Car accident
Car accidents are accidental damaging events that involve automobiles that someone is driving. Damage can occur to one or more autos, people, or structures. Car accidents--also called traffic accidents, auto accidents, road accidents, and motor vehicle accidents--are responsible for thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities each year. Worldwide, 1 million people die each year in car accidents (a 2002 statistic).
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Terminology issues
There is a debate about the use of the word accident in the context of motor-vehicle incidents. Often the incident is the result of carelessness or deliberate dangerous driving, rather than of a circumstance that is totally beyond the control of one or more of those involved. Some road traffic safety authorities have started using alternative expressions such as car crashes in an attempt to educate and emphasise to drivers that these incidents are in many cases entirely avoidable. Further, in some areas (e.g. Victoria (Australia)), consideration is being given to counting single-vehicle single-occupant road traffic crash fatalities in that state's suicide statistics as well as the road toll statistics.
Responsibility of car manufacturers
Car makers have been both accused of making cars that go too fast, and praised for the safety measures (such as ABS) found in new models.
Trends in accident statistics
Road toll figures show that there has been a reduction in car accident fatalities since 1980, with most countries showing a reduction of 50% or so. This appears to show that safety measures introduced since then do work (assuming that driver behaviour has not changed significantly). Some feel that the expected improvements should be greater. Several explanations have been proposed:
- The number of cars is increasing, leading to more congested traffic. This argument is disputed - for example, the road toll in Australia is only about half that of the UK, despite the latter country's more than threefold size of population in an area 1/30th of the size.
- A safer car increases the perceived safety level, inducing the driver to go at higher speeds - in fact there is strong evidence to suggest that every safety advantage conferred by technology is eroded by modified driver behaviour.
- Some types of cars may be inherently less safe (see for example SUV)
- More in-car tech toys exist today. These can distract the driver from the road. These include: cell phones, TVs, pagers, computer notebooks, portable CD and DVD players, laptop computers, electronic games, computer games, GPS navigators, digital recorders, cam corders, radar detectors, and others.
Types of accidents
Car accidents can be divided into some major categories:
- Rear-end collisions
- Side collisions
- Rollovers
- Head-on collisions
- Single-car accidents
- Pile-ups
Collisions can occur with other automobiles, other vehicles such as bicycles or trucks, with pedestrians, and with stationary structures or objects, such as trees or road signs.
In a collision between two cars, the occupants of a car with the lower mass are likely to suffer the greater consequences. See: crash incompatibility.
Causes of accidents
Many factors result in car accidents, sometimes multiple causes in a single accident. Factors include the following:
- Driver distraction, including fiddling with technical devices as noted previously, talking with passengers, eating or grooming in the car, dealing with children or pets in the back seat, or attempting to retrieve dropped items.
- Driver impairment by tiredness, illness, alcohol or drugs, both legal and illegal. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is an organization made up of the families of the dead who were killed in car accidents caused by drunk drivers.
- Mechanical failure, including flat tires or tires blowing out, brake failure, axle failure, steering mechanism failure.
- Road conditions, including foreign obstacles or substances on the road surface; rain, ice, or snow making the roads slick; road damage including pot holes.
- Speed exceeding safe conditions, such as the speed for which the road was designed, the road condition, the weather, the speed of surrounding motorists, and so on.
Most authorities emphasise speed as an inherent cause of accidents in itself, though most experts agree that speed alone is rarely a prime cause of accidents, though naturally a mis-application of speed can be a contributing factor, and higher speed in an accident resulting from whatever cause is more likely to have fatal consequences. Critics of the "speed kills" mentality claim that this approach ignores the complex factors that are involved in accidents, and thus it amounts to little more than a simplistic "quick fix" or political solution that does nothing to address the true causes of accidents. Proponents state that going slower at least can do no harm, and that physics is on their side, since the outcome of an accident largely depends on the energy dissipated in a crash, and that energy rises as the square of velocity, according to the equation E = 0.5mv2, where E is the energy, m is the mass, and v is the velocity.
Legal consequences
Car accidents generally have legal consequences that are proportional to the severity of the accident. In nearly all common law jurisdictions, there is some kind of requirement that parties involved in a collision (even with only stationary property) must stop at the scene, and exchange insurance or identification information or summon the police.
Parties involved in an accident may face criminal liability, civil liability, or both. Usually, the state starts a prosecution only if someone is severely injured or killed, or if one of the drivers involved was clearly intoxicated or otherwise impaired at the time the accident occurred. Charges might include driving under the influence of alcohol, manslaughter, or murder; penalties range from fines to jail time to prison time to death.
As for civil liability, an unfortunate side effect of the popularity of motor vehicles is that automobile accident personal injury lawsuits have become the most common type of tort. Because these cases have been litigated so often in the developed First World nations, the legal questions usually turn out to have been answered in previous cases, and the only real issue for a court to decide is the factual question of who is at fault.
Rubbernecking
Rubbernecking is where drivers slow down to look at accidents or anything out of the ordinary on the highway. Events ranging from gruesome car accidents to a police car stopped on the shoulder can cause traffic jams on both sides of the road, even if the roadway has been cleared.
Although caution is advised when there is unexpected activity on the side of a road, a car with a flat tire on the side of a highway often causes as much slow down as a real accident would due to rubbernecking. The slowdown in traffic persists even after the accident scene has been cleared if traffic is dense. Traffic experts called this phenomenon a phantom accident. Often this behavior causes additional and sometimes more serious accidents among the rubberneckers.
Accident prevention
Although many accidents are caused by behavior that is difficult to alter, by mechanical failure, or by road conditions, some technical solutions are becoming more widely available to prevent accidents:
- Proximity monitors: These would automatically detect how close you were traveling to the car in front of you and automatically adjust your car's accelleration to prevent you from getting closer than you can safely stop at your current speed.
- Sobriety detectors: These locks prevent the ignition key from working if the driver breathes into one and is shown to have consumed alcohol.
- Drifting monitors: These devices monitor how close a vehicle is traveling to lane markers and, if it starts to drift toward or over the markers without the turn signal being activated, sounds an alarm.
In most developed countries, young (under 25 years old) male drivers have been shown to be by far the most likely to be involved in a car accident, and this has become an area of focus in recent times. Reasons suggested for this prevalence include over-confidence, peer pressure, showing off and even neurological development arguments. In addition most serious accidents occur at night and when the car has multiple occupants. This has led to some discussion of the following proposals:
- A "curfew" imposed on young drivers to prevent them driving at night.
- Requiring an experienced supervisor to chaperone the less experienced driver.
- Forbidding the carrying of passengers.
- Zero alcohol tolerance.
- Compulsory advanced driving courses.
Some countries or states have already implemented some of these, but so far no overall consensus to a total solution has been reached. It should be noted that this prevalence has long been noted by insurance companies, and premums reflect that - however, very high premiums for young male drivers does not seem to have had a significant impact on the accident statistics, suggesting that these drivers simply accept the high premiums as part of the "on road" costs of mobility.
See also
[[he:תאונת דרכים]]
ja:交通事故
Categories: Car safety | Road transport