People often talk about crashes as if they were something that just happens. The truth is most crashes don’t just happen. Rather, someone causes them.
While it might sound like a different way to phrase the same thing, it is an important difference when it comes to getting personal injury compensation. You will need to show that the other party caused the crash. Or at least that their actions played a bigger role in causing the collision than yours.
People cause crashes
Research has found that driver-related factors are to blame for 90% of crashes. Here are some examples:
- Driving while tired: While driving while tired is something everyone probably ends up doing at some point, it increases the chance of a collision.
- Driving after consuming alcohol: Even the faintest amount of alcohol will negatively affect your driving ability. The legal limit is not a point below which you are safe to drive. It is just a cut-off point above which the police can automatically charge you.
- Speeding: Driving too fast for the conditions increases the chance a driver loses control of their vehicle. It also leaves them less time to react to a mistake by another driver.
- Misjudging another person’s thoughts: “I thought they were going to let me go” or “I thought they had seen me” are phrases you often hear after a collision. Trying to work out what another driver is thinking can lead to problems if you don’t build in a degree of caution.
If you end up injured in a collision someone else caused, you may need to learn how to demonstrate it was their fault.
