Personal Injury
Pedestrian Accident Claims

Sadly, many pedestrians, young, old, and in between are seriously injured each year after they were struck by motor vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, trucks and buses.

The contest between motor vehicles and pedestrians is always a very uneven one. Motor vehicles, often termed “lethal weapons” can cause massive damage to pedestrians, who don’t have airbags or body armour to protect them from serious injury when hit by a car.

Indeed, pedestrians are the most vulnerable of all road users, despite the fact that pedestrian crossings are supposed to be sanctuaries for pedestrians.

Over the past 40 years Stacks Goudkamp have acted for innumerable injured pedestrians, including infants, children, teenagers, adults and the elderly.

Our pedestrian accident claims case studies contains many examples of claims we have successfully brought on behalf of injured pedestrians. Many are very sad to read because of the enormity of the injuries and loss.

In most car and other road accidents involving injured pedestrians the police will attend the scene and conduct an investigation. They are supposed to speak to any witnesses who may have seen what had happened and also to the driver of the car which has caused the damage. Unfortunately, because seriously injured pedestrians are often removed from the scene and taken to hospital before the police even arrive, or they have no memory of the accident because of the serious nature of the injury, the injured pedestrians are often not interviewed by the police. This can result in the police making a determination as to who was a fault with the injured person.

In our experience it is very common for the police to blame the pedestrian for the accident, even though drivers of cars and other motor vehicles owe pedestrians a very high degree of care, because of the damage caused by collisions between motor vehicles and pedestrians.

We have seen literally hundreds of police reports in which the police have blamed the pedestrian for the accident. Yet in the vast majority of cases, probably over 98%, we have been able to establish that the driver of the vehicle involved in the accident was at least partially to blame for the accident and have recovered significant compensation damages for our injured pedestrian clients.

Pedestrian injury compensation is available to young children who have been injured as pedestrians with no reduction for any contributory negligence for children under the age of 6 because the law has established that such young children cannot be responsible for their own behaviour.

Injured pedestrians older than 6 may be found guilty of contributory negligence if their conduct played some part in causing the accident or failed to keep a proper regard for their own safety, for example running across a road, crossing the road whilst intoxicated, crossing the road at a dangerous spot and not on a pedestrian crossing, darting out from behind a parked vehicle, failing to keep any or any proper lookout for motor vehicles etc.

In our experience it is very unusual for a pedestrian to be found to be totally at fault for the pedestrian accident. Indeed, in our experience very few pedestrians are held to be more than 50% to blame.

As the lawyers for injured pedestrians, we make it our practice to visit the scene of the accident as soon as possible if liability is likely to be denied by the insurer or the insurer is likely to allege that our pedestrian client was wholly or partially at fault. The things we look for when we visit the scene of the accident is whether or not the accident occurred close to a school, if the accident happened at night whether there was street lighting or ambient light from shops and other buildings, the presence of pedestrian crossings, the nature of the road where the accident occurred for example, was it a quiet suburban or country road or was it a major thoroughfare or highway? All of these factors are relevant.

In cases where it is unlikely that the driver of the car or other motor vehicle could have done anything to have avoided the collision it is open to injured pedestrians to allege that they were injured in a “blameless accident”, and still receive significant compensation.