Chattanooga Failure to Yield Accident Lawyer

As defined by Chattanooga Law, failure to yield is when a person is required to wait for another vehicle, because the vehicle on the other lane has the priority to control a lane of traffic. If someone is in a subordinate lane and trying to merge into a dominant lane, they are required to yield the right-of-way to other vehicles in the dominant lane of traffic. When a person pulls out into that dominant lane of traffic and causes a collision with another vehicle already there, they have failed to yield the right-of-way to the person in the other lane. A skilled car accident lawyer can help you pursue damages for an accident that may have occurred due to a negligent case involving right-of-way. If you have been injured at a stop, contact a Chattanooga failure to yield accident lawyer as soon as possible to review the facts of your case.

Determination of Fault

Right-of-way simply means a lane of traffic that a vehicle has the right to occupy. If a driver has a stop sign and the crossing street does not, the crossing traffic has the right-of-way. If someone pulls from their stop sign into the path of an oncoming vehicle who has the right-of-way, they have violated their right-of-way.

Determining whether or not the driver who had the right-of-way (who would be considered the victim of the injury or the victim of the negligence), should have avoided the collision. If a driver pulls out into another driver’s lane and they have time to slow down and do not, then they have acted negligently themselves and might be guilty of comparative fault. Failure to yield cases often lend themselves to arguments that the accident victim was actually at least partially at fault, thus making everything more complicated.

Failure to Yield Fact Patterns

Failure to yield accidents are common on the interstates and the freeways with the entrance ramps coming onto busy roadways and all the construction going in Chattanooga. Entrance ramps are very short and drivers have very little space to pull out into heavy traffic causing a collision. Drivers do not understand how much space they have and pull out, often running into somebody, thinking they had more space, or trying to merge into traffic when there is just not enough space to do it.

Chattanooga failure to yield accident lawyers have seen drivers turning right on a red light with crossing traffic often ends in a T-bone-type collision. Drivers changing lanes into other lanes of traffic on multiple lane roads, or trying to merge (especially on interstates and freeways) and hit another car that they did not see.

How Do Insurance Companies Treat Failure to Yield Cases?

Insurance companies treat failure to yield accidents as an opportunity to blame the person who was hurt. They look for evidence that the person was not paying attention; that they were going too fast; that they were driving aggressively. They may try to blame the person who was run into for causing the collision. They handle these very aggressively and try to avoid paying as much as they can.

Role of Liability

If a person is required to yield, and they failed to yield causing a collision, then they are liable for the damages that result from that collision. If there is a yield sign, that points to which driver was required to yield. A required yield example would be an entrance ramp that has two different entrance points which will then merge together into one ramp before actually merging onto the interstate or the freeway. One of those two entrance points is subordinate to the other and will have a yield sign. If two cars enter at the same time, come up those entry points at the same time and run into each other, then the car with the yield sign should normally be held liable.

What is the Role of Road Signs?

Sometimes there is a yellow sign with two lines, one of which has a crook in it showing that the lane is about to close. Often times a driver will enter into a lane on the freeway which only lasts for a certain period of time and then be required to merge again. There will be a sign telling them that. If a person violates the instructions on a road sign, they are violating the law. If that violation causes a crash, the violator is probably at fault.

Benefit of an Attorney

To investigate a failure to yield case, witnesses would be interviewed. These could be passengers in the vehicles in question; people who saw the accident. Black box recordings are in most new vehicles today and they provide the actual speed of the two vehicles before the collision happened. It would be good to analyze traffic data, e.g., how busy was traffic that day; analyze road conditions. A tremendous amount of information would need to be gathered and that is why it is so important to hire an experienced attorney early so they can preserve all that information from the very beginning.