If you, a family member, or a friend was recently seriously hurt in a North Carolina bicycle accident, and you or the other victim was not wearing your helmet, you likely will face contempt from would-be sympathetic family, friends, and colleagues.

No doubt, you are probably kicking yourself right now, wondering why you ever thought it would be wise or safe to bike without a safety helmet. In this blog post, we are going to bypass the typical recriminations and root out the fundamental reasons why you – or anyone – would hop on a bicycle without the proper safety gear.

Did you not understand the risks?

Perhaps you failed to understand WHY wearing a helmet is critical. Chances are, this was not the case. But if you do need a refresher on why helmet use is encouraged – and the dangers of failing to wear a bicycle helmet – please see the link at the bottom of this article.

If you knew biking without a helmet was dangerous, why did you do it?

This is the mission-critical question. Chances are, at least part of you knew that you should wear a helmet while biking. So here are some possible explanations:

• Perhaps you didn’t have a helmet.
• Perhaps you planned to go for a short bike ride – to a friend’s house in an adjoining neighborhood, for instance – and you figured that you didn’t really need one.
• Perhaps you wanted to “look cool” and impress your daredevil friends.
• Perhaps you have a medical condition that makes it very uncomfortable to wear a helmet.
• Perhaps you have a psychological fear of putting on your helmet.
• Perhaps your helmet was difficult to adjust or “figure out,” and you didn’t want to bother reading your manual or asking a friend to help you learn how to put it on.
• Perhaps you “spaced out” because you were concentrating on some other task, like delivering a paper, seeing a long lost friend, or simply “enjoying the day.”

Most North Carolina bike accident safety analysts would drill down as far as we’ve currently drilled down and then stop.

But that might be a mistake.

After all, even if the reason you didn’t wear a helmet was as simple as — “I just didn’t feel like wearing a helmet because the helmet I have is ugly and uncomfortable” — doesn’t mean you have exposed the ultimate cause of your reckless behavior. Unless you address that ultimate cause, you might put yourself at risk for future accidents and more injuries.

At the same time, you will likely need a creditable, reputable help from a North Carolina bike accident law firm to protect your rights and hold another driver or even the manufacturer of your bicycle or helmet responsible for damages.

More Web Resources:

Bike accident helmet statistics

Why don’t you wear a helmet?

In Part 1 of our discussion on the root cause of North Carolina bicycle accidents, we discussed some of the superficial reasons why some bikers fail to wear proper head protection, including:

• “I didn’t know that not wearing a helmet was dangerous.”
• “My helmet is ugly/uncomfortable/weird looking/confusing to put on.”
• “I didn’t want to look like a dork in front my friends.”
• “I just plum forgot.”

And as we discussed earlier in the week, most analysts consider these explanations to be root causes. However, this kind of analysis probably fails to expose certain fundamental beliefs or bad behaviors that may put you and others at risk in the future – risk not only for other North Carolina bike accidents, but also for accidents and injuries that have nothing to do with biking.

So, let’s drill down.

Let’s take one of the “excuses” – “I didn’t want to look like a dork in front my friends” – and unpack it. Why might someone say this? Let’s ask a theoretical daredevil 14-year-old boy why he is afraid of “looking like a dork” in front of his friends.

Theoretical 14-year-old: “Because dorks don’t have friends.”

Questioner: “So, you felt embarrassed at the thought of wearing your helmet because you have a strong need for acceptance and friendship.”

Theoretical 14-year-old: “Pretty much, yeah.”

Through this exercise, you expose that the 14-year-old has a compelling need to be accepted amongst his peers. This fundamental drive – to be accepted by his peers – is not necessarily good or bad. It’s just strong. And since it is strong, it has a potential to drive the 14-year-old to do other risky things that have nothing to do with helmet use.

The solution, therefore, should focus on encouraging the teenager to meet his needs for acceptance and friendship in ways that don’t violate your need (as a parent or caregiver) to protect him from harming himself or others.

