Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

November 29, 2013

Distracted Driving Underreported, According to National Safety Council Study

As we move through this holiday weekend here is a sobering thought about Oregon distracted driving: at any given moment during daylight hours nine percent of all drivers on the road nationwide are using cellphones, according to the National Safety Council.

The Council has just released its annual analysis of driving and cellphone usage and while the figures are for 2011 – the latest year for which full data sets are available – the numbers can be chilling to read. For example: a driver using a cellphone – even with a hands-free device as required by law here in Oregon and elsewhere – is four times more likely to be involved in a crash. More than one-in-five of all “fatal, injury and property-damage only crashes are likely attributable to talking on cellphones.” That added up to 1.1 million traffic crashes, according to the Council’s analysis.

The Council survey draws together data from a number of government, academic and non-profit sources. Two sections of the report stand out as particularly striking. First, its conclusion that using a hand-free device such as a headset, or the increasingly popular Bluetooth speakerphones built into many newer cars, does not lower the risk of a distracted driving crash nearly as much as one might think. Second, that the distracted driving problem is more widespread than originally thought because cellphone-related crash data is under reported almost everywhere in the country.

November 26, 2013

Teen Safety Tips For Winter Offered by National Safety Council

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The non-profit National Safety Council has published an excellent tip sheet to help parents prepare teen drivers for the special challenges that come with winter.

Oregon car accidents can happen any time of the year, of course, but winter is different. As the website notes: “Winter conditions can challenge even the most experienced drivers. It is incumbent upon a parent to prepare a teen as best as possible for driving under those difficult circumstances that adverse weather brings.”

Many of these recommendations are so basic that one might overlook them, but they bear repeating: slow down, factor in more travel time to get from point A to point B so you don’t unconsciously feel a need to rush; gently test a moving car’s brakes when ice and snow are present to get a sense of road conditions; don’t use high beams when it is snowing. Don’t use the cruise control in the snow either. Keep a greater distance between vehicles than one does in easier driving conditions.

November 22, 2013

Washington Dog Attack May Lead to Charges

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Northwest Cable News reported earlier this month on a tragic Washington dog attack story. “A week after she was attacked by pit bulls, a 65-year-old woman has died at a local hospital,” according to the cable news channel. The victim’s husband told the station he believes “the injuries from the attack triggered an underlying heart condition.”

According to NWCN, citing a report from Seattle TV station KING, the woman was attacked by two pit bulls while taking a walk near her home. The channel reports that bystanders helped pull the dogs off her and called for medical care. The animals were later destroyed.

Though the Pierce County, Washington Medical Examiner lists the cause of the woman’s death as “heart attack, injuries to the body and dog bites” the woman’s husband may be correct in believing that the dog attack was the key event triggering her subsequent heart attack. In my opinion, as a Washington and Oregon wrongful death attorney, legal questions surrounding this incident are likely to turn on the professional opinions of the doctors who treated the victim.

November 15, 2013

An Uncomfortable Truth About Bikes and Cars

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Last week the New York Times carried an op-ed piece on the subject of urban cycling, particularly bike commuting, that managed to be thoughtful, funny and harrowing all at the same time. Topped by the provocative headline: “Is it OK to kill cyclists?” the article cites numerous recent instances of fatal bike accidents from around the country in which bike riders were killed by drivers who then were subject to only the lightest of punishments.

A 24-year-old riding inside a bike lane in San Francisco was killed by a truck making a right turn and police issued no citation. A Seattle area teenager who ran over and killed a cyclist in 2011 was “issued only a $42 ticket for an ‘unsafe lane change’ because the kid hadn’t been drunk and, as (the police) saw it, had not been driving recklessly.” As the article rightly points out: “Laws in most states do give bicyclists full access to the road, but very few roads are designed to accommodate bicycles, and the speed and mass differentials – bikes sometimes slow traffic, only cyclists have much to fear from a crash – make sharing the road difficult to absorb at an emotional level.”

The writer cites a friend who advised him that the best survival strategy was to assume “that every driver was ‘a mouth-breathing drug addict with a murderous hatred for cyclists.’” On one level that is not necessarily bad advice, but the tragedy is that in this day and age it is even necessary. With cycling now, as the article notes, $6 billion industry and an outdoor activity whose popularity is surpassed only by running this is a subject that resonates far beyond the our own streets in legendarily bike-friendly Portland – a fact made clear that even here we suffer several fatal Oregon bike and car crashes every year.

November 7, 2013

Beaverton Police Work to Reinforce Oregon Traffic Safety

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The Oregonian highlights an initiative by Beaverton’s police that is good for the public, and could serve as a model for other communities across Oregon. According to the newspaper as part of a pedestrian safety initiative “more than 30 citations were issued and one arrest made” yesterday alone in Beaverton.

“Beaverton police patrolled Southwest Hall Boulevard and Broadway Street between 11 am and 1 pm to raise awareness and enforce pedestrian right of way laws… There were 25 crosswalk-related citations issued Wednesday and another seven for other traffic-related violations,” the paper reports, citing a Beaverton police spokesperson.

Let’s pause and think about that for a moment: more than 30 violations observed and ticketed by police in and around a single intersection over a period of just two hours on a weekday. The newspaper notes that two similar patrols elsewhere in the city during September resulted in “69 crosswalk-related citations and 23 citations for other traffic-related violations,” so it is fair to say that this week’s experience can be called typical. Many Oregon car accidents are avoidable – this kind of activity often leads to the most avoidable accidents of all.

