Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 11:45:13 :
In Reply to: Who says you have to be following a dump posted by Mark in NH on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 01:04:06 :
True. The most damage I got from something falling off a truck was a piece of wood that fell off a logging truck going around a corner on a 2-lane highway. It broke the turn-signal/marker light lens and put a little dent in the fender. I suppose I could have been mad at the logging truck driver because of course it was his fault that there was a loose piece of broken wood on his truck, and I could have tried to get the company to pay, which they probably would have done, but in the grand scheme of life, is it really all that important to spend a lot of time and hassle and maybe even money on a lawyer just because I'm mad about it and want to prove something?
I know there are cases where something was obviously not secured properly to a truck and it fell off and did real serious damage to some other vehicle or even killed a person. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the stuff that's not very expensive to fix or stuff like rocks that could get thrown up by anybody's tires (though somehow it's always a big truck that gets blamed). Whatever the reason, be it a dump truck ahead with dirty sideboards or a lot of gravel or sand on the road for some other reason, when I hear rocks hitting the front of my windshield I back off even if that means somebody else on the road can get in front of me.
I'm sure if we gave the lawyers free reign, they'd find somebody liable for every accident and inconvenience that happens to us, and they'd be right that it was SOMEBODY's fault. If it wasn't a case of somebody doing something wrong, then they'd say it was somebody NOT doing something right. These days the highway department routinely pays claims from people who hit chuckholes, even if the chuckhole just opened up. Of course it's "government money" not taxpayer money. Personally, life is too short for that. Windshields and paint jobs accumulate rock chips after a while. I can minimize them by staying back when I notice debris is bouncing down the road. My other choices are I can live with the damage, pay to have it fixed myself, or buy comprehensive insurance and let them buy me a new windshield every year.
I have no problem with "cover your load" laws. Most of the trash alongside the highways blows out of pickups of homeowners going to the dump. I just don't think the trucking companies should be expected to buy new windshields for every yuppie tailgater who happens to jot down the license plate number of some truck that was somewhere near them on the freeway.
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