Once you have this frame of mind, you can devise the appropriate strategies. These strategies would not necessarily work for a biker who said, “I don’t want to use my helmet because my helmet was too tight.” In that case, some very different fundamental feelings, needs, and root causes would have to be addressed.

For powerful insights into your case, connect with a competent North Carolina bike accident law firm.

More Web Resources:

Drilling down to find the root cause of an accident.

Building strategies around feelings and needs instead of around blame and punishment.

Modern life is tough. Stresses abound, even for the relatively affluent here in North Carolina, due to the tumultuous economy. Do these stresses contribute to North Carolina car accidents? If so, how much do they contribute, and what can we do about the problem?

First, let’s dissect the issue before we embark on the more complicated task of “fixing” things.

When most safety analysts examine the “etiology” of North Carolina car accidents, they focus on relatively proximate factors. For instance, you might focus on whether the driver had been drinking alcohol, whether the car was well maintained, whether the roads were correctly engineered and the signage up-to-date, etc.

But rarely do analysts examine the more global, chronic factors that might be at play, at least in part, in many accidents. Chronic stress might be one of these. Here is the thinking. When drivers experience chronic stress, they fail to respond quickly to new situations. Reaction time is slow. One’s ability to “see other drivers as human,” the theme that traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt often comes back to in his work, diminishes.

Chronic stress may also lead people to embark on destructive behaviors or activities that further impair their ability to drive. For instance, drivers may smoke, consume alcohol, take antidepressant medications, drive while angry, drive while distracted on a cell phone, etc. Obviously, this thinking is somewhat speculative. To really establish a causal link between chronic stress and North Carolina car accidents, you would have to do some serious investigation. However, it is grist for the mill.

If we can assume that chronic stress does cause or at least contribute to crashes, then accident prevention experts should immediately ask themselves: How could we collectively better manage stress?

Stress management is an enormously broad topic. However, researchers like Jon Kabat Zinn (who is famous for his “mindfulness-based stress reduction program”) suggest that the attenuation of our attention can be fixed through the use of meditation, introspection, rest, and better nutrition. Reducing our chronic stress can, in turn, lower accident rates.

Call a North Carolina car accident law firm if you have questions or concerns about a matter.

More Web Resources:

John Kabat Zinn and mindfulness-based stress reduction.

Chronic stress dangers.

If you or a family member has recently been victimized in a North Carolina car, motorcycle, or truck accident, you are likely committed to “seeing justice done” and getting fair compensation. These are laudable goals.

However, in our rush to hold others accountable for what happened, we can make errors of attribution (blaming the wrong person, company, or other factor), which can not only lead to unfair results (e.g. an innocent person being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for your injuries) but can also destroy a potentially good case against the truly negligent/careless party.

That’s all a little heady. So let’s break it down.

Think about a theoretical North Carolina truck accident. Say, as you were merging onto I-95, a trucker drifted into your lane and forced you off the road. Although you managed to stabilize your vehicle and prevent catastrophe, you and your family were shaken up, and you suffered severe whiplash, which may ultimately cost you tens of thousands of dollars in chiropractic bills and other medical care.

Your instinct might be to sue the trucker, the trucking company, or some other entity that might be responsible (e.g. an insurance company). You might be right. However, a more detailed investigation – conducted by an experienced North Carolina truck accident law firm, for instance – might reveal that the trucker behaved appropriately for the situation. The real cause of the crash had nothing to do with bad driving. It had to do with bad road design.

The highway was engineered in such a way that accidents like yours were relatively likely, given visibility conditions, signage posted, etc. In this case, the culpable party would be the authority that designed that section of the freeway.

It’s important to get these things right both to minimize unfairness and to minimize the chances that your case will be diminished or destroyed by new revelations.

To build a smart defense, connect with a North Carolina truck accident law firm today.

More Web Resources:

The danger of jumping to conclusions.

How to avoid rushing to judgment.

