San Francisco injury law firm

Focus on Safety: The NTSB’s Most Wanted List 2016

May 13, 2016 | Gregory J. Brod

Every year, the National Transportation Safety Board (“NTSB”) releases what it calls its “Most Wanted List.” This list represents the NTSB’s top advocacy priorities for the year, improvements to safety that the NTSB believes can make the biggest difference in preventing transportation accidents and saving lives. Our San Francisco injury law firm shares the NTSB’s commitment to transportation safety and, while we advocate for injury victims in California every day, we know that prevention is always the best goal.

The following items are on the NTSB’s 2016 Most Wanted List:

Reduce Fatigue-Related Accidents: It is impossible to know exactly how many car accidents are due to drowsy driving, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes anywhere from 2% to 20% of yearly traffic fatalities are due to drowsy drivers. The problem also extends to other areas of the transportation field and the NTSB identified fatigue as a probable cause in 20% of the Board’s 182 major investigations between 2001 and 2012.

The Great Divide: Understanding Criminal and Civil Law in California Drunk Driving Cases

January 5, 2016 | Gregory J. Brod

We want 2016 to be a healthy and safe year for all of our readers and all of our neighbors here in Northern California. We also want to remind people that our personal injury law firm in San Francisco, Oakland, and Santa Rosa is here to help if you or a loved one is injured in 2016 due to someone else’s negligence, carelessness, or wrongful acts. In this spirit, this blog post looks at a recent drunk driving accident and reviews the difference between criminal and civil drunk driving cases in California.

Charges Filed Against Suspected Drunk Driver Following Hit-and-Run Crashes

According to CBS SF, police have arrested a 22-year-old man and charged him with suspected felony drunk duikeys driving and hit-and-run causing injury after a series of crashes in Petaluma. The series of incidents started around 12:30 AM Saturday when a pickup truck hit a parked vehicle on Mary Street near Petaluma Boulevard North. A woman who had been placing items in the parked vehicle’s rear seat was knocked over by the impact and suffered minor injuries. Reportedly, the driver fled the scene and then stopped at a nearby parking lot to examine his own vehicle. As he attempted to leave again, he backed into the store building damaging the establishment’s door and window before hitting a crosswalk sign on his way out of the lot. Officers later caught up with the man they believe was the driver and a test allegedly put his BAC at 0.13.

Driving Driverless Cars: Researchers Look for the Best Balance Between Humans and Technology

December 2, 2015 | Gregory J. Brod

It is a topic that can spark quite a bit of discussion around the watercooler at our San Francisco injury law firm – Are driverless cars the future of safe driving or a dangerous detour? We put our trust in computers every day and human error is certainly at the root of many car accidents, but can a computer ever respond the same way a driver can? What balance between human and computer would provide the safest solution?

Stanford Researchers Find Distraction May Be Key to Driver Readiness in Automated Vehicles

The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported on ongoing research into the safety of driverless cars at Stanford University. Specifically, researchers are looking at how automated vehicles can best alert drivers and hand off control when the software and/or sensors become overwhelmed. There are already cars on the market that can be programmed to stay in a lane or maintain a safe distance between vehicles, but there is still a need for a human driver at times and handing off control is a major issue. Automation, for all its many benefits, can lull people into a false sense of security. The Chronicle sums up this issue well: “One riddle automakers must solve: How to get owners to trust the technology so that they’ll use it — but not trust it so much that they’ll be lulled into a false security that makes them slow to react when the car needs them.”