North Carolina car accident reporting is often confounded by too much reliance on bad statistics and hasty conclusions. We live in a “we need more content, stat 24/7” society, and the web is notoriously littered with flagrant marketing pitches disguised as legitimate information.

With so many seemingly useful channels of input coming into your world, how can you know whom to trust? How can you gain clarity? In other words, how do you know when you’re “doing enough” to take care of your problem? How do you know when you need to find more resources, do more research, or just generate more ideas about how to solve a particular problem?

Exposed to lot of information, but not trained effectively for how to use it

As children, we were taught basic rules of learning. We were taught to read, to write, and hopefully, to think critically. But we grew up – or at least most of us grew up – in an era before the web invaded every aspect of our life, education, and culture. As a result, we have certain skills that are essentially useless: who needs to memorize historical dates anymore, when you can find out that trivia instantly using your cell phone?

Meanwhile, we are lacking in certain skills that are essential for navigating the modern web. How do we organize different inputs? How do we prioritize? How do we time manage effectively? How do we discern truth from fiction? How do we know which “authorities” to trust, when, and on what subjects? There are strategies and tactics for dealing with these questions, but almost no one learns them in school. We are forced to find them, ad hoc, as we become adults. And this can be difficult when you are facing challenges with respect to a North Carolina car accident or workers’ compensation claim or any other problem.

After all, if you are just trying to figure out who won the World Series in 1984 (The Tigers) or how to clean your garage in ten easy steps, the web makes it ridiculously easy for you. If you are trying to deal with a more complex topic, the web can help, but it can also hinder. Answers to complex problems require expertise in many domains – and they also require a kind of integrated sense of the problem. But you need people to help you navigate this information, not just information itself.

The team here at the law offices of Michael DeMayo is keenly aware of the challenges and struggles that accident victims face. We can help you regain some clarity and a sense of control not only by giving you powerful legal representation but also by helping you in other aspects of your case and your life. After all, you are not just your case – you are an integrated person with integrated needs. Yes, you want compensation and justice. But even more than that, you want clarity, and you want to regain a sense of control. Let us help you.

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Information alone is not enough

Why people matter

Whether you recently were hurt in a North Carolina car accident, or a friend or relative was injured in a truck or motorcycle crash, you have been thinking about safety quite a lot. You’re keenly aware of the hazards that North Carolina roads present – both supposedly safe highways like Interstate 95 or unpaved rural roads out in the far western corners of the state. Sometimes, it’s helpful to identify what you don’t want to do to highlight what you want to achieve. To that end, here are seven things that you can do that will ratchet up your likelihood of getting into a significant North Carolina auto accident.

#1. Drive only during horrible weather.

Is it snowing outside? Sleeting? Is there a hurricane on the horizon? If so, hop in your vehicle and drive. Be sure to drive with broken windshield wipers, a car that hasn’t been tuned in months if not years, and on roads that you are utterly unfamiliar with.

#2. Consume massive amounts of pharmaceutical medications, drugs, alcohol, etc.

(Note: this is a joke – do not actually do this. Same goes for all of the comments in this article—do not actually attempt these crazy ideas!)

#3. Stay up as long as you can and then hop behind the wheel.

Studies conducted by the National Sleep Foundation and by Australian researchers show that extremely fatigued people — those who stay up for more than 24 hours in a row, for instance — are actually more impaired than DUI drivers.

#4. You hear a rattle in your engine? Ignore it.
See how long you can drive your car before it literally falls apart on the road. Did you notice any warning lights in your dashboard? Ignore those. Is your car billowing black smoke every time you take it on the road? Forget about it. Follow these habits of carelessness and disrespect for your automobile, and you will increase your likelihood of getting into an injury accident.

#5. Ignore your bad habits.

Do you have a tendency to speed, blow through a certain stop sign on your way to work, or get aggressive when you feel like another driver has just you cut you off? If so, keep that up. Ignore those red flags. Ignore the concerns of friends or family members. Ignore the traffic citations you get for driving while yapping on your cell phone or texting your friend. No need to wear a helmet while driving a motorcycle. No need to undergo extensive training if you are going to drive the big rig. No need to change if all your friends call you an angry, scary driver. Just keep doing what you are doing, and disaster will almost surely follow.

#6. Ignore signs of deteriorating health and vision.

If you are a senior driver, and you no longer can see the road — if you are driving at 20 mph because you are so scared of crashing — by all means, don’t seek an intervention. Keep going until you literally drive off the road due to your degradation of skills and capacity.