When most pundits, policy analysts, and driving instructors talk about ways to eliminate North Carolina car accidents – to reduce their severity or impact on drivers and passengers – they focus on commonsense precautions, such as these:

• Avoid speaking on your cell phone or text messaging while driving;
• Avoid driving with pets loose in your car;
• Avoid driving during certain dangerous times of day (Friday and Saturday nights, e.g. and holidays like Memorial Day or the Super Bowl);
• Avoid driving while under the influence of drugs or alcohol;
• Avoid driving while overly fatigued;
• Avoid rubbernecking;
• Reduce the amount of driving time that you do on a typical day; etc

Many of these tips are common sense, and many are likely grounded in good – or at least reasonably good – scientific analysis.

However, North Carolina car crash prevention experts are probably neglecting a very important idea. Clearly, drivers who are distracted have a higher risk of accidents. So why not consider the possibility that eliminating as many distractions as possible – including distracting thoughts, themselves! – might lower accident risk?

Most of us drive on automatic pilot. Yes, we ostensibly pay attention to the road. But we also do things like think about emails we have to write, imagine conversations with our spouses, and even mull over topics we hear on the radio. What if, instead of allowing our thoughts to ramble on like that, pointlessly, we instead purposefully spent energy and time and attention attending to the driving itself?

In other words, what if we put extra effort into perceiving the road, watching for danger, being attuned to our own habits (both good and bad) etc? Would this kind of extra mindful driving be more protective against North Carolina car accidents than normal, standard “safe” driving that’s nevertheless often inhibited by distracting thoughts?

Obviously, there probably are not a lot of good scientific studies that examine the value and merits of this hypothesis. However, given everything that science has shown us about the dangers of distracted driving, the suggestion that stripping away thought distractions would lead to safer driving is far from absurd.

On a less theoretical note, if you need help with a specific question regarding a claim, connect with a thoughtful, compassionate, experienced North Carolina car accident law firm.

More Web Resources;

The dangers of distracted driving

Mindful driving

It’s never a bad idea to ask the “why” question.

WHY are you thinking about taking legal action against a person or a company for a recent North Carolina auto accident? What’s your purpose? How might victory or success redound to help you and your family?

Your first inclination when you read a question like this might be to roll your eyes. Of course you understand “why” you are doing what you are doing. Someone took advantage of you on the road. Or maybe your bucket of bolts fell apart on the highway. And you want justice. You want compensation. You want to be paid back for the physical, mental, and financial harm that you’ve suffered (or will suffer) as a result of the disaster.

While these motivations are all very understandable (and very common), they are somewhat superficial.

Gaining a deeper sense of clarity of purpose may give you more tools and options and ensure that you make smarter decisions going forward. Spending time to examine your fundamental motivations for taking legal action can also help you meet more of your underlying needs.

So how can you probe for these deeper motivations? One interesting method is to borrow a process developed by Toyota called the “Five whys.” Essentially, you take any question that’s on your mind – any problem that’s keeping you up at night – and you drill down to identify the core reasons behind your actions.

Here is an example of this method in action.

Why #1: Why do you want to sue John Doe for your North Carolina car accident?

Answer: Because that idiot cut me off in traffic and forced me to drive my car into a telephone pole.

Why #2: And why was that incident a problem?

Answer: Obviously, because the guy nearly killed me. I have a need to be safe on the roads.

Why #3: Why is it important to you to drive safely and avoid accidents?

Answer: Because I want to live a long life and spend a lot of time with my family.

Why #4: And why is a long life and spending a lot of time with your family important?

Answer: Because being with my family is a fundamental source of joy for me.

In this case, we don’t need to drill down any further – go to the fifth why – because we’ve already arrived at an important conclusion. What’s motivating this person is a deep need to spend time with his family. So it’s a lot more than a quest for dollars or a quest for vengeance. It is about preserving this fundamental need to cherish his most fundamental human connections.

All that said, while it’s important to identify your motivations, you also need good strategies and tactics to get results. Connect with an experienced North Carolina car accident law firm today to start that process.

