California Personal Injury and Insurance Blog

Settling a Property Damage Claim

Okay, so hypothetically lets say you are leasing a 2007 Lamborghini. Nice car. Very nice. You have collision coverage on it, as is required by the lease. And some guy driving a 1972 Ford Pinto rear ends you. After all, if you rear end him, there is a good chance of an explosion! Now, you have $25,000 in damage to your car and he has a $5,000 property damage limit. What do you do?

This is an easy one. You report it to your insurance company and you let them fix your car. Why? Because if you settle with the other party, you have to sign a release. When you sign the release, you are not entitled to anything else. If the lessor decides to come back to you for "diminished value," you could be on the hook for it. If, however, you have not signed a release, you let your insurance company and the lessor fight this one out. You get to sit on the sidelines.

Remember, if you are not at fault, the smart claim is to your insurance company and let them fight to get the money back. That is not a fight you are equipped to deal with in either time or money.

Road Safety Measures

Tony Bizjak of the Sacramento Bee had an article in yesterdays paper about road safety measures. Some of the ideas are counter-intuitive but work. These ideas include removing safety devices like stop signs.

Tony writes: "Danger lurks on the road, for sure; but it may not be where we think it is.

Stop signs, for instance, can lead to bad crashes. But a curvy, cliff-side road with no guardrails may have few mishaps.

Why is that? Buckle up as we take an insider's look at road dangers, inspired by author Tom Vanderbilt's new book 'Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).'

The True Danger Zone

This is no surprise: Intersections are crash magnets. Half of all crashes happen there, including one of the deadliest – the broadside.

How do you cut crashes at intersections? Stop signs and traffic signals are the all-American way.

But they're not a guaranteed defense. Plenty of drivers simply don't obey them.

Most of us assume a green light makes it safe to go through an intersection. So we fail to look both ways before entering. It can be a fatal mistake."

For the rest of the ideas from Tony, go read his article. (By the way, I highly recommend reading Tony every week in the Bee!)

Five Truths About Driving

Since he is such a better writer than me (hence he gets paid for it and I don't), I am going to paste Tony Bizjak's article from the Sacramento Bee today:

Today, we unveil five "truths" you should know about driving.*

(*Which you may refuse to believe.)

Our inspiration is the new book "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)."

We talked last week with author Tom Vanderbilt. He's like The Bee's Back-seat Driver, only smarter.

Truth No. 1: We're not as good a driver as we think we are.

Vanderbilt thinks it's a bit funny and a bit sad that in every survey most drivers say they are above average.

But, technically, only half of us can be above average. That means plenty are poor drivers and don't know it.

Why? We're good at ignoring clues: If we get a ticket, it's because the police obviously are trying to make a quota. If our passenger yells "look out," he's just a nervous Nellie. If a driver honks at us, he's an incompetent who can't handle the road.

Truth No. 2: We are not so nice when we're in our cars.

Cars dehumanize us. Consider: Would we cut in the supermarket line if we see someone not close enough to the person ahead? Would we mouth "Watch it, knucklehead" to a guy who brushes by us to find a seat in our row at the movie theater?

In our cars, we look at other people's rear ends a lot, not their eyes. We can't bond, or even communicate. Because we probably will never see them again, there is no payback for being nice. We even decide things about them based on the vehicle they drive. SUV driver? Self-centered egotist. Prius driver? Self-righteous do-gooder.

Truth No. 3: You're not in a traffic jam; you are the traffic jam.

Vanderbilt doesn't believe traffic jams are our fault. But the way we drive in traffic – braking, speeding, tailgating, switching lanes, refusing to signal and basically doing whatever works best for us at the moment – makes traffic worse. That leads to the next truth.

Truth No. 4: The other lane isn't really going faster.

It just looks that way because we focus more on the cars passing us than on the cars we pass. In congestion, lanes move individually like accordions, spreading out and speeding up, then scrunching up and slowing down. By jumping lanes, we don't get where we are going much faster, but we make the accordion worse for drivers behind us.

Truth No. 5: Traffic flows like … rice! (So slow down, you may get there faster.)

If you pour rice too fast into a funnel, grains clog up and come out slowly. But if you pour the rice slowly, the grains actually get through the funnel faster. There's less bunching up. That is the reasoning behind freeway ramp metering. If you sequence vehicles coming onto freeways, the overall traffic speed is improved.

You still with us? There's plenty more in Vanderbilt's book. Next week, traffic willing, we'll offer five counterintuitive truths about road dangers, including why it may be good to get into a (small) crash."

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I highly recommend you read Tony weekly in the Bee.