Motor Vehicle Accidents

Road construction is often done at night to avoid rush-hour traffic, but people who do not obey the roadwork signs pose a risk to police officers and construction workers. Maryland law requires drivers to move to a lane farther away or slow down considerably. It is intended to prevent accidents and injuries to law enforcement officers, tow truck drivers, and other workers. On Oct. 16, a Maryland State Police trooper was in his car with the emergency lights flashing on I-95 while helping to close lanes for repairs to the road. The

Continue reading State trooper injured in a construction zone accident…

A 26-year-old man was declared dead at the scene of a one-car accident in Maryland on the evening of Sept. 10. The decedent was sitting in the front passenger seat before the accident occurred on Hilltop Road in Fair Hill. The driver and a backseat passenger were both taken to local hospitals for treatment. A spokesman for the Cecil County Sheriff’s Office said that the accident took place at around 9:30 p.m. The 25-year-old driver lost control of his 2012 Ford Mustang while traveling northbound. After crossing the center line,

Continue reading Passenger dead after driver loses control and crashes…

Road users in Maryland and other states will find little to be happy about in a report released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Aug. 29. The safety agency says that the 7.2 percent increase in 2015 road accident fatalities over the previous year was the highest year-on-year increase in crash deaths since 1966. The NHTSA says that more Americans are being killed in car accidents because more vehicles are using the nation’s roads. It believes that this increase in traffic levels is being caused by low fuel

Continue reading Surge in road fatalities highest since the 1960s…

Previously, we looked briefly at the federal hours of service rules, which are largely aimed at preventing truck drivers from driving without adequate rest. The rules, of course, cannot guarantee that commercial drivers have sufficient rest to safely operate a commercial vehicle, but they go a long way toward doing so. Employers must also do their part to monitor employees and individual drivers are still responsible for exercising reasonable care. Drowsy or fatigued driving, of course, is not a problem exclusively with commercial drivers, even if commercial drivers are particularly

Continue reading Nonprofit compares drowsy driving impairment to alcohol intoxication…

In our previous post, we began looking at the federal hours of service rules and provided a brief summary of the rules for property-carrying passengers. As we noted, the primary aim of the hours of service rules is to ensure truckers are adequately rested behind the wheel. The hours of service rules cannot guarantee truckers are adequately rested on the job, of course, but they make it much more likely than if the industry was left to its own devices. Truckers put in long hours on the road and can easily

Continue reading What are the federal “hours of service” rules and why do they matter to truck accident victims? P.2…

Truck safety is an issue that everybody should be concerned about, because all of us are potentially at risk when truck drivers and employers are careless with matters of safety. While there are a number of safety regulations the trucking industry is bound by, increased attention has been given in recent years to the so-called hours of service rules. The hours of service rules, which are administered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, are aimed at ensuring truck drivers have adequate rest while they are behind the wheel. Driver

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