Keep Your Mind On Your Driving

Lately a number of my blogs have discussed drivers who are driving along a Tennessee highway and for some reason become distracted and leave the road. Usually they cross into the oncoming lane and injure or kill another driver or pedestrians, or they hit obstruction on their side of the highway. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration driver inattention is the leading factor in most crashes. Nearly 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes involved some form of driver inattention within three seconds before the event. An accident like this can happen so quickly because the vehicle is usually moving at speed.

Today I’d like to reference two accidents that occurred in Tennessee this weekend that point out another type of distracted driver, that driver is one who is stopped at a traffic sign and then pulls out into oncoming traffic. This type of driver has seemingly all the time in the world to look both ways and make an informed judgment as to the proper time to enter the roadway, but yet, they pull out anyway.

The first of these accidents left an Ooltewah woman, Rhonda L. Morgan, 23, dead at the scene the other driver Vernon Norwood, 67, an Illinois resident injured.  According to an article on the website of the Chattanooga Times Free-Press, Ms. Morgan was stopped at an intersection before she pulled out right into the path of Mr. Norwood’s Chevrolet truck. My prayers go out to the family and friends of Ms. Morgan.

The second collision had a somewhat better outcome because no one died. The details are sketchy but from the article on the website of Knoxville TV station WBIR it appears that the driver of a large box truck towing another vehicle pulled out of a private driveway in front of an oncoming pickup truck. The pick up clipped the left rear end of the box truck causing it to flip over.

To start off this discussion, I want to point out that both Ms. Morgan and the driver of the box truck had a duty to yield to oncoming traffic. That duty entails watching and waiting until it was safe to enter the highway. Both of these drivers were obviously distracted by something and failed to yield. Primary causes of driver inattention are distracting activities, such as cell phone use, and drowsiness.

If you’re driving your vehicle, you are already multitasking. At a minimum you are: operating a piece of heavy machinery; navigating across changing terrain; calculating speeds and distances; and responding to all the other drivers and obstacles around you. Putting one more activity in the mix, even talking to your passengers or changing a radio station, can be enough to make you lose control of your vehicle or fail to respond in an emergency.

The lesson here for Nashville drivers is that you must keep all of your attention on the acting of driving and avoid distractions. You never know when another driver is going to fall asleep, have a medical emergency or get distracted and leave their lane and initiate a deadly collision.

If you or a loved one is injured or killed in a Tennessee automobile accident involving a distracted driver you owe it to yourself to take advantage of a free consultation and speak with one of the experienced Nashville automobile accident attorney’s at Phillip Miller & Associates and find out about your rights and remedies.