Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

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See the link below for an interesting story from yesterday’s Oregonian on a new study focusing on teen driving fatalities nationwide. The good news: Oregon and Washington “are among the nation’s safest states for 16- and 17-year-old drivers, according to a new report by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA).” The bad news: nationwide, teen driving deaths rose significantly during the first half of 2012.

In an effort to tackle popular misconceptions, the newspaper notes that: “Among road users, aging drivers are often thought to be the biggest hazard. But teen motorists are less experienced and (are) on the road more frequently, experts say.”

Oregon recorded just one teen driving fatality during the first six months of 2012 (the period covered by the study), compared with none during the comparable period in 2011. In Washington the year-to-year difference was dramatic: no fatalities among 16 and 17-year-olds from January through June of 2012 compared to 16 in 2011. Nationally, 240 16- and 17-year-olds died in crashes during the first half of 2012, compared with 202 the year before, a 19 percent increase.

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An Associated Press story published yesterday on The Oregonian’s website should grab the attention of many Oregon motorists concerned about both Oregon traffic safety and Oregon defective products issues. According to the news agency, the federal government’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “says it will investigate problems with stalling or surging engines in nearly 725,000 Ford cars and SUVs.”

According to the article the investigation covers 2009, 2010 and 2011 models and applies to the following vehicles:

➢ Ford Escape SUV

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Last month I wrote about the growing controversy over work rules for Tri-Met bus and train drivers and concerns that public safety could be affected when drivers log excessively long shifts. In January, the union representing Tri-Met’s drivers rejected proposed work rules saying that, as written, they posed a threat to both drivers themselves and the public at large.

According to a report in yesterday’s Oregonian the union and Tri-Met now “have officially signed an agreement requiring bus drivers to take off a minimum number of hours between shifts.” The paper reports that both Tri-Met and the union “promised that the agreement will fix a system that has allowed several drivers to pad their paychecks by working as many as 22 hours in a 24-hour period.” (the link to the Oregonian, below, contains, in turn, a link to the full text of the work agreement)

Until now, as The Oregonian notes, loopholes in the federal government’s system of oversight for drivers and passenger haulers mean that federal rules preventing excessive shifts or hours do not apply to Tri-Met’s bus operators but do apply to the transit system’s train operators. The result was a system that has long had real potential to endanger the drivers themselves, their passengers and cyclists and pedestrians who share the road with Tri-Met’s buses and trains, as a number of tragic Oregon traffic accidents have demonstrated in recent years.

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The Associated Press is reporting that two people died and 20 people have been injured in a multi-car and truck accident on Interstate-75 near Detroit. The fatal road accident involved “more than two dozen vehicles including tractor-trailers,” according to the news agency, and highlights the need for caution during this winter driving season.

Though this particular accident took place half a continent away from Oregon, the circumstances are some that we are all too familiar with here in the Pacific Northwest. Be it on the congested roads around Portland or the notoriously dangerous Cabbage Hill segment of Interstate-84 in the east of the state, Oregon semi-truck accidents are a serious problem on the roads of our state and region.

In 2010 alone, the last year for which Oregon Department of Transportation data is available, there were 649 Oregon truck crashes on our roads involving semi-trailers, resulting in nearly 250 injuries and 25 deaths. As these figures indicate, the operation of large trucks calls for special care and caution on the part of drivers. Of course, semi-truck operators are not alone in this responsibility. The accident figures cited here are only a fraction of the total number of Oregon truck crashes that take place every year.

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A three-vehicle Polk County, Oregon car accident over the weekend left one man dead and five people hospitalized, according to a report in The Oregonian.

The Oregon auto accident took place in the town of Dallas, about 60 miles southwest of Portland. The newspaper, quoting the Oregon State Police, reports that the sequence of events began Saturday evening when a van driven by a man from Woodburn “was heading west when it traveled across the center line and collided” with a vehicle headed in the opposite direction on State Route 22.

The driver of the eastbound vehicle was a 69-year-old Silverton man. He was pronounced dead by paramedics responding to the accident. Two other people in the car were taken to a Salem hospital with what The Oregonian describes as “critical” injuries. The driver of the van was not seriously injured in the initial crash, but was struck by a third vehicle, a westbound pickup truck, when he stopped to assess the initial accident. He was taken to the same Salem hospital as the victims in the car and is reported to be suffering from “serious injuries.” The two people in the third vehicle were treated in McMinnville for minor injuries.

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The union representing Tri-Met workers has rejected proposed work rules that would have allowed bus and other transit drivers in the Portland area to work 14-hour shifts, according to a report published in The Oregonian.

