Differences Between Pedestrian Accident and Car Accident Cases

Answer:

I get clients who ask, how does a car versus pedestrian claim differ from that of a regular auto accident claim in Utah?

There are a bunch of things that are the same. The pedestrian gets no-fault benefits like a car. The rules of the road are the same. Insurance law is the same. Of course, there’s levels of insurance that might be available through your own policy. How they differ is also really important.

When a crash involves a pedestrian, usually we’re dealing with a pedestrian’s right of way, crosswalks, intersections, pedestrian signals, what the car driver should’ve seen or what they did see.

Whenever there’s a pedestrian, it adds this extra layer of investigation regarding negligence. How did the crash happen? What was the driver’s field of view? What was the lighting like, the location of the pedestrian, either on the street or on a walkway? Were there any witnesses? Witnesses become critically important with pedestrian cases because with a car, you can look and see the points of impact on the car.

You can’t necessarily see those points of impact on a person’s body. With a car versus pedestrian, we’re missing that physical evidence unless the pedestrian does some damage to the metal or glass on the car. Because of that, there’s certain things that go into a pedestrian vehicle accident that need to be investigated right away before that evidence is lost.

All these things help us reverse engineer how a pedestrian crash happened so that we can present the best possible case to the insurance company. If you’ve been hit as a pedestrian, call me. Our initial consultation is always free. I’d love to talk with you.