Bicycle Accidents

The crash types that keep repeating

Bicycle collisions are not random. The same handful of driver errors produce most of them.

• The right hook. A driver passes a rider and immediately turns right across them.
• The left cross. A driver turning left across traffic looks for cars, does not register a bicycle, and turns into the rider's path.
• Dooring. Someone opens a car door into the bike lane without looking.
• Pulling out. A driver leaving a driveway or parking lot stops past the sidewalk and rolls into the rider.
• Unsafe passing. A driver squeezes by with inches to spare and forces a rider into a hazard.

Each of these has a defense argument attached to it, and each has physical evidence that answers the argument if it is collected in time.

What the insurer will say about you

Expect some combination of these: you were not wearing a helmet, you were not in the bike lane, you ran the light, you were riding at night, you were going too fast. Some of it will be irrelevant to fault. Some of it will be flatly untrue. All of it is aimed at shifting a percentage of blame onto you, because in California fault is compared rather than assigned wholesale, and every percentage point they move reduces what they pay.

Boyd's job is to make that argument expensive to make.

Evidence worth chasing immediately

• Any bike computer, phone, or watch data showing your speed and line
• Helmet camera or a following rider's camera, if there was one
• Damage patterns on the bike and the vehicle, which often contradict the driver's account
• Nearby cameras, which overwrite in days
• The bike itself, kept exactly as it is and not repaired or thrown away

That last one matters more than people expect. A damaged bicycle is evidence. Do not let anyone dispose of it.

Injuries here are worse than the police report suggests

Riders routinely leave the scene without an ambulance and discover the fracture, the concussion, or the shoulder injury a day later. A report that says no injury, written twenty minutes after impact, becomes an argument against you for the next year. Get examined.

Boyd has been the rider on the ground

Weeks after sitting the California bar exam in 2015, and months before he was sworn in, a drunk driver hit him while he was cycling in Huntington Beach. He knows what the road feels like from that side of it, what the following months cost, and exactly which arguments get made about a rider who was doing nothing wrong.

Talk to Boyd before the adjuster

The first conversation with Johnson Injury Law is free and obligates you to nothing.