As a Seattle personal injury lawyer, I come across a lot of Seattle car accident injury victims and a lot of police reports. The most common reason that I come across for the cause of these car accident injury cases in the police report is distracted driving. It is hard to pinpoint which of these distracted driving cases are related to cell phone use or something else, but we can assume that most of them are due to technology distracting people in some way or another.
Distracted driving due to texting while driving or manipulating or reading a cellphone while driving is extremely under reported because of honesty of the victims. Let’s face it, not many people are willingly going to admit to a police officer that the cause of the car accident was that they were looking at their cell phone, which caused the car accident injury case. Most people are going to say that they either didn’t have enough time to stop because they looked at their radio or just didn’t leave enough space for the sudden stop of the vehicle in front of them.
Tailgating is another one of the major causes of car accident injury cases in Seattle. Tailgating is dangerous but many people do it because they don’t want another car to squeak in between them and the car in front of them, especially during rush hour traffic. Couple this type of driving with distracted driving and the ever growing number of apps on our phones and you get a recipe for many car accidents.
Seattle texting and driving laws are very lax due in large part to the specificity of the type of conduct that is illegal. The only thing that is outlawed as of this date is actually reading or texting a text message while driving. This means that people can text while their car is stopped and not moving. People can text at a stop light or stop sign. People can even search the internet or Facebook while driving because the only thing that is outlawed is texting while driving which is very strictly construed to literal text messaging. Text messaging does not include Facebook, email, internet, games, etc. I don’t understand how it doesn’t encompass all of these very similarly distracting means but it doesn’t.
Due to the strict meaning of texting while driving laws in Seattle, Seattle police have a hard time enforcing this law. For this reason, we will continue to see Seattle drivers continue to text and drive with little or no ramification, save for getting in a car accident and severely injuring themselves or others. Additionally, there is no punitive damages for car accident injury cases so your Seattle personal injury lawyer cannot get punitive damages to further penalize texting while driving people to send a message that this is highly dangerous driving.