Every day and night, car drivers crisscross the highways and woodsy lanes of the East End.

So do hundreds of deer.

The local police, highway departments and auto-body shops are all too familiar with the results: hundreds of deer-related car accidents every year, along with hundreds of dead or injured deer.

Our car accident attorneys are concerned with other factors besides property damage and dead deer.  In car accidents involving deer, oftentimes the driver is hurt or killed by the animal’s impact with the windshield.

For six months last year, on a short but notoriously deer-prone stretch of Stephen Hands Path — a pretty road that cuts north from Montauk Highway — all was quiet.

With permission from the Town of East Hampton, citizens installed 116 special reflectors on a half-mile between Route 114 and Northwest Road.  The array is designed to turn headlight beams into a web of reflected light, in hopes that a dazzled deer would stop in its tracks by the roadside instead of making a suicidal dash into traffic.

This frustrates the founder of the 25-member East Hampton Group for Wildlife, which paid $3,000 for the car accident prevention reflectors, called Strieter-Lites, and installed them in the spot selected by the Town Board. The reflectors, he said, had shown promise as a nonlethal solution to the chronic problem of deer and cars.

East Hampton is the first Long Island town to try Strieter-Lites, which are about 7 inches tall by 2 ½ inches wide, mounted on posts about 30 inches above the ground and staggered on both sides of a road.

The State Department of Transportation bought 500 reflectors for a rural stretch of Interstate 86 in upstate Tioga County.  So far, they appear to have reduced collisions.

But not everyone is convinced they work.  Officials in deer-plagued Princeton Township, N.J., bought 500 Strieter-Lites a few years ago but abandoned them.  Animal control officers say the reflectors had been useless in reducing car accidents with deer.  Princeton chose instead to reduce herds by hiring sharpshooters and dosing female deer with contraceptives.

By having these reflector lights installed, we, as auto accident lawyers, believe that lives could be saved.  That is why our personal injury law firm strongly supports further installation of these deer-car accident prevention reflectors.

Call us now at 1-858-551-2090 or click here for a free consultation with an experienced personal injury attorney after you get into a car accident and find out how we can help you.  We speak English and Spanish, and we look forward to providing advice for your case.  No fee if no recovery.