#7. If you’ve been in a North Carolina car accident, ignore the lessons that can be gleaned from that.

Blame it on the other guy. Pretend it didn’t happen. Or otherwise live in a state of denial about your rights and responsibilities.

So those are seven sure fire ways to make your life more miserable, endanger yourself and others on the road, and potentially lead get arrested and thrown in jail.

On the other hand, if you want to make smarter, more strategic decisions regarding a recent accident, connect with an experienced, highly respected North Carolina auto accident law firm, such as DeMayo Law.

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Hidden Dangers of the Road

Catalogue of Bad Drivers

What if we raised the driving age to 24? How would that impact the number, size, and scope of our North Carolina car accident problem?

A suggestion like this would probably lead you to two immediate thoughts:

•    Of course raising the driving age by 8 years would reduce accidents, probably by a ton!
•    Such a proposal would never fly – and wouldn’t even be a good idea because of productivity loss and the straitjacket-like effect it would have on our state.

First of all, these are understandable thoughts to have.

But second, we might want to consider them more critically.

Yes, if we spiked the driving age significantly, there would be fewer drivers on the road. That in and of itself would probably lead to fewer overall accidents. Also, as drivers get older, they demonstrate more mature judgment and behave in a less impulsive fashion. On the other hand, drivers need to learn driving skills at some point. Teenage drivers don’t exactly have a great reputation for safety and stability and agility in crises. But it takes time to learn any skill. If we bumped up the driving age to 24 (or 21 or whatever), then we would probably have a lot more incompetent 21 or 24-year-old drivers on the road than we do right now. Plus, the temptation for underage drivers to get behind the wheel would be enormous – the amount of cheating would be probably huge and those cheaters would not have the benefit of standard driver ed courses.

So even if there were fewer overall kids driving, the kids who did get behind the wheel would probably be way more dangerous on average than the kids driving now. So you may not see substantial reduction in accidents – or as substantial as you might initially expect.

As far as the second point is concerned, you might be surprised at how easy it is to create social changes – like raising or lowering the voting age, driving age, etc. But there has to be a reason for the shift – and that reason has to be urgent and compelling and simple enough for a large group of people to get behind and support. With respect to the bumping up of the minimum driving age to 21 or 24, there just doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of support in that direction. Safety advocates should therefore spend their time searching for other methods and strategies and tactics to reduce North Carolina auto accidents.

If you’ve been injured or have suffered damages, talk to the team at the Law Offices of Michael A DeMayo today.

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Should we raise the minimum driving age?

The law of unintended consequences

What’s the link between chronic disease and car accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere? It’s an intriguing question – one that hasn’t been blogged about to death or discussed at length in the mainstream media. It’s no surprise that type 2 diabetes and associated diseases (e.g. obesity, Alzheimer’s disease) are on the rise in the United States. But when people talk about car accident safety – and crash prevention – they rarely, if ever, discuss how our diabetes/obesity epidemic (“diabesity epidemic”) might be creating hazards on the road.

Parsing the Statistics

Groups like the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration keep tabs on injury accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere. For instance, it’s a famously repeated fact that car accidents kill approximately 40,000 people on US roads annually. But if you look just at stats regarding injury accidents and property damage, you can easily get misled. DUI-related deaths might be down from 15 years ago, for instance, but what can we attribute that to? Are people just driving DUI less? Or are people driving DUI the same amount but getting into fewer accidents because of improved auto safety features or road engineering changes? With a system as complicated as the North Carolina highway system, you can never really be sure what changes cause what results because of the dynamism of the interacting variables.

This is a long way of getting at a key point: the dangers caused by the increasing number of diabetic North Carolinians behind the wheel may be masked by other changes to our driving habits and behaviors and proclivities!

For instance, it could be that diabetic drivers are slightly more likely to get into injury crashes due to diabetes-related fatigue or blood sugar issues. But maybe enhanced car safety features, such as antilock brakes and better airbags, mitigate the effects of the diabetes-induced errors. In other words, if you just look at the statistics, there is too much noise in the data for us to come to any conclusions.

On the other hand, common sense suggest that drivers who are diabetic and fatigued and who suffer from blood sugar swings — and who also might be on diabetes drugs and thus subject to side effects related to those drugs — might be riskier drivers. It would also then follow that, if we could figure out ways to reduce the number of North Carolinian diabetics– or improve the treatment for these diabetics – then we could make a subtle but not insignificant dent in the number and severity of car crashes!

Of course, that’s all a lot of speculation. Until we have hard science and good data, we can’t really make any conclusive statements.

