Florida Rated as One of Eleven Danger States
The national automobile safety advocacy group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety recently released its 19th annual Roadmap of State Highway Safety Laws, a report rating all fifty states for the effectiveness of their traffic safety laws. Perhaps unsurprisingly for many Floridians, Florida was only one of eleven states that were rated as a “danger” state for its lack of many of even the most basic safety laws. Indeed, in overall scoring, only two states rated lower than Florida: Wyoming and Montana.
The Report’s Conclusions as to Florida’s Safety Laws
Florida had 3,753 traffic fatalities in 2021. While the Sunshine State does require the use of seatbelts by both drivers and passengers in the front seat, prohibits driving with open containers of alcohol and also bans texting while driving, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety identified a number of areas in which it believed the state was falling short, such as mandating the use of seatbelts by all backseat passengers (Florida only requires rear seat passengers 18 and under to wear seatbelts) and requiring both drivers and passengers on motorcycles to wear helmets. It also highlighted Florida’s lack of any laws that help contribute to less preventable traffic injuries or deaths among toddlers, younger children and teenagers like mandating a complete ban on cell phone use by beginning drivers, the use of only rear-facing car seats for children two years old and under or requiring the use of a car seat through the age of twelve.
Motorist Safety in Florida: It Starts and Ends with You
As a motorist in Florida, you know that ensuring that you stay safe is your own responsibility given how patchy and/or ineffective even many of the state’s existing safety laws are. As any Florida driver knows, many motorists do not follow even the limited safety laws they are supposed to in Florida, although those are indeed the law. Consequently, as a motorist in Florida, your own safety always begins and ends with you.
Contact Schwed, Adams & McGinley
At Schwed, Adams & McGinley, our experienced personal injury attorneys have more than 200 years of combined legal experience representing motorists who have been injured in every conceivable type of motor vehicle accident. As a motorist in Florida, you are in one of the most dangerous states in the country to be on the road. Therefore, you need to ensure that you take all precautions you can given both the lack of many basic traffic safety laws in the Sunshine State as well as the disproportionate number of accidents in Florida as compared to other states. The results of not doing so can be deadly. However, if you are injured because of another motorist’s negligence, then you are entitled to seek compensation for your injuries from that motorist. Therefore, if you have been injured in a motor vehicle accident in the Sunshine State, contact our experienced personal injury attorneys today at contact@schwedlaw.com or (877) 694-6079 today.