If you or a loved one has been involved in a car wreck caused by a driver who was texting, you should be able to take legal action to recover compensation. An experienced Atlanta Car Accident Lawyer at Van Sant Law, LLC can help.
According to a Pew Research poll in 2011, 73 percent of American adults send and receive text messages. In just one month over the course of the same year, Americans sent and received more than 196 million text messages.
Unfortunately, some of these text messages are being read or sent when people are driving. Although texting and driving has been proven to be extremely dangerous and has been made illegal in the state of Georgia, some drivers disobey the rules and continue to text behind the wheel. These drivers are at significant risk of causing an auto accident.
The Dangers of Texting and Driving
While it is dangerous to talk on a cell phone or use any type of handheld device when driving, texting may be the most risky distracted driving behavior of all. Unfortunately, when a driver texts as he is driving, he looks away from the road for a long period of time and a good portion of his brain activity is devoted not to safe driving but instead to the texting behavior.
Distraction.gov, for example, indicates that a person who is sending or receiving a text message will look at his or her phone for an average of 4.6 seconds. During this 4.6 seconds, the driver is not looking at the road. Unfortunately, in this length of time, the driver might travel as far as the length of a football field without looking at the road if the driver was going at 55 miles per hour. A lot can happen during this time: the texting driver could go off the road, hit a pedestrian, or strike a motorcycle rider, bicyclist or other motorist.
The risk of a crash is so great when texting and driving that Distraction.gov reports a person who is texting is 23 times as likely to become involved in an auto accident. This is a significantly greater risk than even a person who is simply using a handheld device, as research shows someone using a handheld device is only four times as likely to get into a crash as compared with a driver who is not distracted at all.
Texting and Driving Puts Everyone at Risk
When a driver makes the decision to send or receive a text message while he or she is driving, he does not just endanger himself or the passengers in his car. Everyone who is on the road with the texting driver could potentially be in danger of becoming involved in a crash.
To prevent this danger, Georgia has instituted a ban on texting and driving that applies to all drivers. No drivers in the state are supposed to send or receive text messages. If a driver does, he is breaking the law.
Getting Legal Help from an Atlanta Car Accident Lawyer
Because Georgia has a law banning texting and driving, it can be easier to recover compensation in texting accidents than in other types of distracted driving cases. When someone breaks a safety rule or regulation and causes an accident as a result, the law says that person can be presumed to have been negligent and negligence doesn’t have to be separately proved.
You will, however, still have to show that the texting was the cause of the crash and you will need to demonstrate the extent of your injuries so that you can maximize the compensation available to you under the law. An experienced Atlanta Car Accident Lawyer from Van Sant Law, LLC can help you to gather your evidence and to build a strong claim so you can obtain monetary compensation for medical costs, lost wages, pain and suffering, emotional distress and other damages.
To learn more about how we can help, give us a call at tel:(800) 234-9556 or contact us online today to set up a free consultation.