Austin Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

The numbers behind a rider's case in Austin

Every figure in this section comes from a government source we pulled on September 5, 2026, and every one of them can be reproduced from the dataset or the published table it came from. Where a number is Austin, it is Austin. Where it is Texas or national, we say so. We do not carry a figure we cannot point at.

What happened on Austin streets in 2025

The City of Austin publishes every crash the Austin Police Department and the other agencies inside the city report to the state. Filtering that record to 2025 and to crashes with a motorcycle among the units involved gives this.

Set that against the city as a whole. Austin recorded 12,004 crashes in 2025 and 99 people killed. Motorcycle crashes were about two and a half percent of the crashes and motorcyclists were sixteen percent of the deaths. That gap is the whole reason this page exists as its own document.

How the 303 happened

Two rows in that table carry most of this page. The single-vehicle row, 93 crashes and seven deaths, is where road surface and evasive maneuvers live, and it is the row an insurer will try to file your case into. The two left-turn rows together are 51 crashes and 13 suspected serious injuries, and that is the crash almost every rider we talk to describes.

Five years in Austin

The crash count barely moves. Treat the most recent year's injury counts with some caution: records keep being processed after the year closes, and recent-year figures shift upward as they land.

Texas, statewide

TxDOT's own tables for calendar year 2025 count 559 motorcyclists killed in Texas — riders and passengers together. That is down from 585 in 2024. Another 2,470 motorcyclists suffered a suspected serious injury. Texas recorded 3,769 traffic deaths in total in 2025, so roughly one in seven people killed on a Texas road was on a motorcycle.

The number that says the most is a quieter one. TxDOT counted 9,643 motorcyclists in reportable Texas crashes in 2025, and only 1,374 of them were recorded as not injured. Roughly one rider in seven walks away from a reportable crash. In a car, walking away is the normal outcome.

TxDOT labels its 2025 figures as data received and processed as of April 7, 2026, which means they can still move. We report them as TxDOT publishes them.

National context

NHTSA's most recent published motorcycle fact sheet, DOT HS 813 732 (July 2025, covering 2023 data), puts the exposure gap in one line. Per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2023, the motorcyclist fatality rate was 31.39 against 1.13 for passenger car occupants — almost 28 times higher for the same distance traveled.

The same sheet contains the single most useful fact any Texas rider can know walking into a claim. Of 3,419 fatal two-vehicle crashes involving a motorcycle and another vehicle in 2023, in 46 percent — 1,588 of them — the other vehicle was turning left while the motorcycle was going straight, passing, or overtaking. Both vehicles were going straight in 709. And 79 percent of the motorcycles were struck on the front, against 6 percent struck on the rear. The signature motorcycle fatality in this country is a car turning into a rider who had the right of way.

Sources

• City of Austin, Austin Crash Report Data — Crash Level Records (dataset `y2wy-tgr5`), pulled 2026-09-05. Filter: `is_deleted = false`, `crash_timestamp_ct` in calendar 2025, `units_involved` containing "Motorcycle". <https://data.austintexas.gov/Transportation-and-Mobility/Austin-Crash-Report-Data-Crash-Level-Records/y2wy-tgr5>
• TxDOT, Texas Motor Vehicle Traffic Crash Facts, Calendar Year 2025 and Motorcyclist Fatalities and Injuries by Age Group and Helmet Use, 2025. <https://www.txdot.gov/data-maps/crash-reports-records/motor-vehicle-crash-statistics.html>
• TxDOT, Share The Road: Look Twice for Motorcycles fact sheet, May 2025. <https://www.txdot.gov/content/dam/docs/division/trf/safety/motorcycle-safety/motor-fact-sheet-eng.pdf>
• NHTSA, Traffic Safety Facts — Motorcycles: 2023 Data, DOT HS 813 732, July

1. <https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813732.pdf>

What these numbers do not cover. The Austin dataset stops at the city's full-purpose boundary. A crash on I-35 through Round Rock, on RM 620 in Lakeway, on US-290 in Dripping Springs or on I-35 at Kyle is not in the 303, and neither are Georgetown, Buda or San Marcos. TxDOT does publish crash counts by county, but those tables are not broken out by vehicle type, so they cannot answer a motorcycle question. TxDOT's CRIS query application, which could, is an interactive tool that returns nothing to a scripted request and produces no citable document. We would rather tell you that than publish an estimate dressed up as a count.

