Dutchess County, New York Personal Injury Blog

This week is Global Road Safety Week, which means that governments, non-governmental organizations and activists worldwide are focusing on traffic safety. This year, the focus is on preventing serious and deadly pedestrian accidents, and the AARP brought forward some troubling statistics, along with a call for cities and towns across the U.S. to adopt pedestrian-friendly municipal ordinances.

According to the AARP, fatal pedestrian accidents make up 14 percent of all traffic fatalities, and much of those tragedies could be prevented by adding sidewalks where they don't exist, improved sidewalk and road maintenance, and the elimination of unsafe road design.

The AARP also found that, of the more than 4,400 people killed in pedestrian accidents in 2011, fully one fifth (20 percent) were people aged 65 or older, although older people only make up 13 percent of the population. Worse, older people involved in pedestrian accidents are more likely to die than people in any other age group, and were much more likely than other age groups to be hit by cars in crosswalks, as opposed to while jaywalking or walking along the side of a roadway.

According to a new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that used video cameras to monitor drivers for a month, the average driver talks on a cell phone more than 10 percent of the time. At the same time, NHTSA says that the "visual-manual tasks" needed to operate a hand-held cell phone typically distract drivers for at least two seconds -- and a two-second distraction triples your risk of being in a distracted driving car accident.

Over the past decade, we've all heard the statistics on the dangers of driver distraction. In 2011, for example, NHTSA says that 387,000 people in the U.S. were injured and 3,000 were killed in distracted driving car accidents. Nevertheless, despite cell phone and texting bans and a wide variety of other policy initiatives, we haven't made much progress on cutting down on the distractions behind the wheel.

One reason driver distractions seem to keep multiplying, says outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, is that automakers use technology as a selling point for new cars. The latest, sexiest new tech installed in vehicles is a major incentive to buy -- but that new tech isn't necessarily geared toward safety.

"It can be wrong diagnosis, no diagnosis or delayed diagnosis," explains the lead author of a new statistical survey by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "If you get the diagnosis wrong, the chances of getting the therapy right are greatly reduced."

That's a profound observation, considering the results of the study, which was just published in the online journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Researchers pored over some 350,000 medical malpractice claims that resulted in payouts to plaintiffs over the past 25 years, and discovered that misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis and failure to diagnose a patient's condition accounted for fully 35 percent of the approximately $38.8 billion in verdicts and judgments for victims between 1986 to 2010.

"We really have to make it a priority to measure and track diagnostic errors on an ongoing basis as we do other mistakes such as infection and wrong-site surgery," said the study's author, a Johns Hopkins neurology professor. "They are completely underrepresented in terms of what we pay attention to."

Some interesting research has just come out of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. In the past, traffic safety researchers had based their estimates of behaviors that commonly cause car accidents on surveys, test tracks and simulator studies. The results of those studies generally found that the number of car accidents caused by driver fatigue was probably negligible.

The problem with surveys, driving simulators and test track studies, researchers acknowledge, is that the ordinary driving behavior of the participants can't be captured by them. The participants are far too aware that they are being observed, and they're often on their best driving behavior.

To counter that effect, researchers at Virginia Tech recruited 100 people who were willing to drive cars with tiny sensors and unobtrusive video cameras installed. Some were their own cars and some were leased to the drivers, but the idea was that the group of volunteers would simply drive those cars as they usually would.

There is this assumption that robotic surgery removes the human surgeon from the equation, as if H.A.L. from "2001: A Space Odyssey" is running the medical show. But the truth is that robotic surgical devices require continual human oversight. Even in the short span of their usage, failure to properly maintain and operate these machines has caused hundreds of serious injuries, yet so much hype still surrounds robo-surgery.

Poughkeepsie residents with medical concerns may be interested to know that, after hundreds of reported mishaps, the Food and Drug Administration is investigating robotic surgical devices made by Intuitive Surgical, the industry leader. The name given to these machines -- the da Vinci system -- perhaps betrays a romantic view of their benefits to patients.

Police in Fort Lee, New Jersey, have been running decoy operations recently, in the hope of cutting down on the number of serious and fatal pedestrian accidents in that town. Last year, 68 pedestrians were struck down in Fort Lee, four of whom died. In just the first two months of this year, 12 more pedestrian accidents had already occurred, according to police data.

According to preliminary data compiled from NYPD reports, 11,621 pedestrians were injured in New York City last year, and 155 were killed. With numbers like those, could cities and towns around our state benefit from decoy programs like those being run in Fort Lee?

Their police department publicly announced the program in March and has spent the last few weeks on a public information campaign, which included handing out flashing reflectors and fluorescent umbrellas.

"This is not a sneak attack," explained Fort Lee's deputy police chief. "We want to let [drivers] know we're doing it all over town. Our ultimate goal isn't issuing summonses. Our ultimate goal is compliance."

A highway maintenance worker for the town of Oswego made a grisly discovery Tuesday morning. A car carrying four young men, aged 19, 20, 23 and 23, had apparently been involved in a fatal, single-vehicle rollover crash sometime overnight on Monday.

The highway worker immediately reported the fatal car accident to the authorities, but accident investigators from the Oswego Town Fire Department are at a loss to explain the cause of the deadly crash except to say that excessive speed was likely involved.

According to local press reports, the stretch of the 0.6-mile long road where the accident occurred is preceded by a long hill flanked by sheer, thicketed embankments. The road was clear and dry.

Somehow, the car left the north side of the road, became airborne, struck a tree and then plunged down into the brush and rolled onto its roof. It is believed that all four young men were killed in the wreck.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, one of the federal agencies responsible for regulating the truck industry, passed strict new rules on the number and combination of hours commercial drivers can work before taking a break. The rules mandate that truckers take off-duty breaks during their workdays, and the agency also strictly limited how often trucking companies can restart the weekly period in which total hours worked is limited.

All of this was presumably meant to cut down on serious and deadly truck accidents caused by driver fatigue. In 2011, in New York State alone there were 145 commercial truck wrecks blamed on the driver either falling asleep or losing consciousness while driving. The FMCSA says large commercial trucks were involved in 3,484 fatal crashes in 2010, and its 2006 study estimated that as many as 12 percent of fatal truck accidents were caused by drowsy or incapacitated drivers.