Kansas City Car Accident Lawyer Calls for All Passenger Seat Belts, Stronger GDL Laws
The Emergency Nurses Association has just released its annual statewide safety rating just in time for the holiday season. It’s the right time for Kansas City car accident attorneys, and the state’s highway safety agencies to consider the areas we could be focusing on harder to keep motorists safer on Missouri streets.
The Emergency Nurses Association report is called 2010 ENA National Scorecard on State Roadway Laws: A Blueprint for Injury Prevention. The report rates all 50 states and the District of Colombia on 14 safety criteria. The Emergency Nurses Association is encouraging states that fared poorly to work harder on trying to meet the criteria in time for its next report, which will likely be out in 2012.
These criteria include:
- Primary seatbelt enforcement
- All passenger seatbelt laws
- Distracted driving and texting laws
- Passenger and nighttime restrictions for teen drivers
- Ignition interlock device laws
- Child passenger safety
- Access to a trauma care system
As a Kansas City car accident lawyer, I was concerned to find that Missouri meets only 10 of the 14 eligible teen criteria. While our state has a well-developed state trauma system and mandates child passenger safety up to the age of 16, it does fall behind in certain other important safety criteria. The four criteria that Missouri fails to meet are primary seatbelt enforcement, all passenger seatbelt laws, passenger restrictions on teen motorists and a complete ban on distracted driving, including the use of handheld communication devices and texting while driving.
These criteria relate to safety proposals that Kansas City car accident attorneys have been promoting for years now. It’s high time we had a complete and comprehensive ban on the use of handheld cell phones and texting while driving for all motorists. It’s also high time that we had seatbelt requirements for all passengers in a car, and not just motorists and front seat passengers.
