• 22
  • April
    2010

As San Francisco's Streetsblog highlighted in a recent article, more Americans die in car accidents every year than from handgun injuries. Even so, the laws penalizing drivers involved in fatal accidents or who have caused serious injury are much less strict than those applied to crimes involving handguns.

In most cases, as long as a driver is not intoxicated, they will pay their insurance deductable and a fine of $70 for "bodily injury," or $95 if an accident results in "great bodily injury."

This seemingly light penalty seems a poor fit with California's reputation as one of the most dangerous states for bikers. Biking advocates have long protested the light penalties applied to dangerous drivers and called for more discouraging sentences for those involved in car accidents with bike riders and pedestrians.

With Assembly Bill 1951, San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano attempted to do just that. However, the bill did not even made it out of committee on Monday, with most members voting against harsher penalties for careless drivers. 

Under the proposed bill, district attorneys would have been given greater flexibility in dealing with cases of dangerous driving - including the option of charging unsafe driving as either an infraction or misdemeanor, if someone was injured as a result.

DAs would also have been able to seek imprisonment for between five and 90 days, as well as fines between $145 and $1000.

According to the San Francisco Injury Center for Research and Prevention at SF General Hospital, pedestrian injuries - many caused by car accidents - cost the city more than $74 million between 2004 and 2008. Of that hefty bill, less than 25 percent of costs were covered by private insurance companies. Public funds and injured pedestrians paid the rest.

Despite the bill's failure, the measures it sought to enact still bear a lot of supporters across California. One shouldn't be too surprised to see a similar bill, or bills, proposed in the near future.

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