Holiday Traffic Safety Tips from Your Friends at Hensley Legal Group

December 24, 2024

The holidays are once again upon us.  While this season can provide ample opportunities to get together with the people we love, it is not necessarily the safest time to visit them, particularly if you have to drive to do it.  The National Safety Council estimates that 131 Americans may die in auto accidents this Christmas, but your friends at Hensley Legal Group would like to share some holiday traffic safety tips that could prevent the worst from happening.

Plan Your Trip

A critical part of holiday traffic safety is properly planning any trip that you have to take this season.  With this in mind, check the weather reports before you hit the road and consider staying home if there is a significant chance of heavy snow or ice.

Otherwise, be sure that your gas tank is filled and your vehicle is in perfect working order so that you won’t end up stranded in the middle of nowhere with temperatures falling and snow levels rising.

Don’t Speed

One of the best reasons to plan ahead is that it may reduce the need to speed, which is a major obstacle to holiday traffic safety.  Driving too fast is the leading cause of motor vehicle accidents and the second leading cause of motor vehicle fatalities in the United States, claiming almost 13,000 lives per year.

Drivers who speed have less time to react yet require more time to stop, which could be a disastrous combination during the kinds of adverse weather conditions that are associated with 21 percent of car and truck accidents.  No matter how urgently you want to arrive at your intended destination, being late is definitely preferable to getting into an accident that could keep you from being able to go anywhere else again.

Pay Attention

Distraction is just behind speeding as a contributor to collisions, and it has grown into an epidemic with the rise of the smartphone, which is a factor in approximately 12 percent of crashes nationwide despite states like Indiana banning the use of handheld devices while driving.

Illicit smartphone use could be even more prevalent during the holidays, when drivers might find themselves frantically searching for directions after getting lost on their way to unfamiliar locations, but clarification can always wait until you have parked your vehicle.  This is especially true when you are driving on the highway, where you could span the length of a football field in the time it takes to fire off a brief text.

Get Your Rest

We often travel huge distances during the holidays to reconnect with relatives who live too far away for us to see them regularly throughout the course of the year.  Yet such long journeys can make drivers more susceptible to drowsiness, which has been shown to be as detrimental to driving as drinking in some circumstances.  In fact, a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has linked fatigue to 109,000 injuries, 6,400 casualties, and 328,000 collisions across the country annually – about 5.1 percent of total domestic traffic accidents.

It is never good to become a statistic, so get your rest before you head out for the holidays and don’t be too proud to pull over if you find yourself nodding off behind the wheel.

Stay Sober

You might not have realized how deeply a lack of sleep can hinder your ability to drive, but chances are you are already well aware that drinking and driving don’t mix.  Alcohol dulls our reflexes and clouds our judgment, increasing both the likelihood and the severity of an accident.  But despite decades of harsher criminal penalties and widespread public awareness campaigns, intoxicated driving remains a problem in Indiana, where law enforcement makes a DUI arrest every 11.98 hours.

Sadly, these arrests represent a tiny fraction of the actual number of drivers who may be inebriated, a number that reaches record levels on Christmas and New Year’s, when 40 percent of lethal auto accidents involve alcohol use, compared to 28 percent during the rest of December. Though it may be tempting to be as “merry” as possible at the office Christmas party, it is much better to be responsible.  A drunk driving accident can leave you with a lifetime of regret, but that regret can be avoided if you follow one simple rule: If you are driving, don’t drink, and if you are drinking, don’t drive.

Holiday Traffic Safety Is Important

At Hensley Legal Group, where our Indiana personal injury lawyers have been standing up for the innocent victims of negligence since 1998, we know how important holiday traffic safety is because we have seen firsthand how dire the consequences can be when it is ignored.

From our family to yours, we hope that you enjoy a very happy and healthy holiday season!