Maintaining an assured clear distance to have a decent stopping distance between your vehicle and those around you - particularly the vehicle in front is critical for safe driving.
Perhaps the average driver is unaware that there are highly refined equations related to stopping distances for trucks and automobiles.
Many times Houston truck accident attorneys use experts to reconstruct an accident and they apply engineering to the known formulas to recreate an accident.
While the formulas themselves would be boring, let's consider some statistics and research on the topic.
If a street surface is dry, the average driver can safely decelerate an automobile or light truck with reasonably good tires at the rate of about 15 feet per second (fps). That is, a driver can slow down at this rate without losing control of the car.
The measure of velocity is distance divided by time (fps), stated as feet per second.
For the statistical novice consider the following explanation:
Velocity is reduced 15 fps every second. If the initial velocity were 60 mph, 88 fps, after 1 second elapsed, the vehicle velocity would be 73 fps, after 2 seconds it would be 58 fps decreasing accordingly thereafter.
Given a typical dry roadway, it would mean that a driver could stop the described vehicle in a total of 6.87 seconds (including a 1 second delay for driver reaction) and your total stopping distance would be 302.28 feet, slightly more than a football field in length. While most newer car manufacturers publish stopping distances much less than that number many times those numbers should not be relied on to avoid an accident.
A football field is often too lengthy of a span to slow down to prevent an accident. The cautious driver will leave plenty of room between their vehicle and the one in front, I know on Houston highways it is often difficult to maintain an assured clear distance- but try your best.
Greg Baumgartner is a Houston personal injury lawyer and a safety advocate.
