Utah Law Talk

We hear a lot about motor vehicle accidents that happen on Bangerter Highway. Unfortunately, there was another one yesterday evening. According to a report by KUTV, a driver in car apparently failed to yield to oncoming traffic and turned left from Bangerter onto 13400 South, directly in the lane of travel of a white van heading northbound on Bangerter. The white van ended up “t-boning” the car, which caused the van to spin off the road and literally wrap around a pole. The driver of the car that made the turn also lost control and the car spun onto its side.

The male trapped in the van was removed by the jaws of life after over 30 minutes of work by emergency crews. The female driver of the car was also removed from her vehicle by the jaws of life. Both drivers of the car were reported to be in critical condition and transported to local hospitals, the driver of the van by helicopter and the driver of the car by ambulance.

Unfortunately, these kind of car crashes, which happen all too often, involve drivers who are impatient and who choose not to wait until they can safely complete their turn. According to Utah law, the driver of a vehicle intending to turn left “shall yield the right-of-way to any vehicle approaching from the opposite direction which is so close to the turning vehicle as to constitute an immediate hazard.” See Utah Code section 41-6a-903(1). So a driver who is wanting to make a left hand turn has the duty to wait, or yield, to nearby, oncoming traffic. In this situation, if the driver turning left had simply waited until traffic had cleared, then no crash would ever have occurred. Hopefully, others can learn from this and avoid the same mistake in the future.

As to the driver of the van who hit the car, since the crash from his perspective appeared to be unavoidable, he would have a claim against the insurance company of the woman driving the car. In the case where that insurance was used up, he could make a claim against his own “under-insured” insurance policy. (This shouldn’t raise his rates unless he somehow contributed to the crash.) Since most attorneys or lawyers that practice personal injury or motor vehicle accident law give free consultations, it would be worth his time to contact one to get more details on what his legal remedies are.

Published by: Ron Kramer

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Vehicle Injury. 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.