October 31, 2013

Wrongful Death Award has Oregon Link

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The 2009 death of an Oregon-bound family on a California freeway led this week to an important wrongful death ruling by a court in our neighbor to the south. As reported by the Los Angeles Times a 13-year-old girl is now the only survivor of her family’s SUV accident. The family car hit the rear of an illegally parked truck near La Crescenta, California while on its way to Oregon for a Thanksgiving vacation.

According to the newspaper the truck’s driver was parked “in an area designated for emergencies only without his trailer lights or emergency reflectors on… (the driver’s) attorney argued at trial that his client had pulled over to the side of the road to take medication for a severe headache, which constituted an emergency.” The victim’s attorney, however, pointed out that the driver had given conflicting versions of the incident at different times, “including stopping to urinate and pulling over to sleep,” the Times reports.

When the family SUV burst into flames the teenage girl and her elder brother managed to reach safety but their parents and another brother were not able to get away from the burning car. The newspaper notes that the surviving brother “committed suicide in June, four days before his mother’s birthday,” a fact that highlights in the worst way imaginable the intense psychological trauma these two children have gone through.

October 29, 2013

The McDonalds Coffee Case and the Importance of Accurate Reporting

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A mini-documentary and accompanying article posted on the New York Times’ website last week are a timely reminder of the importance of both accurate reporting and of the role our courts play in helping ordinary Americans get the justice they deserve, even when facing off against large, deep-pocketed corporations.

The piece, part of the Times’ “Retro Report” series examining older stories people may only half-remember, focuses on the famous McDonald’s coffee case from the early 1990s. Note that I wrote “famous” not “well known”, because, as the documentary outlines, most of what people think they know about this case is wrong.

In the popular imagination the McDonald’s case is evidence of a personal injury law system run amok: an elderly woman collecting a lottery-sized settlement from McDonald’s after spilling coffee on herself. In many popular versions of the tale she suffered the burns while also driving the car with the coffee cup between her legs. As the documentary outlines the car was parked, the victim was in the passenger’s seat and her burns were severe enough to be life-threatening. The large settlement awarded in the initial trial was reduced by more than 80 percent on appeal. Perhaps most shocking, as the newspaper notes, “she was not one isolated case of scalding, there were hundreds – which amazingly did not move McDonald’s to change their policy on the temperature at which to keep the coffee.”

October 23, 2013

SafeKids Oregon Joins Teen Driver Safety Week Program

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Regular readers know that I am a strong supporter of SafeKids Oregon, so I’m pleased to share the fact that SafeKids Oregon has joined with other SafeKids organizations across America and overseas to promote Teen Driver Safety Week.

As SafeKids Oregon announces on their website (see link below), “although SafeKids primarily focuses on children ages 0 – 14, we believe that teaching safety to pre-drivers will help all children and youth be safer now and in the future.” This week’s activities are focused on social media as a way of making young soon-to-be drivers aware of the importance of safety and the responsibility that comes whenever they, or anyone else, sits down behind the wheel.

A key component of the Safety Week initiative is Teen Driver Source, an information-sharing program run by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. As the SafeKids website outlines, the initiative brings together “a team of researchers, educators and communicators from the Center for Injury Research and Prevention. The Teen Driver Safety Research Team takes a multidisciplinary approach to study the causes of teen driver-related crashes and then provides information, tools and other resources to help prevent these crashes.” Put another way, it offers tools that allow the lessons learned across the United States to be applied everywhere, rather than in just a particular city or state.

October 20, 2013

Accountability and Transparency

by Matthew D. Kaplan

With barely two weeks to go until election day voters in Washington won a victory this week even before they go to the polls to decide the fate of Initiative 522. According to an article published Friday in The Oregonian a major opponent of the GMO-labeling initiative bowed to pressure from the Washington State attorney general and agreed to disclose the names and contributions of major donors to an anti-522 campaign.

Washington State Initiative 522 would require the labeling of foods produced using genetically modified organisms, also known as GMOs. A similar ballot initiative in California failed in 2012 after a strong ‘vote no’ campaign funded by the food industry. With Washington voters scheduled to go to the polls on November 5 the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade group, “agreed to make public a long list of donors to its anti-labeling campaign after being sued this week by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. He charged that the Association violated the state’s disclosure laws by setting up an internal fund that solicited money from its members to fight the initiative,” the newspaper reports.

According to The Oregonian, the GMA has put over $7 million into the anti-522 campaign, with almost half of that coming just from Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle.

October 12, 2013

Proposed Bike Lane on Barbur Boulevard Would Increase Safety for Oregon Bikers

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The death of a Portland bike rider on Barbur Boulevard last August has given new urgency to proposals to change the balance of cars and bikes along this important commuting artery.

As a recent article in The Oregonian outlines, an advocacy group, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, is urging the ODOT “to put a harrowing section of the high-speed boulevard on a “road diet.” Essentially the group wants a northbound auto lane removed to make space for about two miles of buffered bike lanes and pedestrian paths in both directions of the critical north-south corridor.”

As one might expect many drivers are unhappy with this plan, citing the fact that, according to The Oregonian, ODOT relies on Barbur to relieve rush-hour traffic pressure on I-5. What is different about this dispute is the fact that commuting has emerged as the focus for both sides in this debate. Unusually for these sort of debates, the question is not one of balancing roadways against recreational bikeways but, rather, of balancing the needs of different types of commuters in a city that prides itself on its bike-friendly attitude. The paper reports that “nearly 800 bicycle commuters a day” travel along the route. For the cycling community Barbur is especially important as it offers a relatively flat route through hilly Southwest Portland.