Roadway accidents can be classified into a number of different ways. Regardless of the type of roadway accident you are talking about, though, more needs to be done to reduce such accidents. Roughly 300 drivers die and 3,000 are injured every year due to rollover crashes, which involve, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2012, over half of fatal accidents were due to rollover crashes.
This is why the agency will be putting into place a new regulation requiring manufacturers of large trucks to include electronic stability control systems on those vehicles. The technology, as readers may know, prevents trailers from fishtailing and keeps all wheels on the ground, which can be a problem for large trucks when following curves in the road or using exit ramps.
The technology is not new to the trucking industry, since many fleets have already implemented the technology, even if only on a partial basis. The regulation requires compliance for all new trucks manufactured after August 1, 2017.
Trucking safety compliance, of course, is a big issue in the field of personal injury. Truckers who fail to abide by their safety duties under federal law not only put themselves at risk but other drivers as well. The key, of course, is consistent enforcement, without which safety regulations do not achieve their full potential in terms of increasing safety. One indirect way of support truck safety compliance is for those injured by negligent truckers to work with an experienced attorney to negligent truckers accountable in personal injury litigation.
We’ll speak more about this in our next post, particularly the issues that can come up in these cases and how an experienced personal injury attorney can help.