When you find yourself sitting in heavy traffic, it’s easy to crawl out of your skin. Even if it’s something you deal with every day of your life, it doesn’t change the frustration level.
It’s critical that you never look past the steps you can take to maintain your safety when navigating heavy traffic. If you do, you could end up suffering a serious injury in an accident.
Understanding the top causes of motor vehicle accidents in traffic can help you prevent trouble. Here are a few to be aware of:
- Being impatient: If you begin to look for ways to speed up, such as passing other vehicles on the shoulder, you take risks that you would otherwise avoid. It’s easy to become impatient in traffic, but you need to take a deep breath and deal with what’s in front of you.
- Distracted driving: When traffic backs up, it’s natural to search your vehicle for ways to stay occupied and pass the time. This can lead you to scan the radio stations, text your friends, make a phone call or turn around to chat with your children in the backseat. All of these distractions, among others, put you at risk of an accident.
- Reckless driving: This takes on many forms in heavy traffic, such as continually changing lanes, changing lanes without signaling, lane splitting and yelling at other drivers.
- Following too closely: Slow traffic makes it much easier to drive closely to the vehicle in front of yours. It’s tempting, especially in bumper to bumper traffic, but leave a few extra car lengths to enhance your safety.
Safe drivers know how important it is to avoid any behavior that increases the risk of an accident. However, even if you fall into this group, another driver could make a mistake that puts everyone in a bad spot.
Should you find yourself part of a motor vehicle accident in heavy traffic, such as the result of someone hitting you from behind, move to the shoulder of the road and then call 911 for help.
Your health and recovery is more important than anything, but don’t forget to file an insurance claim and look into other ways to hold the negligent motorist responsible for causing such as serious crash.
