For thousands of years, the only way to move around was by foot or through animal power. Now, with a few presses on a smartphone using a rideshare app, an individual can call a driver to take him/her anywhere. This convenience has revolutionized the way many people conduct their lives, but cannot remove the inherent risk that comes with traveling in a vehicle on a roadway, nor the risk of being in a car accident.

Driving is not an easy task and requires practice, skill, and awareness to avoid making bad decisions that can lead to collisions. Common sense would dictate that if a rideshare driver was at fault for an injury, the injured rider and other crash victims would seek compensation from rideshare company, as the entity who represented the driver was safe to transport passengers.

However, because of the way rideshare companies are structured, answering the question of who is legally responsible is difficult. Given the widespread use of rideshare drivers, understanding one’s legal rights in a car accident for recovery is vital, and an overview of how Illinois handles this issue will follow below.

Safely and responsibly driving a car requires both skill and concentration. Skill is obtained with practice, but concentration often hinges of the level of alertness of the driver. Lacking either skill or concentration can result in a serious car accident that causes significant injuries. Appropriate concentration allows a driver to perceive, anticipate, and respond to hazards and other dangers on the road that could impact safe driving, and the absence of concentration is known to greatly increase the risk a driver will miss a key issue or make a bad decision. Distractions are one way in which drivers lose this attention to the road, but another one that is harder to control, and likely an issue for every driver at some point, is fatigue. Fatigue can hit a driver at any point during the day, but is most prevalent at night, when more concentration is required to make up for the lack of visibility on darkened roads.

Fatigue can cause a driver to lose control, crossover into traffic, or hit parked cars, a situation that was tragically played out in southern Illinois when a tired Tennessee man left the road and overcorrected. His actions caused the car to hit a guardrail, injuring one passenger and killing another. Everyone is potentially at risk for driving in this situation, and understanding what the effects of fatigue are, as well as the legal consequences if an injury occurs, is important information for all drivers.

The Effect of Fatigue on Driving

Anyone who has spent time in retail stores has seen the telltale signs that an accident happened, which is usually identified by the presence of a warning sign, orange cones, and/or ropes to cordon off an area. Often, these accidents are the result of some liquid spilling onto the floor, creating a slip and fall hazard that could endanger the safety of customers. By marking the area off, and taking steps to clean up the spill, the operators are acting responsibly and fulfilling their duty of care to keep the area open to the public free from dangerous hazards. Unfortunately, this level of attention and precaution is not employed at every store, and the result can be injured customers who slip and fall on substances present on the floor.

A woman recently sued Dollar Tree Stores Inc. after slipping and falling on a liquid substance left on the floor of an aisle during a visit to a Joliet location in April. Falling on a foreign substance while visiting a retail establishment is an all too familiar occurrence, and these companies need to be held accountable if negligence was involved. Premises liability law determines if a store owner/operator is responsible for an injury to a third party, and when it comes to a foreign substance on the floor, several factors influence whether a business may be found liable to pay compensation. An overview of how the law evaluates slip and fall cases involving foreign substances will follow below.

Premises Liability Law

It is general knowledge that driving drunk, public intoxication, and open containers of alcohol are against the law. Of course, people do not always follow the law, and unfortunately, with alcohol, this can lead to injuries of third parties, particularly in car accidents involving drunk drivers. Once a person reaches the age of 21, alcohol is readily available from bars, restaurants, liquor stores, and other establishments that have a valid license to sell these products. Selling products that are known to lead to injuries from negligent behavior is a big responsibility, and while most are aware that a personal injury lawsuit may be filed against an intoxicated wrongdoer, many States, including Illinois, have laws that impose liability on business establishments that supply the alcohol. These laws, known as Dram Shop Laws, are in place to prevent vendors who sell liquor from providing alcohol to intoxicated persons because this practice puts the general public at risk.

A recent example of how this law may be used to hold a business liable appears in a lawsuit filed against a local bar in St. Clair County, Wisconsin. A woman traveling as a car passenger was injured in a crash by a driver who was intoxicated from alcohol served at the establishment. Dram Shop claims are more complicated than simple negligence claims, and an experienced personal injury attorney is needed to properly present them. A discussion of how this third-party liability is regulated in Illinois will follow below.

Proving the Vendor Was Responsible

Operating an automobile on public motorways involves a lot of social compacts. Because accidents involving automobiles can inflict serious injury, and even death, all automobile operators must ensure that not only are they operating the automobile in a prudent manner, but that the automobile itself must be in a safe state. The need for regular maintenance and repair is especially important for commercial trucks. A poorly-maintained truck can cause accidents, and victims may need to engage the services of an attorney experienced in truck equipment failure accidents to recover compensation.

A horrific example of a poorly-maintained commercial truck recently occurred in the Brooklyn Borough of New York City, in which a wheel flew off a sanitation truck and killed a nearby motorist. In this particular example, Century Waste, a New Jersey company who owned the faulty commercial truck, actually failed 65 percent of the government inspections performed within the past two years. A discussion of maintenance requirements for commercial trucks, as well as some common examples of inadequate truck maintenance, will follow below.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)