Category: Fatal Motor Vehicle Accidents

Zero traffic fatalities — that’s the ambitious goal set this past week by the Transportation Department. Zero, zip, nada. That’s a bold ambition, given that we have been seeing record numbers of deaths the past two years. Last year was the bloodiest year since 1966, and this year is expected to be 10 percent worse….

Every year the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety lists which vehicles were involved in the most fatal crashes. Before reading you should know several things: Cars are actually safer today than ever. It’s not always the car’s fault – by design or performance — that the accident proves fatal. These numbers reflect fatalities from years…

California residents might be interested in understanding more about why Paul Walker’s daughter has filed a lawsuit against Porsche over the late actor’s sudden death in a car accident in 2013. Walker died after the 2004 Carrera GT he was a passenger in crashed into a concrete lamppost. Investigators believe the vehicle was traveling up…

Whether or not we realize it, many of our decisions in life are based on an immediate cost-benefit analysis. Behavioral rewards are weighed against risks, and we choose accordingly. And while we usually get things right, we often make the wrong decisions as well. Why do some errors leave us feeling like we did our…

In our last two posts, we discussed concern over the recent increase in the number of pedestrians and bicyclists being hit by commuter trains in California. Because it is believed that many of the accident victims were distracted by cellphones and other gadgets when they were hit, Sacramento Regional Transit recently launched a campaign warning…

In recent years, more and more people who are involved in California car accidents have been surviving thanks to safety innovations and medical care, and the fatality rate has been falling. However, cars are not the only vehicles on the roads, and bike accident fatalities have actually been trending entirely in the opposite direction. If…

This week, we have been discussing the two different kinds of cases that can be filed under our legal system: criminal cases and civil cases. In our last post, we explained the main differences between the two types of cases, and we also stated that it is possible for a defendant to face both types…

As we began discussing in our last post, it is often possible to hold people accountable in civil lawsuit even when criminal charges are not successful because the standard of proof is different in each type of case. Criminal charges must usually be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is a very high burden on…

Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic gold medal decathlete who is even more famous for fathering Kendall and Kylie Jenner and step-fathering the Kardashian clan, was involved in a fatal car accident in California over the weekend. According to CNN, the four-car accident took place on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu around noon Saturday when…

Even though highway fatalities have fallen by close to 25 percent over the past 10 years, there are still far too many lives lost and families torn apart by fatal motor vehicle accidents. For that reason, safety advocates are still encouraging states to do more to bolster their traffic laws. The Washington D.C.-based Advocates for…