West Palm Beach Pedestrian and Bicycle Lawyer
You had the walk signal and a car came anyway, and now there are broken bones, weeks in a bed and bills arriving for both. We can take it from here. Call 833-370-8692 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our West Palm Beach personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Palm Beach County since 1993.
Pedestrian and Bicycle claims in West Palm Beach
The driver told the officer you stepped out, and if they left the scene there may be nobody to bill at all. Meanwhile you are working out how to cover the first surgery, how long you will be off work, and who pays if that driver is never found. Answering those three is our job, and it starts the day you call.
Crossings on Okeechobee and Southern Boulevard, and the approaches to I-95, are where the serious pedestrian injuries in this county happen. The municipality holds signal phase timing and streetlight maintenance records, and both we can get. They frequently establish that a crossing took longer than the signal allowed, or that the light over it had been out for weeks.
A Palm Beach County pedestrian claim is built from records rather than accounts, because the driver gave the only version at the scene. Signal timing, lighting history and the damage on the vehicle are what move fault. Where a city, the county or a transit agency shares responsibility, no suit can be filed until written notice has been presented and answered, which takes months.
What to do after a pedestrian and bicycle in West Palm Beach
- Take the ambulance. People struck while walking get up, apologize and go home more often than any other group we see, and it is the decision that costs them most. A vehicle strike puts force through the body in three separate impacts, and internal injuries and bleeding on the brain are frequently found hours later on imaging rather than at the roadside. A same-day record is also the clearest evidence that the injuries came from the collision.
- Get witness names, because yours is the account nobody hears. The person on foot is being loaded into an ambulance while the driver is giving the officer the only version of events in the file. If you cannot do it, ask whoever is with you to take names and numbers from anybody standing there. A single independent witness is frequently what turns a report that says you stepped out into a claim.
- Keep the clothes and everything you were carrying. Do not wash them and do not throw them out. What you were wearing answers the argument that you were invisible, and the damage to a bag, a phone or a stroller records the direction of force. It is evidence that costs nothing to keep and cannot be recreated once it is gone.
- Write down what you remember the same day. Where you were standing, which signal you had, which direction the vehicle came from, what the driver said. Do it while it is fresh, in your own words, on paper or on a phone. A concussion takes detail out of a memory over the following week and the account you give in month three will be less complete than the one you could have written on day one.
- Give no recorded statement to the driver’s insurer. The call is friendly and the questions are about whether you looked, what you were wearing and whether you were on your phone. You are under no obligation to be recorded by the other side, and answers given by somebody on pain medication get quoted back months later as though they were considered testimony.
Where these happen in West Palm Beach
Palm Beach County walks in three very different places: the downtown blocks, the transit corridors, and the long stretches of main road where there is no sidewalk at all. Each produces a different claim.
-
Tri-Rail and Palm Tran corridors
The routes people walk to reach a train or a bus, which are frequently the least walkable roads in the county.
- Stop and station placement relative to the nearest signalized crossing, which is a documented agency decision
- People crossing in front of or behind a stopped bus, where nobody can see anybody
- Transit vehicle cameras and scheduling records, held by the agency and something we can get
- Written notice to the agency, which is a precondition of suit rather than a formality
-
Downtown and the Clematis blocks at night
The evening economy puts a large number of people on foot into a small number of blocks, alongside vehicles looking for parking.
- Impaired driving after closing, where a venue may carry a share under a narrow Florida rule
- Garage and business cameras covering the street better than any public camera does
- Vehicles reversing and turning into pedestrian traffic while looking for a space
- Rideshare pickup activity that stops vehicles in the lane and starts them again without warning
-
The bridges and the barrier island
The Intracoastal crossings and the island roads beyond them, which mix pedestrians, cyclists and traffic on narrow surfaces.
- Cyclists and runners struck from behind on roads with little or no shoulder
- Sidewalks that begin and end without warning, putting people into the lane
- Bridge tender logs, which timestamp openings and closings around a collision
- Seasonal drivers unfamiliar with where people cross and where they walk
-
The main roads and the western communities
Okeechobee, Southern, Military Trail and the roads heading west, where a great deal of walking happens on the shoulder because there is nowhere else.
