With the advent of bike lanes and bikes for rent on corners throughout the city, bicycle safety and accidents remain a prime concern. The personal safety of bicyclists is at stake when motorists don’t yield and pay attention to new road patterns and signs that have been modified to enable bicyclists safe passage throughout the city. To complicate the situation further, rent-a-bikes may be used by those who are not readily familiar with the traffic patterns and who are unfamiliar with the dangers of sharing the streets with trucks, buses, and cars. Also, bicyclists must remember that they have an obligation to follow the same rules of the road as automobiles. The attorneys at Hess and Leibowitz have represented numerous cyclists who have been injured on the streets of New York and New Jersey.
Insurance brokers often do not properly inform their clientele about a very important and rather inexpensive form of insurance which can easily and effectively protect you when you are in an automobile accident with another vehicle which has either minimums of low amounts of liability insurance. For these instances you can actually purchase your own insurance which will pay you for your own injuries.
Perhaps using an example can help to explain this situation. If you’re driving your car and you have underinsurance coverage limits of $250,000 and have an accident with a car that has $25,000 of liability insurance then your own policy is available to pay the difference in the amount of your underinsurance coverage and the other vehicle’s liability coverage – in this case, $225,000.
Please don’t think that this is uncommon. The number of cars with the minimum coverage of $25,000 or only $50,000 represents about one half of the cars on the roadways.
Protect yourself. Ask your broker for increased underinsurance coverage limits.
Usually when we’re at home in our apartments we feel rather safe, whether it’s while we are watching TV, eating at the kitchen table, or sleeping. However, it’s commonplace, unfortunately, for fires to occur, whether because of a faulty extension cord, match or cigarette falling onto the bedspread, a defective stove, or excessive lint in the clothes dryer. It is critical that safety devices are properly working and appropriately situated. Smoke detectors must be adjacent to the bedrooms and kitchen. Windows leading to fire escapes can never be blocked by locked scissor gates; and there must be 2 separate locations to exit the apartment. Of course, the batteries in the smoke detectors should be changed regularly and it’s easy to remember to do this two times each year when we change our clocks: “Spring forward, Fall back and change the batteries.”
Safety at home can be accomplished if we’re thoughtful.