Birmingham Injury Blog

The National Highway Safety Administration has posted an article about the updated traffic fatality and injury data for 2009. The data shows there were 33,808 highway fatalities last year, the lowest number since 1950 (which had 33,186 deaths), even though the vehicle miles travelled had increased by 0.2% since 2008.

2009 also saw the lowest recorded fatality and injury rates with 1.13 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles, compared to 1.26 deaths in 2008. Motorcycle fatalities also declined by 850, the first decrease in eleven years.

Injuries from vehicle crashes continued to decline for the tenth consecutive year, falling from 2.346 million in 2008 to 2.217 million in 2009, or a 5.5% decrease. Drunk driving fatalities also fell 7.4% from 2008- 10,839 fatalities in 2009 as opposed to 11, 711 in 2008.

All crashes, including injury, fatal, and property damage only, fell by 5.3%.

“Today’s numbers reflect the tangible benefits of record seat belt use and strong anti-drunk driving enforcement campaigns,” said NHTSA Administrator David Strickland. “But we are still losing more than 30,000 lives a year on our highways, and about a third of these involve drunk driving. We will continue to work with our state partners to strictly enforce both seat belt use and anti-drunk driving laws across this nation, every day and every night.”

The Baltimore Injury Lawyer Blog has posted an article about how trucking companies adding a "black box" to their trucks to record things like speed, location, and movement -basically to make sure the driver is where they're supposed to be- can come back to haunt the trucking company if one of their vehicles is involved in an accident.

John Bratt, writer of the article, discusses the impact of the black box in a recent case he was involved in over a Maryland trucking accident. He says that, like all experienced lawyers who deal with trucking accidents, he requested the vehicle data recorder information. It seems pretty reasonable to assume that factors like the risk factors like the truck's speed, vehicle load and how the load affected the truck's ability to stop is relevant information to the case.

Amazingly, the request for the truck's black box was denied because the defense's lawyer felt that it was "overly broad, unduly burdensome and seeks to discover information not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence."

This is as absurd as arguing that a video of the accident isn't relevant...there can't be anything more relevant in a truck accident trial than the "vehicle movement data."