Construction season remains in full swing, and crews will be out in full force for several months to come. While that may mean that your travel times will be slowed, it also means that you’ll likely continue to confront potentially hazardous situations. And a construction zone accident can leave you in a rough position where you’re dealing with physical, emotional, and financial losses. You certainly don’t want that to happen.
What can you do to stay safe in construction zones?
Fortunately, there are steps that you can take to protect yourself when driving in a construction zone. Amongst them are:
- Plan your driving route carefully: Before heading out for the day, it might be best for you to research your travel route to avoid construction zones as much as possible. By utilizing detours, you can bypass some of the tricky driving conditions that you’d otherwise see in a construction zone.
- Remain focused: Construction zones can present a number of driving challenges. You might be flagged to stop by construction workers, lanes may shift dramatically, lanes might narrow, and traffic might suddenly slow down. You’ll need to stay attentive as you travel through these zones so that you don’t end up causing an accident. Staying focused can also ensure that you’re driving as defensively as possible, which can avoid a collision caused by someone else.
- Reduce your speed: The speed limit in construction zones is slower, but a lot of people fail to abide by those slower speeds. By reducing your speed, though, you can better maintain an awareness of your surroundings, identify construction workers who are near the road, and take defensive driving actions when needed.
- Properly move into open lanes: When you’re facing a lane closure, its best to try to move into an open lane as soon as possible unless the construction zone specifies otherwise. Just make sure that you’re keeping an awareness of the vehicles around you so that you don’t change lanes into them and so that you can take corrective action if needed.
- Keep an appropriate distance: You should always give the vehicle in front of you ample room so that if you need to stop you can do so without causing a rear end collision. This rule is even more important in a construction zone where a rear end accident can cause an even bigger wreck that results in more extensive damages and injuries.
Abiding by these rules can help you stay safe. After all, more than 700 fatalities are suffered in construction zone accidents each year, with thousands of other people being injured in these wrecks. You don’t want to become a part of those statistics.
Legal help is here if you need it
That said, if you do end up injured in a construction zone accident, then you need to carefully think through what you can do to protect your interests moving forward. This may include taking legal action against the driver who caused your harm.
But pursuing one of these claims may not be as straightforward as it seems, especially when the other driver is likely to try to blame you for the accident. That’s why it’s imperative that you know how to build a compelling personal injury case while anticipating what the other side is likely to argue.