Legal Question in Personal Injury in Pennsylvania

I was recently found at fault for a collision. The roads were flooded and a traffic light went straight from green to red. As you can imagine, I slammed the brakes at 15 mph in a 25 mph zone but was unable to stop from sliding through the red light and collided with another car's passenger side. Thankfully nobody was injured. I received a fine for the accident and I am fighting it. I video recorded the traffic light at that intersection to determine the average duration of that yellow light and wrote down the results for 10 trial runs. Unfortunately, the light did not skip yellow in the recording. The average of all 10 trial runs was 2.779 seconds. Is there any legal minimum duration of yellow lights in the state of Pennsylvania? And if so, how strong of a case would I have?


Asked on 8/24/11, 6:40 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
Richard Senker Senker Law Office

You have a very difficult case for 2 reasons: 1. Most traffic lights have an electronic controller and, if they get "out of sequence", they go to flash mode immediately. Therefore, it's unlikely that your light went from green to red w/o yellow. And you won't be able to prove that it did 2. Even though you were going less than the speed limit, you were going too fast for conditions, evidenced by the fact that you lost control of your car.

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Answered on 8/24/11, 7:26 pm


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