According to data provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 360 New York residents lost their lives in 2012 in traffic accidents involving excessive speed. The agency says that speeding drivers are involved in about 30 percent of all of the fatal motor vehicle accidents that occur in the United States each year. Excessive speed kills over 10,000 people on the roads annually, and NHTSA puts the yearly cost to society of these fatal accidents at over $40 billion.
The NHTSA figures reveal that younger drivers are the demographic group most likely to be killed in a speed-related traffic accident, and a young man is far more likely to be behind the wheel than a young woman. While many would assume that a large number of speed-related accidents occur on interstate highways, the statistics indicate that almost 90 percent of them do not.
Drunk driving continues to be a menace for road users, and NHTSA data reveals that 42 percent of the speeding drivers involved in fatal accidents in 2012 had a blood alcohol level of .08 percent or higher. Only 16 percent of the drivers involved in a fatal accident that did not involve speeding were found to be driving with a BAC level at or above the legal limit.
Drivers rarely have a good excuse for speeding, and showing that a motorist was traveling at a speed in excess of the posted limit may be sufficient to establish negligence in a civil action. In the event that the police report does not conclusively determine that excessive speed contributed to an accident, an attorney for an injured victim may conduct further investigations. These efforts could include interviewing witnesses, analyzing road conditions and skid marks and viewing footage recorded on security cameras in the vicinity of the accident scene.