During the winter months, Ontario car accident lawyers are often contacted by injury victims involved in automobile collisions. Driving in Ontario can be precarious at the best of times – when the weather turns sour, accidents and injuries often increase.
January 2018 was an unusually dangerous month on the province’s highways, however. On January 4, the Toronto Star reported that five people had been killed in automobile collisions on that day in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) alone. In Orangeville, a head-on collision left one dead and two seriously injured. In Pickering, three people died and one was seriously injured in a two-car collision. In Milton, a 52-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene of a collision between a car and a pickup truck.
In northeastern Ontario, the situation was similarly dire: four people died in three crashes in the region during the first week of the year.
These nine fatalities contributed to a staggering 26 deaths on Ontario’s highways between New Year’s Day and January 15. Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Sgt. Kerry Schmidt told the CBC that the first two weeks of 2018 had been “tragic and heartbreaking.”
“That’s a very startling number,” he added. On Twitter, Sgt. Schmidt noted that the 26 deaths were an increase of 271 per cent over the same period in 2017, when just seven people lost their lives.
What caused this sharp uptick in serious collisions? Though severe winter weather was a province-wide concern, Sgt. Schmidt insisted that road conditions weren’t solely to blame.
“Poor road conditions and poor weather conditions don’t cause crashes,” he said. “It’s poor driving that causes crashes.”
Ontario car accident lawyers will be unsurprised to hear that speeding and aggressive driving were factors in “several” of the fatal accidents, according to Schmidt. In the province’s north, long-time traffic inspector and safety consultant Mark Andrews told the CBC that distracted driving was an area of concern.
Andrews also lamented the lack of substantive progress on road safety initiatives.
“I hear the same issues being raised again and again of the cause [of collisions]… and ideas being raised that were raised 10 years ago,” he said. “The roads haven’t been developed, the cars haven’t been developed and the users haven’t kept up with what we now have for a vehicle to drive in. We’re not going to back up the clock. Technology won’t let us do that.”
If you or a member of your family has been injured in an automobile accident, contact the Ontario car accident lawyers at Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers today to arrange a free, no-obligation consultation. We may be able to help you access compensation for your injuries.
Image credit: Bobby H./WikiMedia Commons
Greg Neinstein
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