No one expects to become the victim of a traffic accident when driving to work in the morning or to dinner at a favorite restaurant that night.
Unfortunately, accidents happen. Crashes between motor vehicles, including angled collisions, cause more medically consulted injuries than crashes with fixed objects.
Types of vehicle crashes
Crashes that result in injury or death include collisions between vehicles and fixed objects, collisions with pedestrians and non-collisions, such as rollovers. According to the National Safety Council (NSC), crashes between motor vehicles represented only 42% of the total in 2018 but they were responsible for 79% of all injuries.
Dangerous angled collisions
Angled collisions are those that occur between two vehicles traveling in the same direction. The collisions often happen in heavy traffic where vehicles merge or when one vehicle strikes an object such as a guard rail and caroms into an adjacent vehicle. Because the sides of cars lack fewer safety features than the front or rear, angled collisions account for about 35% of all serious and fatal injuries.
Medically consulted injuries
Statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show that from 2005 to 2018, the percentage of drivers using cell phones increased by 1,500%. The NSC estimates that drivers using cell phones cause 6 million crashes each year, many of which involve medically consulted injuries. This kind of injury is one that is serious enough to require the attention of a medical professional. In 2019, there were 4,423,000 non-fatal injuries of this type resulting from vehicle crashes such as angled collisions. A crash victim with serious injuries will often face hospitalization, a lengthy recovery and mounting medical expenses. However, an advocate can focus on obtaining financial compensation sufficient to cover the patient’s current and future medical bills, loss of income and more.