GJEL Blog » Driving Information

Like we’re back in school, 34.4 million Americans, including more than 4 million Californians will join me this Friday night to travel more than 50 miles to a vacation getaway for the long Labor Day weekend. In California and across the country, this holiday weekend’s travel predictions mark a ten percent increase over 2009 numbers, which indicates that it will be marked by more traffic, and likely more accidents, than last year.

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No one wants to be told that they can’t drive. For teenagers, restrictions on driving are set in stone until 16 (at least), making obtaining a drivers license a coming-of-age symbol of freedom. But the rise in laws regulating the freedom of older drivers has stripped that freedom away, frustrating older drivers who feel their freedom of association is being revoked. We’ve developed a resource on the dangers of driving as we age, current laws regulating such driving in each state, and alternatives to help maintain sense of freedom.

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In an odd policy statement this week, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety criticized the government for focusing too much on distracted driving and unintended acceleration, and ignoring more important safety concerns. “The hypervisibility of these issues diverts attention from initiatives that have far greater potential to save lives,” said the group’s president Adrian Lund. “There’s nothing rational about the way we set highway safety priorities.”

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This past week, tech blogs have asked an important question for the future of distracted driving: why haven’t we mastered the technology to make cell phone use behind the wheel safe? While a number of car companies, cell phone service operators, and independent techies have probed Bluetooth, voice recognition, and text prediction as potential solutions, no safe driving technology is currently widely used and the number of distracted drivers continues to increase. To make matters worse, new research shows that these tech advances could have a minimal impact, at best, on driver safety.

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Time and time again, plaintiffs trying to get what they deserve from negligent companies run into an unexpected obstacle. Not the team of lawyers hired to defend giant corporations or or judges with financial interests in such companies, but those who degrade legitimate claims by launching law suits based on imaginary or staged car accidents. Sadly, the National Insurance Crime Bureau reports that questionable insurance claims were up 14 percent in the first half of 2010 compared to the same period the year before.

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San Francisco isn’t the only region cracking down on distracted driving this month. Here in Contra Costa County, California Highway Patrol officers have cited more than 300 drivers this week for violating distracted driving laws which prohibit the use of handheld devices behind the wheel. On Wednesday, the CHP issued nearly 800 citations for the dangerous practice in the Bay Area as a whole, reports the Contra Costa Times.

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Following the nationwide tidal wave recognizing the extreme dangers of distracted driving, San Francisco has launched a series of crack downs in recent weeks to enforce California’s laws against using handheld devices behind the wheel. Last week’s crackdown led to more than 900 tickets for cell phone users. Today, the California Highway Patrol has launched the second citywide bust in ten days, and expects to ticket at least that number.

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“Click it or Ticket,” is the threat that has prompted thousands more Americans to buckle up since the punitive campaign launched two years ago. Since more than 15,000 people not wearing seat belts are killed each year, it’s considered irresponsible not to strap in while zooming along the highway. But when it comes to large commercial vehicles, seat belts are considered less essential. This week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a campaign that could save dozens of lives each year by requiring commercial bus passengers to ‘click it’ as well.

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As cell phones continue to become more advanced, enabling users to send text messages, emails, and even photographs from behind the wheel, the dangers of distracted driving have become more pronounced. The ‘epidemic’ has been cited as the cause of more than 500,000 accidents each year and is called the number one killer of teenagers. This week, New York City joined criticism of the dangerous practice with a report detailing distracted driving’s somber impact on pedestrians. Check out our state-by-state interactive map to see your state’s driving laws and how they compare to the rest of the country.

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In what will become additional ammunition for Toyota supporters who say the company’s unintended acceleration problems were the result of driver error rather than electronic or mechanical errors, the NHTSA released initial findings this week showing that for many accidents studied so far, the brake was not activated at the time of collision.

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