A 17-year-old Nevada teen was sent to the hospital recently after a car crashed into a home that he was standing outside of. He suffered from head injuries which local reports say are non-life threatening.
The car was driven by a woman who told police that her door flew open and that she accidentally accelerated when she reached to close it. At that point the vehicle crashed into the nearby home and struck the local teen who was standing outside in the process.
A report from the National Transportation Safety Administration says that many injuries and deaths occur each year on the road because of drivers who are intoxicated but not above the legal blood alcohol content limit.
The current level of .08 percent still allows for about 10,000 drunk driving traffic deaths each year, according to experts. Safety advocates say that it is time to lower the legal limit and therefore lower the tolerance for even slightly impaired driving that could lead to a car accident.
There has been a lot of excitement here in Nevada about the possibilities for self-driving cards. Nevada is one of the first states to legalize the use of a self-driving vehicle, making it possible for technology and car companies to test the new technology on the open road in normal traffic conditions. This extensive testing has shown that the cars can be very safe - none of Google's self-driving vehicles have bene involved in a motor vehicle accident while the computer was driving. There has been one accident involving a self-driving model, but representatives from the tech giant say that a person was driving during that incident.
It is easy to see that the Las Vegas area has a problem with drunk driving. In the first four months of this year, the police had already arrested 1,844 drivers on suspicion of drunk driving. Compare that to last year, when police arrested just over 2,000 over the course of the entire year.
Drunk driving is not only dangerous for the driver and passengers, but for everyone on the road. Many thousands of innocent people are injured or killed in drunk driving accidents each year, yet many drivers in Las Vegas fail to take the issue seriously, insisting that they are OK to drive when they are intoxicated.
It only takes two seconds of having your eyes off of the road to miss an oncoming hazard or lose control of the car and cause a car accident. During those two seconds the probability that a driver will be involved in a car accident increases significantly, and it is this information that has led safety regulators to a variety of new rules designed to keep drivers eyes on the road.
The most well-known of these efforts has been the texting and general cellphone bans now active in Nevada and many other states around the country. Cellphone use has been a significant source of distraction, leading drivers to take their eyes off of the road for what they think is the brief touch of a button, but which can last for several seconds or longer, resulting in a car accident.
A recent study found that 20 percent of car accidents are caused by a fatigued driver. In past studies, researchers have reported a much lower percentage, closer to three or four percent. The new results are considered to be more accurate since they were based on observation of drivers over a period of time.
The study was rather exhaustive, looking at 110,000 events to determine which were caused by fatigue. Often, accident studies look at police reports or insurance paperwork to determine the causes, often established by statements from the people involved in the accident. In this study, however, researchers looked at recordings of what the drivers were doing in the minutes immediately before a crash or a near-crash incident and evaluating whether their behavior indicated that they were fatigued.
In another story about a vehicle crashing into a building, 10 people were hurt when a car drove through the patio area of a Las Vegas restaurant and shattered its plate glass window. Among the injured were four people who were run over by the car. The driver will likely face felony charges in connection with the car accident.
According to police, the driver collided with at least two other vehicles near an Egg & I restaurant near the Las Vegas Strip. The vehicle careened out of control and hurtled through the patio, where several diners were sitting. It was 12:30 p.m., the peak of lunch hour and there were about 150 patrons at the restaurant. The car crashed through the restaurant's front window and partially entered the restaurant before finally coming to a stop.
Local police arrested a man on suspicion of drunk driving recently after his car crashed into a home in his neighborhood. Reporters indicate that the car was speeding and swerving when police initially spotted him, leading officers to believe that he was intoxicated and prompting them to attempt to pull the vehicle over. The driver tried to evade officers, driving through an alleyway and then someone's yard before he eventually crashed into the house. He then got out of the car and continued to flee on foot but was apprehended a few blocks later.
Police administered a breath test which indicated that the man was intoxicated beyond the legal limit. He sustained only minor injuries during the ordeal and luckily no innocent bystanders were hurt in this drunk driving car accident.
A new and exciting clinical trial has recently started when researchers at one of the nation's top paralysis centers completed a successful transplant of nerve cells to treat a spinal cord injury. The first patient to undergo the surgery has made it past the initial healing stage without complications, making doctors hopeful about the long term results of the trial, which will hopefully enroll a total of eight patients who have suffered from a spinal cord injury.
Many readers have heard of using stem cells in treatments like this, but the new trial is working with a different type of cell, known as a Schwann cell, which is found in the nervous system.
Advocates for the trucking industry argued before a panel of federal appeals judges to eliminate the limits on consecutive driving time. Current federal regulations require drivers to take breaks after a certain number of hours in order to combat extreme fatigue which is linked to the many destructive and fatal truck accidents each year in the United States.
The lawsuit that was recently heard by the Court of Appeals was over a new version of the current regulation which would require truck drivers to be off of the road for two nights in a row. The rule specifies that the "nights" must be between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., which the industry says is too rigid of a standard and would require drivers to spend more time stuck in traffic.
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