US injuries and deaths from bicycle accidents have been on the rise since 2011, but an even larger increase since 2020 has been associated with more people taking up biking during the pandemic.
This is partly because more individuals are riding bicycles in the first place, but reckless drivers and streets designed solely for motor vehicles are also believed to contribute to the problem.
Closer to home, Georgia saw an increase of 150 percent in fatal accidents involving bicyclists or pedestrians from 2020 to 2021. The state has attempted to make biking safer for riders with legislation addressing the interaction of bicycles and motor vehicles on roads.
In 2021, the state’s “Three Feet Law,” which required drivers passing a bicycle to allow at least three feet of space, was updated to require the driver to move into an adjacent lane if possible. If it’s not possible to safely move into an adjacent lane, the driver should slow down to at least ten miles an hour below the speed limit and proceed cautiously around the bicyclist.
If a driver ignores the Three Feet Law or other bicycle laws and causes an accident, the bicyclist is likely to suffer more severe injuries than the driver. Cars have safety features like seatbelts and airbags that work to keep the driver safe, while a bicyclist may be thrown off their bike, leading to broken bones, head injuries, back or spine injuries, or internal injuries.
If you’ve been hurt in a bicycle accident, you may have severe and painful injuries, expensive medical bills, and a loss of income while you recover. You need help with these damages, but the driver might claim no responsibility for the accident and could even blame you.
How can you get the compensation you need to recover?
Contact a Kennesaw Bicycle Accident Attorney Today
Your bicycle accident attorney understands how devastating a bike accident can be and will work to secure compensation for your damages. We’ll carefully calculate all your losses to determine your claim’s worth and seek that amount from the driver’s insurance company.
Potential damages in a bicycle accident include:
- Medical bills. Health insurance doesn’t cover everything, and bicycle injuries are often severe. Some injured bikers find themselves with thousands of dollars in medical debt. Others may wonder how they will continue to pay healthcare costs if they need longer-term treatment like physical therapy or multiple surgeries. There is no reason you should bear the brunt of these costs if the car driver is at fault for your accident.
- Lost income. When you’ve been seriously injured in a bicycle accident, it may be difficult or impossible to go back to work right away. If your job requires physical labor, you may be off work for weeks. If you’re lucky, you’ll use up all your paid time off; if not, you’ll be taking unpaid time off and wondering how to pay your bills in the meantime. You have a right to request your lost income, including the PTO you had to use for your injuries.
- Lost earning potential. Unfortunately, some bicycle accidents are severe enough to cause permanent disability or disfigurement. If this leaves you unable to work or to do the same kind of work at the same pace, we will seek compensation for your lost earning potential.
- Permanent disability or disfigurement. Even if your livelihood is unaffected, you can still recover damages for the negative impact a permanent injury has on your life.
- Property damage. If your bike or other belongings were damaged in the accident, we can pursue compensation from the driver’s insurance.
- Pain and suffering. Bicycle accidents can result in excruciatingly painful physical injuries, but they can also be terrifying and traumatic. In addition to physical injuries, many bicyclists suffer emotional distress or mental health effects, such as anxiety, insomnia, or PTSD. You deserve compensation for both types of pain and suffering.
- Wrongful death. About 2 percent of all motor vehicle accident fatalities are bicyclists hit by cars. If you’ve lost a loved one because a careless driver hit them, you may be frustrated at the lack of justice provided by the criminal court system. At the same time, you could be struggling with medical and funeral bills while working through your grief. In these situations, a wrongful death suit might help you secure financial compensation so you don’t have to worry about how to pay the bills while processing your loss. At the same time, many people find that a civil suit provides an alternate way to pursue justice for a tragic and preventable death.
What if the Driver Says You Were At Fault?
This is a prevalent problem in bicycle accident cases. Often, the driver will claim that they had the right of way, that the bicyclist cut in front of them, etc.
Rest assured, their insurance company will agree because if you were at fault, then they don’t have to pay your claim. In fact, the insurance adjuster may place blame on you even if the car driver admits fault due to Georgia’s modified comparative negligence statutes.
What Is Modified Comparative Negligence?