- No sidewalk at all along stretches people plainly walk, which is a roadway design question
- Streetlight outages on roads used after dark, recorded by the utility and the municipality
- Long distances between signals, which makes crossing mid-block the only realistic option
- Serious injuries routed to the trauma center at St. Mary’s Medical Center
What causes them
- Failure to yield at a marked crosswalk, which is the driver’s duty rather than a courtesy
- Signals whose crossing interval is too short for an older person or anybody using a cane or a walker
- Long distances between signals on wide roads, which makes crossing mid-block the only realistic option
- Streetlights out for weeks on a road people walk along after dark
- Roads built with no sidewalk at all, which puts people on the shoulder or in the lane
The injuries we see, and what each one turns on
Legs, knees and pelvis
Tibia and femur fractures, destroyed knees and pelvic fractures, several of which need hardware and then a second operation to remove or revise it. A first settlement offer usually arrives before anybody has said out loud that a second operation is coming, and it is priced on the bills that already exist.
Spine and spinal cord
Herniations, fractures and cord injuries from the impact and from the landing. The standard defense is age, since nearly every adult spine shows wear on imaging, and the argument is that the collision found it rather than caused it. A clear picture of function before and after is what answers it.
Internal injuries
Organ damage and internal bleeding, some of it not apparent at the roadside and found only on imaging hours later. It is the single strongest reason to accept transport rather than walk away, and it is the injury people who declined the ambulance are most often admitted with the following morning.
What Florida law requires you to prove
Who had to yield, and what happens outside a crosswalk
Florida sets out the rights and duties of people on foot in Fla. Stat. § 316.130. Drivers have to yield to a pedestrian lawfully in a crosswalk, and a person crossing outside one has to yield to vehicles. The part that gets left out of the conversation is in the same statute: every driver has a duty to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian, whether or not that person was where they should have been.
Being outside a crosswalk is not the end of a claim
It affects how the blame is divided rather than whether a claim exists. Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81 a recovery is reduced by the injured person’s share of responsibility, and a person found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing. Driver speed, sight lines, lighting and how far the nearest signal actually was all bear on that split, and all of them are documentable. Most Florida negligence claims arising on or after March 24, 2023 carry a two-year deadline under Fla. Stat. § 95.11.
When the road itself is part of the problem
Some of these collisions happen because of where a crossing was put, how long the signal gave people to use it, or a light that had been out for a month. Where a city, a county or a transit agency is responsible for that, the claim runs on a different track: Florida requires written notice of the claim to be presented to the agency, and in most cases to the Department of Financial Services, before any suit can be filed at all, and the agency then has months to respond. Recovery is also capped. Neither the notice nor the wait can be skipped, so identifying a public defendant late can leave no time to complete a step that is a precondition of suing.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide pedestrian and bicycle page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Palm Beach County
The useful records in this county are largely public, which means they can be requested directly rather than fought over. The constraint is timing rather than access.
- Signal and pedestrian phase timing at the intersection, which the municipality or the county will release
- Streetlight outage and maintenance history, held by the utility and the road authority
- The damage on the vehicle, its location and its height, which indicates speed and body position
- Where the debris field and any marks sit relative to the crossing, photographed before the road is cleaned
- The clothing and everything being carried, kept unwashed, which answers the visibility argument
- Transit stop placement, vehicle camera footage and scheduling records where a stop is part of the story
- Camera footage from businesses and garages within sight, most of it overwritten inside a month
- The written notice to the agency and to the state where a public body may be responsible, filed inside the statutory period
Where the road itself is part of the claim, which happens more often in this county than people assume, the notice is the item with no second chance. It goes out early and in writing, before anybody is certain the claim will be pursued.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in West Palm Beach is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled pedestrian and bicycle claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
-
Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Brett Yonon is who this firm puts on a catastrophic injury or a death in the family, and he has tried those cases to verdict. Full profile →
How insurance companies handle these claims
A pedestrian file starts with the driver’s account already in it, and the questions that follow are aimed at the share of fault rather than at whether you were hurt.
- You were not in the crosswalk
- It affects how the blame is divided, it does not end a claim, and it is rarely the whole story. How far the nearest signal was, whether there was a sidewalk at all, and whether a bus stop had been placed where crossing was the only way to reach it are all part of the picture. So is the driver’s independent duty to use due care regardless of where somebody was walking.
