Rear-end accidents are one of the most common types of collisions in Buffalo, Clarence, Williamsville, Amherst and nationwide. After a rear-end accident, determining the crash cause is important in order to determine who should be held legally liable for all losses and damages incurred by victims. In some cases, a driver can be held criminally responsible for causing death or serious injury if he was grossly negligent or was impaired while driving and caused an accident to happen.

A personal injury lawyer knows that law enforcement officers will typically conduct a comprehensive investigation into an accident cause, especially if serious injury or death happened. One part of this investigation may involve asking the motorists who were in the crash to provide their cell phone records.

Cell Phone Records Can Shed Light on Rear-End Accident Causes

According to the Claims Journal, a rear-end accident that has made headlines is currently being investigated. The crash involved Olympian athlete and reality television star Bruce Jenner. There were a total of four vehicles in the chain-reaction rear-end crash that left one person dead. Each of the drivers involved in the accident, including Jenner, has been asked to provide their cellular phone records. If any of the drivers is not willing to turn those records over, it is likely that the sheriff’s investigators who have been assigned to determine the cause of the crash will subpoena the records.

The purpose of obtaining the records is to determine if any of the drivers was either talking on the phone during the crash or was involved in texting during the crash. Talking or texting does not automatically mean you are to blame for causing the accident. However, because these behaviors do significantly increase the risk of a collision due to delayed reaction times and impaired judgment, the fact that you were on the phone or texting can be a strong indicator that you may have been at least partly to blame for causing the rear-end or other accident to occur.

Police will look at your call log to determine if you may have been talking on the phone. Cell phone records provide information on the time a call came in or a time the call was made, as well as how long you were on each call. This makes it very easy for police to see whether you were talking at the time of the crash.

It is a little harder to see if you were texting. The problem is that when you are texting, only the delivery time of the text is displayed on the phone records. The time when you are typing or reading does not show up. However, if there were many text messages sent or received at around the time that the accident happened, this could create a strong presumption that you were probably texting at the time of the collision. In rear-end accidents, the rear driver i usually considered at least partly responsible because he has the obligation to make sure he leaves room to stop if the front driver does. Still, phone records could provide more info on whether the front driver may have alone done something wrong that led to the crash occurring.

Contact a Buffalo accident attorney at the Law Offices of James Morris at 800-477-9044 or visit http://www.jamesmorrislaw.com.  Serving Buffalo, Rochester, Williamsville, Amherst Cheektowaga and surrounding areas. Attorney advertising.

Speeding is a top cause of motor vehicle collisions and fatalities in Rochester, Buffalo, Clarence, Amherst and throughout the entire United States. A personal injury lawyer knows that around a third of deadly car accidents in this country involve a motorist who is exceeding the posted speed limit and/or who is driving at a speed that is not safe given the current road and weather conditions.

Speed cameras and ticketing by law enforcement officers are some of the different ways in which lawmakers try to force people to abide by speed limits. Still, drivers continue to go too fast. Now, Fox News reports that there is a new approach being taken to help to deter speeding drivers. This approach involves the use of the popular toll collecting device, EZ Pass.

Could EZ Pass Help Reduce Speeding?

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a third of all car accidents since 2003 that have resulted in fatalities have involved drivers who were going too fast. Highways and freeways are the site of approximately 30 percent of all of the deadly accidents in the country in which drivers are speeding. Only small local roads were the site of a higher percentage of speeding-related crashes, with about 38 percent of deaths caused by speeding occurring on these roads.

Preventing collisions on highways and freeways could save thousands of lives each year. In 2012 alone, 1,185 people died on U.S. interstates as a result of excess speed. In total over the course of that same year, there were 10,219 nationwide deaths on all roads due to speeding.

Many drivers traveling on highways and freeways use EZ Pass in order to avoid having to stop their vehicles to pay tolls. The EZ Pass goes in the front window of the vehicle and allows for electronic collection as the driver passes through the toll plaza.

Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland have now teamed up with EZ Pass so that a driver going through the toll plaza is also monitored for his speed. If the motorist is going too fast, he risks consequences. Currently, there is no system in place in which that driver is either ticketed or receives points on his license. Instead, a driver who is detected to be going over-the-limit is in danger of losing the use of his EZ Pass.

In Maryland, for example, a driver who exceeds the posted speed limit of 30 miles-per-hour in toll plazas could lose his EZ Pass for a period of 60 days. The driver will lose the use of the EZ Pass after two incidents in which he travels through the toll plaza at a speed that is at least 12 miles-per-hour over the speed limit.

There are some concerns in these states about privacy and about whether EZ Pass should be involved in speed monitoring. However, if this effort can save lives and reduce the dangers of interstate travel, the programs are likely here to stay and mores states may also move forward in an effort to improve their own road conditions.

Contact a Buffalo accident attorney at the Law Offices of James Morris at 800-477-9044 or visit www.jamesmorrislaw.com.  Serving Buffalo, Rochester, Williamsville, Amherst Cheektowaga and surrounding areas. Attorney advertising.