Chief among the causes of major highway pileups are bad conditions and plain bad driving. With more and more cars on the road, it can be expected that there will be a patch of inattentive drivers ready to form a pileup.
So, how can you avoid a pileup? You must avoid the common causes.
- Check the weather. If visibility is low or the roads are very wet, pileups are much more likely. If you must drive in poor weather conditions, increase your following distance to account for increased braking time and shorter sight distance.
- Drive the speed limit. This piece of advice of obvious, but so many of us fail to follow it on a daily basis. Certainly, slowpokes on the highway are dangerous, but so are speeds in excess of the design speed of the road. If weather conditions are poor, account appropriately for the poor conditions by reducing your speed.
- Don’t tailgate. Especially if conditions are poor, the key cause of pileups is that drivers don’t have time to stop. If you follow too closely, you simply can’t brake in time, both because of human response time and braking time.
- Finally, pay attention. Especially if conditions are bad, concentrate on the road. On the German autobahn, cupholders were once rare for this reason. Driving is an activity that requires attention. Make sure that your attention is not on your cell phone or fiddling with the air conditioning or radio. These distractions often turn out to be deadly.
Serious Car Accident Attorneys of Reeves, Aiken & Hightower
If you or a loved one has been injured or killed in a car accident, you need a serious car accident attorney like those at Reeves, Aiken & Hightower. Review our credentials, make sure that we are right for you, and call us at 877-374-5999, or contact us here, for a private consultation.