed to large number of lives being saved in automobile crashes. There has also been an increase in efforts made towards traffic safety enforcement. The state with the largest reduction in fatalities was Massachusetts with a 29 percent drop , followed by Wisconsin, Alaska, Hawaii, Virginia and the District of Columbia  where these rates dropped by 20 percent. New Jersey fared well on the list too, with an 18 percent drop in accident fatalities in 2008. Georgia was the other state that saw a double digit drop in accident fatalities with a 12 per cent decline.

Other interesting factors have been cited by the GHSA as contributing to this welcome drop in fatalities. Drivers it appears, are driving slower in an attempt to save on fuel. This means that major-impact crashes that occur at high speeds and very often result in fatalities, have been markedly reduced. Expect safety enforcement programs across various states to use this "fuel efficiency" carrot to encourage drivers to slow down.

The results of the GHSA survey seem to mirror findings from other agencies that have pointed to a drop in fatalities. The Department of Transportation has estimated that the accident death rate for 2008 has dropped substantially. . Of course, these lowered accident rates seem to be coinciding with a slow economy, as well as the gas price crisis last summer, which may explain the drop to large extent. With a meltdown in full swing,, people are less inclined to drive unless absolutely necessary, which has meant fewer people on the roads. We'll have to wait a couple of years to see if these statistics change dramatically once the economy gets back to normal, and people begin their usual driving habits again.

Bergen County Car Accident Lawyers

At the Law Offices of Scott Grossman, our Bergen county car accident lawyers constantly represent victims of automobile accidents. If you have suffered an injury in an accident, contact a Bergen County car accident lawyer at the firm to discuss your options for compensation.

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Stricter enforcement, enhanced auto safety features, and of course, the fact that high gasoline prices made sure most people thought twice about making that not-so-necessary trip – these were the reasons the rate of road accident deaths in New Jersey, from Passaic County to Ocean County and beyond, fell to their lowest in over a decade.

The numbers were particularly encouraging in Ocean County, where the number of deaths from road accidents fell by almost 50 percent to 36 in 2008. In 2007 year, a total of 74 people had died in traffic accidents in the county. That's s a significant drop, and one that has as much to do with better monitoring by our law enforcement agencies, as it has to do with high gasoline prices. In our very own Monmouth County, the drop hasn’t been very steep – from 55 in 2007 to 48 in 2008. Worse yet, Monmouth County was second on the list of auto fatalities in 2008 in the state.

Taken countywise, law enforcement officials say, these statistics don't mean much since the rate could vary from year to year for each county, and not be that significant in the overall scheme of things, but when you consider that there has been the biggest ever drop in the past thirteen years in the total number of deaths from traffic accidents in New Jersey overall, then that is a significant development. The death rate in 2008 was 597 for the entire state, compared to data from the past thirteen years, which show a death rate that’s constantly above 700.

Nobody's saying that we should all cheer because we had 597 New Jerseyans die on our roads last year, but if we look clear and hard at some of the programs our enforcement agencies managed to implement last year, and see how much these had to do with reducing the death rate so dramatically, then we may find ways to see such similar decreases in 2009, and beyond. It appears that better seat belt enforcement and anti-drunk driving measures played a big part in law enforcement programs in 2008, and these seem to have paid off richly in terms of lives saved.

All in all, whatever else is happening in the rest of the state, Monmouth County needs to get its act together. Since 2002, the county has constantly ranked among the top three counties, for accident related deaths. One reason why Monmouth County accident lawyers are as busy as they are, but definitely a trend we need to see moving in the other direction.  

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