Barefoot Drivers And Your South Carolina Car Accident Claim

In the song “Toes,” Zac Brown describes the feeling of connection to one’s environment as direct contact between one’s feet and the natural flooring material beneath them. For most of the verses of the song, the narrator is sitting on a beach in Mexico, feeling the edges of the waves on his toes, but in the last verse, he returns home to Georgia. Sitting in a lawn chair in his backyard, he realizes that there is no feeling quite like feeling the clay soil on his toes; in other words, there is no place like home. Driving a car is every bit as much a sensory experience as sitting still on the beach or in your own backyard. If you are not about to let a little footwear get between you and the sands of Myrtle Beach, why would you let footwear get between you and the gas pedal? Even though it is technically legal, barefoot driving is a bad idea. If the at fault driver’s lack of shoes was a contributing factor in the accident that caused your injuries, contact a Columbia car accident lawyer.

Driving Barefoot Is Legal but Not Safe

In South Carolina, as long as your seatbelt is buckled, it does not matter what you wear when you drive your car. South Carolina does not have laws against driving barefoot, and neither does any other state. Despite this, what you wear on your feet can affect your ability to drive safely. Car manufacturers designed the pedals of your car with the assumption that you would drive while wearing form-fitting shoes with soles, such as sneakers, loafers, or boots.

If you drive barefoot, you will need to apply more pressure than normal to the brake to get it to engage. Besides, driving barefoot is uncomfortable. When the weather is hot, which is when you are the most likely to go out barefoot, the pedals can get so hot that you might take your foot off the brake before you come to a complete stop. Flip flops can satisfy your craving for shoelessness while maintaining a barrier between the pedals and the bottom of your foot. Your flip flop can easily get stuck to the accelerator or brake pedal or to the car’s floor mat, delaying your effective braking.

It is unlikely that an insurance company will decide that a bare foot or a flip flop was the lone cause of a car accident, but they might consider it a contributing factor. South Carolina is a comparative negligence state, where insurance companies and the courts can assign percentages of fault for an accident to various parties. For example, the insurance company might decide that most of the fault for the accident belongs to the other driver, because he ran the stop sign, but if you had been wearing shoes, you could have braked sooner, so some of the fault is yours. This does not stop you from recovering compensation, but it reduces the amount of money you can get.

Let Us Help You Today

The personal injury lawyers at the Stanley Law Group can help you get adequate compensation if you got injured in a car accident.  Contact The Stanley Law Group in Columbia, South Carolina or call (803)799-4700 for a free initial consultation.

Source:

yahoo.com/news/illegal-drive-sandals-nj-legal-082631851.html