- You were looking at your phone
- Asserted far more often than it is established. Where it is genuinely in issue the phone record answers it, and the same record answers the same question about the driver, which is the part that tends not to get raised. We can get both sides of that.
- An early offer, arriving before anybody knows the injury
- It is priced on the bills that exist in the first month and it comes with a release that cannot be reopened. In a practice where a second operation is common and a brain injury frequently declares itself weeks later, that timing is the point. Nothing is signed until the treating doctors have said where this settles.
What a claim can include
Pain, and what daily life has become
Walking, sleeping, standing at work, and the confidence to cross a road again, which people underestimate until they try. It is proved with the account of the people around the injured person as much as with records.
Scarring and disfigurement
A separate head of loss after grafting or a degloving injury. Photograph the healing as it happens, because a record of what it looked like at three weeks does not exist unless somebody made it.
Life care costs after a catastrophic injury
Equipment, home modification, attendant care and the replacement schedule for all of it, set out by a professional so that it is a number rather than an argument.
What we have recovered
Verified matters this firm has handled on pedestrian and bicycle claims. Figures are gross recoveries, before attorney fees, costs and medical liens come out of them.
Settlement
SettlementEvery verdict and settlement we publish, with the press coverage for the ones that were reported. No result predicts another case: every claim turns on its own facts, its own evidence and the insurance actually available.
Why Wolf & Pravato in West Palm Beach
A Palm Beach County pedestrian case is filed in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in West Palm Beach, and the firm’s office on Vista Parkway is in the county rather than across the state. These cases run on public records requests to local agencies, and the firm has recovered $3,850,000 for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle.
Board Certification in Civil Trial law is the Bar’s own measure of trial experience, and 861 of Florida’s 109,000-plus lawyers hold it. Richard Pravato has held it since 2004. It is the credential that changes how an adjuster reads a file, because it says the case has somewhere to go if they will not pay it.
Asking costs nothing and there is no fee unless we win. If we look at what happened and think the claim is not worth pursuing, we will say so on the first call instead of signing you up.
West Palm Beach pedestrian and bicycle questions
Can you get the signal timing for a West Palm Beach intersection?
Yes. Signal and pedestrian phase timing, along with any maintenance history for the lighting, are public records held by the municipality or the county, and we request them early. They are ordinary documents that frequently decide whether a person had time to cross at all, and they are the reason a report saying somebody stepped out can be answered rather than argued with.
There is no sidewalk on that road. Does that matter?
It can matter a great deal, in two ways. It undercuts the argument that walking there was unreasonable, because there was no alternative. And where a road authority put a bus stop or a destination somewhere people plainly have to walk to without providing a way to do it, that may be part of the claim itself. A claim against a public body also cannot be filed until written notice has been presented and the agency has answered it or run out of time to, which is a step worth starting early rather than discovering late.
The driver had no insurance.
The claim does not necessarily end there. Uninsured motorist coverage on your own auto policy, or on a resident relative’s, commonly responds when somebody on foot is struck by an uninsured or fleeing driver. Your own PIP can also pay the first medical bills, because it follows the person rather than only the vehicle. Both are worth checking before anybody concludes there is nothing to claim against.
The police report blames me. Is my claim over?
No. A crash report reflects an officer’s conclusion, usually formed from the only account available at the scene, which is the driver’s. It is not binding and it is not evidence at trial in the way people imagine. Signal timing, lighting records and the physical damage regularly tell a different story.
Are bicycle claims handled the same way?
Broadly yes. Cyclists have the same rights and duties as drivers on Florida roads, and the same coverage routes apply, including your own PIP and uninsured motorist coverage. The practical difference is that the driver’s account is even more likely to go unchallenged unless someone gathers the physical evidence quickly.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
More in West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach Personal Injury Lawyer
Everything we handle in Palm Beach County, and where our office is.
View →West Palm Beach Negligent Security Lawyer
Attacked at a Florida apartment, hotel, store or parking lot.
View →West Palm Beach Catastrophic Injury Lawyer
Florida catastrophic injury lawyers.
View →West Palm Beach Car Accident Lawyer
Florida car accident lawyers since 1993.
View →
Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 Vista Parkway, Suite 4500, West Palm Beach, FL 33411.