The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-

Speed calculation based on photographs

Robert A. Berger (rberger@winston.com)
Fri, 10 May 1996 14:57:14 -0400 (EDT)

I am an attorney who will cross examine an accident reconstructionist about the
speed of a car involved in a crash. My client cannot afford her own expert so
I've spent the last week trying to understand the difference between crush
stiffness coefficients and friction coefficients. It's been slow. My question
is this. Can anybody offer advice or recommend resources that detail the
pitfalls from attempting to calculate the speed of a car just prior to an
accident based solely on photographs eye witnesses and a police officer who
measured the skid marks by pacing them off. The photographs were taken by
the police officer but do not capture each side of the two cars involved or
the entirety of the skidmarks. The accident reconstructionist has not examined
the cars or the accident scene (except through the photographs).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Robert A. Berger
rberger@winston.com

NOTE: You are reading in an archived session of ARnews. It is possible that this topic is still being discussed. To see if this topic is still active, or of there were any more recent posts on this topic, check later archives of ARnews.

If there is no current post, and you would like to add to this topic, link to the Current ARnews Discussion and begin a new thread. Be sure that if you are starting a new post that the thread title does not contain the abbreviation RE: Placing RE: at the beginning of a new post will confuse Hypermail and prevent others from answering your post in the future.

For example, to continue this discussion look for a thread titled

Speed calculation based on photographs

If this thread does not exist in the current archive, you can begin another one by using that title.