Several people in the San Francisco Bay Area wonder whether they need to walk their bicycle across the California crosswalks. Technically, in California, one is supposed to walk it whenever he or she is in a crosswalk. Under the California Vehicle Code Section 21200 governing the operation of cycles in the state, riding it across a crosswalk is unlawful. For your health and safety, getting off your bicycle when you cross the street is the best possible thing to do. That said, in the event of a serious accident when you ride your cycle in a crosswalk, never take for granted that you are at fault. You can seek the help of accident injury lawyers to get justice.
Responsibility for Bicycle Accidents
Even when you are riding in the crosswalk, a negligent driver has no excuse to hit you. Even if the cop notes down that you were riding in the crosswalk, this does not mean that you cannot recover compensation for your damages. Some accident injury lawyers turn down their clients when the police report puts the accident cause down to riding a bike in the crosswalk. However, oftentimes it would have been the same whether you were riding or walking because somebody who just passed the crosswalk did not see you. In that case, lawyers can secure full compensation for you in spite of the technical discrepancy.
Responsibility for a bike accident has to be proven under California’s comparative negligence standard. Simply put, this means that the parties are liable for compensation in the same proportion as the extent they were at fault for the accident. For instance, if they are found to be responsible for 70% of the accident, they have to pay that much of the overall damages to the plaintiff party. Besides, bicyclists have to keep in mind that motorists are held to an extremely high standard of care. In the event an automobile hit you when you were on your bicycle, chances are the motorist did something negligent.
Act to Protect Your Rights
Los Angeles accident attorneys always tell their injured clients to see the big picture. They tell them to consider the whole world of liability and who actually induced the accident. Their main piece of advice to clients is this: never take the report filed by the police at face value. The report is usually inadmissible in court when the police officer did not see the accident in real-time but they merely formed a judgment. The main thing is that bicycle-automobile accident lawsuits are very fact dependent.