Uneasy Rider

Steven C. Lee, a personal injury attorney with an eponymous firm in Austin, gets approximately 50 bicycle accident phone calls a year, of which he takes on approximately 10 as clients. As a cyclist himself, he’d rather you didn’t get in an accident in the first place and offers the best preventative measures he knows, including: “Don’t be aggressive, because the bicyclist will always lose to the car,” and “Make yourself visible. I see more fashion than safety out there. Make sure you know that it doesn’t matter if you’re looking good when you’re going down.”

And if you do go down?

“The first thing is to make sure you’re OK,” Lee says. “I see a lot of riders, very athletic, fit, positive people, and they seem to want to walk off the injuries. They’re almost always more concerned about their bike than their body.”

“There’s almost always a head injury,” adds Lenore Shefman, a personal injury attorney at Cyclistlaw in Austin, who has been representing bicycle and motorcycle accident victims for 26 years. “When you have a client who says, ‘The first thing I remember …’ that’s an indication that there was something they don’t remember.”

Other advice from these attorneys: Get your bike off the road and onto the sidewalk immediately. Call 911. Tell your side of the story to the dispatcher, the police, and paramedics if called. Get the driver’s insurance card. Don’t junk your bike; preserve it as evidence. Call your insurance carrier. 

Attorneys cite the most common bicycling injuries as shoulder, spinal cord, head and neck injuries. Both encourage taking photos of the scene—people, places, the license plate of the car that hit you, its make and model, everything.

“If you are capable, turn your camera on ‘record,’” Shefman says, “and record everything and anything in the scene—including witness statements.”

Photos, adds Lee, “should include the other vehicle, the location of the crash, the proximity of the car to the bicycle, the roadway surface in case there’s an existing crack in the road, and signage to show which way you were traveling. … If you were in a bike path, take a photo that shows you were in the bike path. I can’t tell you how many people don’t take a photo that indicates they were in a bike lane when they got hit.”

And don’t forget about your gear. “Take photos of your helmet, if it’s damaged,” Lee says. “Take photos of your gear, because a lot of times that’s what takes the brunt of the accident.” And don’t throw your gear away just because it’s damaged. “Bad idea—they need to bag and tag those,” Lee says.

At some point, Shefman recommends taking the foam padding out of the helmet. “You’ll see where the damage to the helmet is, which is where the injury to the brain is,” she says. “Also, I want to see witnesses. If victims are cognitive enough to give me a call, I want them to go talk to anybody who’s standing around, get a name and a phone number, because the police won’t do that. We can get data-recording devices to tell us part of the story, but that human story exists at the scene, and that’s the one we’re ultimately telling in the courtroom.”

Most cases don’t get in the courtroom. “They settle the majority of the time,” Lee says. “About one-third of them require lawsuits.”

Lee adds a final word of caution: Heads up.

“I live in a town with a lot of motor vehicle traffic, a lot of inexperienced drivers, a lot of visitors, and tourists, and newly minted Austinites who are looking at their phones to figure out if they should turn right or left,” he says. “Super dangerous if you’re a cyclist. You may be doing everything perfectly, but oftentimes your side of the story doesn’t get heard. In this world, people are not necessarily that sympathetic to bicyclists. Most drivers find bicyclists to be an annoyance, an additional hazard. Bicyclists are not necessarily well-respected on the roadway, so if you do go down, get your side of the story to the police officers.”