Nevertheless, this idea of expanding our thinking can be useful, particularly if you or someone you care about is involved in a North Carolina car crash, and you are trying to figure out how and why the accident occurred and what you can do to get compensation and move on with your life. Step one is getting good help: connect with the Law Offices of Michael A DeMayo today for a free consultation.

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How Does Diabetes Affect Performance?

Diabetes and Driving

Whether you sustained a major injury in a North Carolina car crash, or you just suffered some fender bender type damage and emotional shock after getting rear-ended by a truck at a traffic light, you’re trying to come up with an appropriate way to process what you’ve been through.

This is difficult because, even if your friends and family members are sympathetic and if you have resources on your side like a competent North Carolina car crash law firm, the experience of being a victim can be incredibly isolating and terrifying. When we don’t process the accident correctly, from an emotional point of view, we can find ourselves hemmed in by our own irrational fears for months or even years after the disaster.

For instance, you might find yourself remarkably and paralyzingly afraid of getting behind the wheel again. The trauma of the accident is just too fresh and potent. On an intellectual level, you’d like to conquer this fear and get back out there. After all, you have a job to do, bills to pay, people to see, and errands to run. But on an emotional level, you’re having a very difficult time conceptualizing your limitations and getting beyond them. Maybe you’ve even tried things like hypnotherapy, talking therapy, cognitive behavioral approaches, etc to some effect.

Step one to dealing with fears like this is to acknowledge the extent and scope of the problem – as well as the limits that this problem are putting on your life. Be compassionate with yourself. Sure, you may suffer through thoughts to the effect “I’m so stupid, why am I so scared of something as silly as the prospect of driving to a 7-11?”

Fears like this – which may seem silly or irrational to others or even to yourself — often stem from far deeper and more complicated root causes. Just knowing that your accident was somehow involved won’t necessarily make the problem go away, either. You need to put attention on the problem and potentially try out various therapies and modalities to restore some balance and equilibrium in your life.

You may also need time. We live in a world in which we expect results instantly – not only from ourselves but also from our therapists and doctors and lawyers. But the reality is that, in some situations, you may need to invest a lot of time and energy just to make a problem go away. In some cases, success may not even be fully possible! In other words, it is at least conceivable that you may be afraid of driving for the reminder of your days. To reconcile with all this, you need to start to think about various ways you can reengineer your life.

For instance, you could try to make your driving fears less debilitating. You could also think about alternative tactics to use in your life to compensate. For instance, maybe your spouse could take care of all highway driving from here on out. Or maybe you could do more business and shopping online to avoid traveling via car. Or maybe you could take the bus to work or car pool.

In other words, your strategy could be a two-front approach:

1) Work on the fear itself. Find its root cause, and see what you can do to get over it or make it less debilitating.

2) Develop workarounds in your life to make things easier and less complicated for you.

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The Fear of Driving

Getting Over Phobias

On Saturday March 31st, the Charlotte Motor Speedway was rocked by a fatal North Carolina motorcycle accident that took the lives of two motorcyclists and send a third biker to the hospital in critical condition.

According to reports, the Vietnam Veterans’ Homecoming Celebration had been a raucous event – over 62,000 people showed up to celebrate the service of American Armed Forces who fought in the Vietnam War. The festival featured an exhibition of the Vietnam Memorial itself, a performance by the Charlie Daniels Band, and thousands of motorcyclists riding around the track.

A report from the Yahoo! Sports Bureau painted a pretty scary picture of this motorcycle circus: “Several witnesses interviewed by area newspapers indicate there was plenty of unsafe driving going on…many of the estimated 2,000 riders were not wearing helmets. Some riders were attempting to scale the speedway’s high-banked turns, which aren’t meant for slower-speed driving. Finally, there were reports that traffic was going both ways on the speedway, which, of course, has no lane markers to guide riders.”

If this report is even close to correct, it’s easy to understand why a fatal North Carolina motorcycle accident took place there. It all comes down to the law of averages. If you get enough dangerous drivers together doing dangerous things for a long enough period of time, horrors are going to unfold.

Unfortunately, many riders who engage in unsafe practices — like riding without a helmet or driving too fast or attempting tricks on their bikes — will look at articles like this and come to a conclusion like “that will never happen to me.” And chances are, on any given day, they will be right. Statistics are very, very difficult for us to understand on a visceral, emotional level.

