I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.
As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:
Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.
Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?
I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.
Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.
They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.
I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.
Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.
But I think there’s another part of it as well:
In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.
They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.
And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.
But the absolute freakiest thing?
Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.
Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.
(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)
The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.
“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”
Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.
It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!
Work is for chumps.
Once you go to the dark side you never go back…..
Wow… that’s… something else. I think that kind of culture must be infiltrating the UK. Just after Christmas, I was involved in a fender bender. I don’t *think* it was my fault, but it was foggy and icy and I didn’t know the road, so I was driving very carefully. It was a glancing blow with an oncoming car. No air bags went off, we all walked away from the accident. The cars were write-offs, the crumple zones did their job and no-one was injured – except, a month later, my insurance company tells me that the other driver is claiming for whiplash for herself and her passenger. I really hope she’s OK, I genuinely got whiplash myself decades ago before crumple zones, but I have this niggling doubt that she sustained any injuries. I’m just letting the insurance company deal with it.
Might not be just a Florida thing. Driving around Northern California, it’s pretty much the same. With a few Dental Implants billboards sprinkled in for variety.
That’s worse then Sin City.
That settles it – I’m NEVER going to Florida. I mean, I live in a motorhome, I’m retired, I could do the snowbird thing in Florida, but there is JUST SO MUCH WRONG with Florida, and now this?
Thank you.
It’s just American culture. I see lots of billboards and TV commercials about three things: Personal injury lawyers, shady loan companies, and prescription drugs.
Used to be a lot worse in Taiwan by the way, with all these shady financial companies (likely mafia backed), but it’s gotten way better. No prescription drug commercials here because I don’t know if it’s banned or something. Besides doctors prescribe stuff and there’s already national healthcare rules on what gets covered and what doesn’t… Like they don’t cover the newest stuff until they can see that there’s good medical benefit over what’s existing.
But in the US it must be due to the sue happy culture that these personal injury lawyers make their living. I mean the US has the highest per capita number of lawyers in the world, basically the street is littered with lawyers. Perhaps Florida has the highest, I don’t know, but you see this all over the country.
One major reason the US can’t have universal healthcare is because of the legal costs involved. With people can sue anyone for anything, insurance is expensive. Basically medicare like system for all in the US would cost so much that they’d have to have another American economy to pay for it.
Car insurance costs more in the LA area due to the prevalence of accident attorneys (and their billboards).
As a long time California resident, i say the same thing. There is a large number of accident attorney bill boards all over LA. One bill board after another. I recently drove down a street near LAX and one lawyer bill board after another.
My grandmother, late in life, had a live-in boyfriend who had been a competitive swimmer until he was hit by a boat in his 20’s. He got a big payout and never worked another day in his life, but replenished his assets every few years by suing somebody.
One day they were driving on local (Long Island) streets, with her at the wheel, and had an accident. He wasn’t injured, but she was; she went to the emergency room, and eventually died. Naturally, he sued her estate. And by the time anybody else in the family got to the house, most of her jewelry was missing.
IIRC, the heirs agreed to a cash settlement just to get him out of their lives so they would never have to hear his name again.
Where is there that does not have this?
Portland.
Can we please givee Florida to Mexico?