The paper reports that “the union representing operators, mechanics and support staff quickly rejected the plan on Monday, saying it didn’t go far enough to address the growing problem with exhaustion.” The paper quotes a union leader saying “No human being, especially one transporting passengers through city traffic, can safely operate a bus over a 14-hour workday, day-after-day.”

The proposed work rules would “limit” drivers to a 14-hour workday and require at 10 hours off between shifts. According to the paper the proposed work plan would have applied to drivers of both buses and light-rail trains. The paper notes that “the current policy, based on service days, makes it easy for a driver to finagle extra overtime by working marathon runs.”

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Following up on a story I first blogged about last week, The Oregonian reports that federal authorities have ordered the bus company involved in the New Year’s weekend crash on Deadman’s Pass section of Cabbage Hill, east of Pendleton, to cease operations in the United States. According to the newspaper, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced on this week that the Canadian company operating the tour bus had let the driver work “well beyond” the 70 hours per 8 days maximum allowed by US law.

As the paper notes, “nine people died in late December when (the) bus… ran through a guardrail and rolled down a steep embankment along Interstate 84.” A further 39 people were injured in the fatal Oregon bus crash, an accident which, as I noted last week, raises significant wrongful death questions.

The action taken by federal officials raises several issues. Obviously, rules designed to prevent driver fatigue need to be rigorously enforced in the interest of public safety, but enforcing those rules on a foreign company is likely to involve significant technical and logistical issues. It is especially worrisome that, as The Oregonian reports, the order requiring the company to cease US operations “specifically cites the company for failure to test the driver for drugs and alcohol prior to the crash, failure to properly maintain driver qualification requirements and failure to operate a motor vehicle in a safe manner.” To be fair, it is difficult to imagine that Canadian national or British Columbian provincial law (the bus company is headquartered in Vancouver, B.C.) does not also address most if not all of these issues – but assuming that it does, one has to wonder why two governments as closely tied as ours and Canada’s are not able to exchange information that might go a long way toward protecting public safety.

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By now most Oregonians will have read or heard about the terrible New Year’s weekend bus crash on Deadman’s Pass in the east of the state. According to The Oregonian, nine people died and dozens were injured last weekend when a tour bus “skidded off Interstate 84 east of Pendleton and rolled 200 feet down a mountain canyon.”

The newspaper quotes an Oregon state police spokesman saying that 39 injured people were taken to hospitals across three states. A total of 49 people were aboard the bus at the time of the accident, meaning that only one person avoided injury in this Oregon bus crash. The newspaper reports that the passengers ranged in age from seven to 73 years old. Most were Americans and Canadians of Korean ancestry.

The bus was reportedly returning from an excursion to Las Vegas at the time of the accident, which occurred on a dangerous stretch of the Cabbage Hill section of I-84. “Oregon state police investigators will look into the possibility that (the) bus driver… was driving too fast for the slippery conditions on the notorious mountain pass,” according to the paper. “Investigators will also determine if driver fatigue was a factor,” The Oregonian reports.

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An article published last week in The Oregonian’s ‘Hard Drive’ column asked a simple question: if using a cellphone behind the wheel is considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant Oregon’s distracted driving law, what about other potential distractions?

The question was prompted by Washington’s new law legalizing marijuana use. Pot may be legal, but should you be driving with it in your system? If marijuana is going to be legal to consume, should its potential to impair a driver be treated more-or-less the same way that we treat alcohol consumption and driving?

If the answer is ‘yes’ that opens an entirely separate conversation about impairment levels and the best way to measure them. For our purposes, however, the question is broader. As The Oregonian puts it, “whether it’s applying lipstick or reading a book (or flicking ashes from a Camel), trying to micromanage and ban every kind of distraction isn’t the quixotic endeavor that it used to be.”

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A single car accident in the early hours of Friday morning is calling attention to the problem of Portland drunk driving and the damage it can cause.

According to a report in The Oregonian, in the early hours of Friday “a gold four-door 1998 Toyota Corolla crashed into the overpass abutment at Northeast 33rd Avenue and Columbia Boulevard, ejecting the 34-year-old driver from the vehicle.” The paper notes that the woman wound up trapped underneath the car. After being rescued she was taken to an area hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries.” The newspaper quotes police sources saying that an investigation is still in progress, but that the crash appears to be alcohol-related.

While we can take some small consolation from the fact that this terrible accident involved only a single car, it also serves as a powerful reminder of the damage drunk driving can do – a reminder that is especially timely as we enter the heart of the Holiday Season. The period between Thanksgiving and the New Year is always filled with parties, visits to and from relatives and many, many opportunities to overindulge.

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