If doing something like riding your motorcycle without a helmet increases your chances of a fatal collision by 15% over five years (not accurate figures), you might be alarmed. But say you broke that stat down to a day-to-day number. You’d likely only be very fractionally more likely to get hurt on any given day as a result of your “reckless driving.” Only when we see behavior in aggregate – over long periods of time or, in this case, seeing thousands of drivers all behaving irrationally in tandem – can you truly appreciate the potential dangers of behaving carelessly.

This analysis, by the way, is not intended in any way to diminish this tragedy or to make any comments about the accident itself. Rather, we want to highlight the disconnect. That is, when would-be reckless drivers see reports like this, they ignore the potential ramifications, and we don’t want you to ignore the ramifications because they could be important.

For help with a specific case, connect with an experienced North Carolina car and motorcycle crash law firm.

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Charlotte Motor Speedway Motorcycle Tragedy

Vietnam Veteran Festival

Auto accidents in North Carolina and elsewhere in our union take the lives of 40,000 million a year, injure millions more, and lead to untold indirect costs for the victims, their family members, their coworkers and associates, and society as a whole.
But what if automobiles are even more deadly as instruments of pollution than they are as instruments of destruction?

This may sound far-fetched. After all, 40,000 deaths a year is an enormous amount. But it is at least possible, given some science and suggestive research, to build a case that the pollution exuded by cars, trucks, motorcycles, and other transportation vehicles causes or contributes to thousands of deaths in the U.S. every year – perhaps more.

Witness, for instance, pretty scary epidemiological evidence that shows that people who live within a mile or so of Los Angeles’ notoriously congested freeways (like the 405) are substantially at greater risk for diseases like heart disease, asthma, and other respiratory problems. Now, not every person who inhales the pollution from the 405 is going to get heart disease and die from it. But the quality of life certainly might be affected. That person might have less energy. That person might be less able to think effectively and deal with emergency situations. So if the pollution itself directly kills, say, a few hundred people in the Los Angeles area alone annually (making those numbers up), maybe the indirect effect of the pollution could wreak yet more havoc.

Imagine, for instance, a person who lives in an apartment that’s abutting the freeway – who inhales massive amounts of particulate matter and toxins every day – and thus suffers deterioration in cognitive capacity. It’s easy to imagine that that person would get hurt at work easier or more easily lose his balance and slipping and suffer a terrible slip and fall. If you extrapolate and really think about the indirect consequences of our exposure to pollution – particularly in major cities like Los Angeles and goodly sized cities like Raleigh – perhaps our safety experts should be focused not just on car accident prevention in North Carolina but also on car pollution prevention.

Whether or not you agree with this thesis, hopefully you are getting to appreciate the holistic nature of auto accident science. As a victim – or a family member of a victim – in a recent car crash, you probably have a very specific way you’ve been thinking about the accident. You “know” who might be to blame, what kind of compensation you deserve and so forth. But to get best results, you need to look at your problems from different angles and get advice from objective, qualified resources, like a North Carolina auto accident law firm.

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Air Pollution in Los Angeles near the 405

How bad is our automobile pollution problem?

The North Carolina car accident prevention experts may be a little too boxed in and wanting for creativity. We typically think about auto safety prevention only in terms of the conventional wisdom about it – that people need to wear seatbelts more often, that drivers need to drive slower, that drivers need to stop text messaging and driving DUI, that roads need to be better built, that car parts need to be more durable and regularly inspected, etc.

There is nothing wrong with these conventional ideas about auto safety – provided that we subject them to rigorous scientific tests and make rational actions based on the data that we collect. But it’s very easy in the world of science and auto accident prevention to make logical errors that can redound to lead to more injuries/deaths… as well as lot of wasted time and opportunity. For instance, as intrepid researcher Tom Vanderbilt argued in his book, Traffic, the wide adoption of air bags should have led to a significant across the board decrease in injuries. But it didn’t. Vanderbilt theorizes that drivers who bought safer cars took extra liberties – drove a little bit faster, followed other cars a little more closely – because they felt safer. This slightly more reckless driving offset the safety related improvements.

The moral is: We need to be very, very careful when it comes to how we think about North Carolina car accident prevention. Along those lines, it certainly wouldn’t hurt us to theorize about “out of the box” solutions for car accident safety, such as:

•    Why not mandate that automobile drivers and passengers alike wear helmets for extra protection against head injury?
•    Why not publicly humiliate randomly selected “jerk drivers” to dissuade other would-be “jerks” out there from doings things like weaving across four lanes of traffic in one turn without even using a turn signal?
•    Why not conduct rigorous experiments to test which highway speed limits lead to the least fatalities and most driver satisfaction?
•    Why not experiment with an education campaign to encourage drivers to eliminate not just some distractions (e.g. cell phone conversations) but all distractions in the vehicle — such as conversations, listening to the radio, etc – to see whether a completely “distraction free” environment would enhance safety and driver focus?