More Web Resources:

Five Whys

What’s your real motivation?

You and/or a close family member was recently involved in a traumatic, terrifying, possibly catastrophic North Carolina car, motorcycle, truck, or bus accident.

In the hours, days, or weeks since, you have been trying to pick up the pieces of your life and put them back together again. One strategy you might deploy – the sooner the better – is to connect with an experienced North Carolina car accident law firm to go over your strategic and tactical opportunities to recover damages and hold wrongdoers to legal account.

Beyond that, you also face day-to-day stresses. Specifically, you may face a certain pregnant silence with friends, co-workers, or possibly even close family members when the topic of your accident comes up. You know what happened. The other person knows something about what happened. Or maybe knows only bits or pieces. But the disconnect between the other person’s curiosity, interest, concern, etc., and your ability or emotional tolerance for talking about what happened may be quite big.

This gulf creates social tension.

The other person may want to know about the accident and push your boundaries. Or you might feel “weird” talking about the shocking nature of the accident, since you don’t want to disturb the other person with your legal, financial, medical, or logistical concerns.

So what can you do to ease this small but surprisingly vexing social problem?

One strategy is to prepare “talking points” about the accident so you can quickly dispatch with common queries. Write out scripted responses for common questions. Memorize them, or at least read them over a few times, so you feel more prepared about how to deal with the questions.

Another strategy is to practice “being in the moment” whenever conversations about the accident arise. In other words, don’t pre-prepare. But prepare to be thrown off of your game. Recognize that the topic of your accident will come up from time to time, and steel yourself, emotionally and otherwise, to manage your feelings about those conversations.

Say a careless co-worker, for instance, won’t stop bugging you with questions about the accident. Just pay attention to your emotional state and, in no-nonsense terms, tell the person to stop bugging you and/or give yourself some “soothing time” after the experience. For instance, take a nice bath, talk to a friend about the traumatic conversation, or engage in something restful and refreshing, like exercise, meditation, yoga, sleep, etc.

More web resources:

Socially awkward situations

How To Say “I don’t want To Talk About It”

The pundits, politicians, bloggers, and soothsayers who study the problem of North Carolina truck accidents – and who mull over policy solutions to prevent horrific crashes or at least make accidents slightly less horrific – rarely explore “out of the box” initiatives. That’s understandable. Our policymakers like to ground their ideas in good science and research.

However, from time to time, it may help to consider counterintuitive solutions. Here is one of those: What if we improved technology to reduce the load burden on trucks, thereby reducing the volume of trucks on our state’s roads?

With fewer trucks on the roads, there would be fewer truck accidents.

Let’s walk through the logic a little more carefully. Thanks to information-sharing technologies, social networking, and other web- and mobile-assisted mechanisms, people in North Carolina can now access goods and services virtually. Thus, in some areas of our lives, we depend less on real “brick and mortar” supplies to help us and more on virtual solutions. For instance, instead of buying an alarm clock, you can just buy an alarm clock app on your phone. This reduces (in a small way) the amount of materials that need to be shipped, purchased, wrapped, etc.

Think about this more broadly: Imagine what might happen if we found solutions that allowed us to “outsource” many of the tasks that we now delegate to real objects. Obviously, you can’t “download” a chair to sit on. But you can download books and magazines, and you can also download systems and structures. It might take some creativity to figure out “virtual solutions” to problems like “how do I cook my dinner?” and “how do I build my porch addition?” And virtual solutions will only reduce our needs for real goods – they won’t replace them all together, unless we end up, in the distant future, living in some dystopian world, like out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Until then, however, we can start to think creatively about how to reduce our shipping footprint and reduce the need to ship so much stuff. If we did that, we could reduce the number of trucks on the road and thus cut down on the number of serious North Carolina truck accidents.

Need more help? Connect with an experienced North Carolina truck accident law firm.

More web resources:

Why “Going Virtual” Equals “Going Green”

How More and More of Our Lives Are Becoming Virtual