When considering road traffic accidents, the focus, quite naturally, tends to fall upon people driving cars and riding motorbikes or their passengers. Ask the average person to think about a car accident and they’ll envisage two cars coming together. Often, however, the people most likely to be injured as a result of a road traffic accident are pedestrians. Government figures, which can be found at http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120926002851/http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/tables/ras30002/ show that, in the latest year for which figures are available, 26,198 pedestrians were injured to some degree following road traffic accidents. In some cases, this would have been the fault of the pedestrian concerned, but in many it would have been due to the negligence of another person.
Another factor to bear in mind when considering the travails of pedestrians is that in the event of an accident they lack the protection afforded to drivers by the bodywork of the car and factors such as seatbelts, crumple zones and airbags. Bearing this in mind, there’s a greater possibility that if you are a pedestrian injured in a car accident, then your injuries will have a larger impact upon your life.
