Deaths from Red Light Runners on the Rise in Ft. Lauderdale
Fort Lauderdale car accident lawyer Joseph Lipsky reports the results of a recently released AAA study which show wrongful deaths caused by motorists running red lights reached a 10-year high last year. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reports that nearly 1000 people lost their lives last year when a driver disregarded or tried to beat a red light. The number of preventable deaths rose on a year by year basis by more than thirty percent over the past decade. This deadly trend represents the fifth straight year of deaths attributed to red light crashes. The AAA study monitored everyone killed in a traffic light crash, including the driver, passengers and pedestrians and cyclists.
Not to stress this point, but according to Jack Nelson, the AAA director of traffic safety and research, “this is at least two people killed every day at the hands of drivers blowing through red lights.”
While the purpose of the study was not to determine the reason for the increase in red-light related car accident deaths, the AAA still postulated that one contributing factor is that we are driving more as a society. According to the data AAA tracked, the average number of miles motorist drove over the last ten years, since the great depression, increased by more than five percent, a figure confirmed by the Federal Highway Administration. Other uncontroverted factors include the exponential rise in the number of so-called smartphones being used by drivers and the increase in in-vehicle information and entertainment systems.