Pedestrian Accidents: Protecting the Rights of Injured Walkers and Families

A person on foot absorbs the entire force of a collision. There is no bumper, no crumple zone and no airbag, which is why pedestrian crashes produce a wildly disproportionate share of catastrophic and fatal injuries in Georgia.

The legal fight almost always starts in the same place: the insurer argues the pedestrian was where they should not have been. Georgia's modified comparative negligence rule gives that argument real teeth, because a pedestrian found 50% or more at fault recovers nothing.

Beating it requires evidence gathered before it disappears. Crosswalk markings and their condition. Signal timing and pedestrian phase length. Street lighting levels at the hour of the crash. Sight lines from the driver's approach. Whether the driver was on their phone. Whether the roadway design itself, in a corridor with a known crash history, contributed.

Coverage is the second problem. Georgia's 25,000 minimum bodily injury limit does not begin to cover a serious pedestrian injury, so the real recovery frequently comes from uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage on the injured person's own policy, or a resident relative's policy, which many people do not realize applies when they were walking.