Commercial vehicles range from armored cars, cement trucks, fire trucks, PGE, other utility vehicles and UPS Trucks. On any injury claim in Oregon or Washington State the commercial truck or vehicle has a heightened duty of care to regular car drivers, bicycles, and pedestrians. This is because the operators of such rigs have a commercial driving license and owe the greater public more care.

Commercial drivers are made more responsible to others in Oregon and Washington state because the business entities are on the road for the purpose of making profits and their much larger utility trucks injure more because they are simply bigger. Bigger at-fault trucks may result in greater injury including death to pedestrians, cars, and walkers.

Questions often addressed in the car accident cases involving commercial vehicles include such factors as: did the side mirrors have bubble convex mirrors to give the driver a broader range of view, did the utility vehicle have a warning sound which would emit and warn pedestrians to prevent run-overs, and finally did the commercial driver fully keep a proper lookout before executing a right or left hand turn.

I have worked on these in the last 16 years in Oregon and Washington car accident law. For commercial driver saying the injured person was in their blind spot is a cop-out because they are statutorily made to take these extra measures as to protect the public at large.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Large Commercial Trucking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.