These are obviously just speculative strategies. But it is important to think outside of the normal conventional ways of thinking about auto safety, if we want to really make major progress in reducing the terrifying numbers, such as the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration statistic that 40,000 Americans die every year in auto crashes.
For help dealing with a specific accident, connect with North Carolina car crash law firm today.

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Summary of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic

Out of the Box Safety Ideas

It happens every day: North Carolina car accidents occur. Reporters, bloggers, lawyers, and others weigh in about what they think happened and what they think “ought to be done” to fix the situation, compensate those hurt, and prevent similar crises from recurring.

Sure, it’s important to have a flourishing, open conversation about car accident safety and prevention. If we did not share information, exchange opinions, test theories against one another, etc., we would be doomed to repeat past mistakes.

On the other hand, there comes a point at which reporting about auto accidents in North Carolina becomes exploitive. What’s the value of the reporting? Is it simply to serve advertisers or to market a message? If so, that can be ethically dubious. On the other hand, if you are trying to provide a valuable message to people – extract lessons from the accident, draw meaning from it, reference it in a compassionate and mindful way – then said reporting can be powerful and helpful. Here are types of value that we can extract from examining North Carolina auto accident news stories:

•    Lessons in “what not to do”: The more that we reflect on bad habits and behaviors – driving DUI, driving recklessly, driving with a poorly maintained car, etc. – the more conscious we and our readers will be of our own driving weaknesses, and the more likely we will be to eliminate them or at least mitigate them.

•    Lessons for the greater good: An accident can highlight problematic systems and processes. For instance, if a reporter notices that one intersection in North Carolina tends to be a magnet for accidents, then by noting this coincidence and alerting the appropriate authorities, we might be able to reengineer the road to make it safer.

•    Lessons for what to do after an accident: In so many cases, victims of accidents panic after the event, which negatively impacts their ability to collect compensation, hold people to justice, and position themselves to feel better, long term, about their case. For instance, a victim might leave the scene of an accident without getting a police report or fail to document potentially helpful witness statements. By drawing attention to what victims could have done better to help themselves, reporting can serve a good purpose.

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The ethics of reporting on accidents

When we discuss North Carolina car accidents, we often oversimplify. For instance, you may learn about a driver who fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed into a school bus. You’d thus be likely leap to blame the driver’s lazyness or negligence for the catastrophe. This analysis might be correct. But we should not overlook simple, subtle, small things that can accumulate to create enhanced risk for accidents.

Consider, for instance, the fact that national holidays like the 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, and Super Bowl Sunday are more “dangerous” than normal days of the week. Why? The hypothesis is that more drivers, on average, drink and party on those days. Thus, there are more drunken drivers on the road. Thus, there are more drunk and driving related accidents.

Sounds simple enough, right?

But this idea hides a complex lesson. For instance, say in a typical town, you would have 20 DUI crashes on any given day; on a national holiday, you’d have 40 DUI crashes. But it’s not like only 20 people “got more drunk” than they normally would. The town’s population, as a whole, drank more than normal. So what you are seeing with these stats is a threshold effect! There probably were A LOT of people who drank a little more than they normally would. But the vast majority didn’t get into accidents because they did not reach the accident threshold – a combination of luck, genetics, etc.

We almost always pay attention to evidence above this threshold – seeing the DUI driver who caused an accident – but we don’t have a way of measuring the “dog that didn’t bite” – the DUI driver who got home safely.

Here is another way to think about this. Most people would never riot at a bar. But imagine if you’re at a bar, and your team wins. Suddenly people start getting rowdy and crazy and throwing chairs. You might “join the fun” and throw a glass or tip over a barstool or do something out of exuberance to be part of the crowd. You would never normally do that. But the social permission changes your behavior.

The moral is: we need to pay attention to small cumulative “things” that provoke us and misbehave on the road – driving under the influence of medication, for instance, or driving while fatigued, or driving long distances on roads that you are not used to driving on, etc. All these below the radar factors can influence your ability to drive safely.

If someone hurt you or someone you love in a car crash, an experienced car accident law firm in North Carolina can help you create a strategy to obtain justice and substantial compensation.

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Small Causes Add Up To Big Effects

The Threshold Effect