Sometimes, people think of fault in a car accident as being a very black-and-white situation: one person is at fault, and the other is not. But reality is often much more complicated, and it’s possible for both parties to make mistakes that contribute to an accident.
Modified comparative negligence statutes seek to set out rules for handling these situations of shared fault.
In Georgia, you can recover damages as long as you are less than 50 percent responsible for an accident or injury. The party who was more than 50 percent at fault will have to pay damages (although, in most cases, their insurance carrier will pay on their behalf).
But there’s one other aspect of modified comparative negligence that’s essential to understand: If you were more than 0 percent at fault, you would lose whatever portion of responsibility you had from your final award. So, if you were 10 percent responsible for the accident, you would lose 10 percent of your damages.
Keeping that in mind, you can understand why an insurance adjuster would argue that you had at least some fault – if they can’t completely evade responsibility for paying your claim, they hope to at least lower the amount they have to pay.
Who Decides Fault in a Vehicle and Bicycle Collision?
Most people assume it’s either the police, a responding law enforcement agency, or a jury in a court case. While a police report is a valuable piece of evidence in a bicycle accident, it doesn’t definitively prove what happened.
Police generally arrive after an accident is over and base their report on the evidence they observe, plus interviews with the involved parties and witnesses. In many cases, the driver and bicyclist have different explanations of how the accident happened.
When the responding officer writes a report, they make an educated guess, giving their opinion of how the crash occurred and who was at fault based on the available evidence. However, because the available evidence may be limited and conflicting, this opinion can be challenged in court.
One of the first things we do when reviewing a bicycle accident case is read the police report and discuss it with the client. If you feel anything in the report is inaccurate, we can have an investigator search for additional evidence we might use to challenge the report.
For instance, we may look for video evidence of the collision, witnesses who may not have been interviewed at the scene, or event data recorder (EDR) data from the vehicle that hit you.
So, does a jury decide fault? In most cases, no.
If your case goes to trial, then yes, a jury or judge will be asked to determine who is at fault. Because of modified comparative negligence laws, they will have to assign a percentage of fault to each party – in this situation, the driver and the cyclist.
But most cases don’t go to trial. Trials can be lengthy, stressful, and time-consuming, and we don’t want to put an injured person through that if it isn’t necessary.
The good news is that in most of these cases, we can work out a settlement with the at-fault driver’s insurance company so you get the compensation you need. However, we won’t advise you to accept a settlement that doesn’t adequately cover all your damages, and if the insurance company refuses to make a fair settlement, we are prepared to pursue your case in court.
The final point to understand is that while most cases don’t go to trial, the perception of how a trial might go is crucial to the negotiation process. In other words, the more evidence we have that the vehicle driver was all or mostly at fault, the less the insurance company adjuster will want to go to trial, and the more motivated they will be to make a reasonable offer.
What if an Uninsured or Underinsured Driver Hit You?
Don’t make the mistake of assuming you’re completely out of luck in this situation. A bicycle accident lawyer can examine the details of your case and explain any other options for recovering your damages, such as:
- Suing the driver. This is always an option, but if the driver has no money or assets, it may not be a good one. However, in some cases, the driver does have assets we can seize.
- Using your own uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UI) coverage. If you have UM/UI coverage for your car, you can use it for a bicycle accident involving an uninsured driver, even if your car had nothing to do with the collision.
- Suing a third party. In a few less common situations, we may be able to pursue compensation from a liable third party, such as a manufacturer that made a defective bike helmet. While the bike helmet did not cause your accident, if its failure made your injuries more severe, the manufacturer could still be liable.
How Can You Get Help From a Kennesaw Bicycle Accident Law Firm?
Please contact the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm for a free, confidential consultation about your accident. We’ll review your case, answer any questions you have, and explain your options. If we take your case, you won’t owe us anything until we win or settle it.
Founder and lead attorney Ali Awad established the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm just a few short years ago, and it quickly became one of the fastest-growing law firms in the country. Mr. Awad and his team have recovered millions of dollars in compensation for injured people and their families.
When he’s not fighting for clients in the boardroom or the courtroom, Mr. Awad gives accessible legal advice to more than a million followers on social media. Work with him today by calling (470) 323-8779.
