Legal Issues Covered

Causes of Accidents

Many factors result in car accidents, and sometimes multiple causes contribute to a single accident. Factors include the following:

Driver distraction, including fiddling with technical devices as noted previously, talking with passengers, eating or grooming in the car, dealing with children or pets in the back seat, or attempting to retrieve dropped items.
Driver impairment by tiredness, illness, alcohol or other drugs, both legal and illegal. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is an organization made up of the families of the dead who were killed in car accidents caused by drunk drivers.
Mechanical failure, including flat tires or tires blowing out, brake failure, axle failure, steering mechanism failure.
Road conditions, including foreign obstacles or substances on the road surface; rain, ice, or snow making the roads slick; road damage including pot holes.
Speed exceeding safe conditions, such as the speed for which the road was designed, the road condition, the weather, the speed of surrounding motorists, and so on.
Road design and layout. Some roads are notorious for being accident "black spots" for a whole variety of reasons, many subtle and not necessarily immediately obvious. These include alignment, visibility, camber and surface conditions, road markings, etc. Finding out the causes for a repeated series of accidents on the same stretch of road is becoming a science in itself.

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Many authorities emphasise speed as an inherent cause of accidents in itself, though most experts agree that speed alone is rarely a prime cause of accidents, though naturally a mis-application of speed can be a contributing factor, and higher speed in an accident resulting from whatever cause is more likely to have serious consequences. Critics of the "speed kills" mentality claim that this approach ignores the complex factors that are involved in accidents, and argue that it amounts to little more than a simplistic "quick fix" or political solution that does nothing to address the true Causes of Accidents. Proponents state that going slower at least can do no harm, and that physics is on their side, since the outcome of an accident largely depends on the energy dissipated in a crash, and that energy rises with the square of velocity, according to the equation E = ½ ·m·v², where E is the kinetic energy, m is the mass, and v is the velocity. The first person who died in a petrol engined car accident, Bridget Driscoll, was killed by a car driving only 4 miles/h (6.5 km/h).

Attempts to force car manufacturers to limit the top speed of vehicles has so far been resisted by both the manufacturers and governments themselves. Partly this is because the car manufacturers have substantial political lobbying power and speed and performance are powerful marketing tools, and partly because it is easy to show that such measures are unlikely to have a significant effect on the road toll, and might then force governments to seriously address the more complex Causes of Accidents. A recent proposal in Australia for car manufacturers to fit speedometers which are blank above 130 km/h (whatever the actual top speed of the vehicle) has proved extremely controversial, and legally unworkable, according to most commentators.

Rubbernecking

Rubbernecking is where drivers slow down to look at accidents or anything out of the ordinary on the highway. Events ranging from gruesome car accidents to a police car stopped on the shoulder can cause traffic jams on both sides of the road, even if the roadway has been cleared

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Although caution is advised when there is unexpected activity on the side of a road, a car with a flat tire on the side of a highway often causes as much slow down as a real accident would due to rubbernecking. The slowdown in traffic persists even after the accident scene has been cleared if traffic is dense. Traffic experts call this phenomenon a Phantom Accident. Often this behavior causes additional and sometimes more serious accidents among the rubberneckers.