"I never saw the motorcycle"

This is the sentence. It is in the report, it is in the recorded statement, and it will be in the deposition. Drivers say it because it is true — they did not see you — and they say it as though it excuses them.

It does not. A driver's duty under the Texas rules of the road is to keep a proper lookout and to yield when the law says yield. Failing to perceive a vehicle that was there to be perceived is the negligence, and saying so out loud is an admission, not a defense. The work is proving the bike was visible, and that is a physical question with physical answers.

Sight lines. Where exactly was each vehicle at the moment the driver's decision was made? A left-turning driver decides to go about a second and a half before the front wheel moves. Put the motorcycle where it was at that instant, draw the line from the driver's eye position, and you either have an unobstructed view or you have an obstruction you can name — a parked box truck, an A-pillar, a median tree, a queue of stopped traffic in the inside lane. Naming the obstruction is also useful, because an obstructed view is a reason to slow down and creep, not a reason to turn.

Conspicuity. Headlight on, which on any modern motorcycle it is by design. Daytime running configuration. Reflective panels on a jacket. Lane position inside the lane, which is a rider's most underrated piece of evidence: a rider holding the left third of the lane on approach to an intersection is deliberately putting themself in the turning driver's field of view, and that is a fact worth establishing early.

Speed. "He came out of nowhere" is very often a driver's way of saying they misjudged a closing speed, and the defense will convert that into an assertion that you were speeding. The answer to a speed assertion is arithmetic, not argument. It runs on damage profile, on the distance the bike and rider traveled after impact, and on the timing of the signal phase. It is covered further down under reconstruction.

Where this goes in the file. Every one of those threads has to be pinned down before the physical evidence disappears. That is why we ask for the case early and why the first weeks matter more here than in an ordinary rear-end claim.

The left turn across your path

An oncoming car turns left across a rider going straight. Nationally it is 46 percent of fatal two-vehicle motorcycle crashes (NHTSA, 2023 data). Inside Austin in 2025 it was 38 crashes with 10 suspected serious injuries, plus another 13 angle crashes where one vehicle was turning left. In Texas as a whole, TxDOT puts 40 percent of motorcycle fatalities at or near an intersection.

The law here is not complicated. Texas Transportation Code § 545.152 says that to turn left at an intersection, or into an alley, private road or driveway, the operator shall yield the right-of-way to a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction that is in the intersection or close enough to be an immediate hazard. Section 545.153 does the same job at stop and yield signs, and adds something useful: if a driver runs a yield sign without stopping and hits someone in the intersection, the collision itself is prima facie evidence that the driver failed to yield.

So liability should be clean. Insurers fight it anyway, and they fight it in three predictable ways.

"He was speeding, so he wasn't an immediate hazard." This is the real argument, dressed up. The statutory duty attaches to a vehicle "in such proximity to the intersection as to be an immediate hazard," and if the carrier can push your closing speed high enough, they can argue you were not yet a hazard when the turn started. The counter is a reconstruction that fixes your actual approach speed, and a hard look at how long the driver sat in the intersection before committing.

"He could have avoided it." Braking a motorcycle hard in a straight line while a car occupies your lane is a maneuver with a physical limit, and swerving around a turning car frequently puts a rider into the next lane or the curb. A rider who lays the bike down is not confessing to anything. The relevant question is how much time and distance you actually had, which is a number, not an opinion.

"He was passing." Passing on the approach to an intersection is a real defense theme, and it is where lane position and lane markings matter. It is worth knowing before you say anything that the NHTSA left-turn category expressly includes motorcycles that were "going straight, passing, or overtaking" — passing is not, by itself, the end of the case.

Under Chapter 33 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, the jury assigns a percentage to everyone. Every point the defense moves onto you comes straight off the recovery. On a left-turn case where liability looks obvious, that percentage fight is not a side issue. It is the whole negotiation.

What the officer wrote at the scene, and how to correct it

The Texas crash report is the CR-3, and on a motorcycle case it does more damage than on any other kind of collision, for a simple reason: one of the two people who could tell the officer what happened is usually in an ambulance.

So the officer takes a narrative from the driver who is standing up, talking, and unhurt. The diagram gets drawn from that narrative. A contributing factor — "unsafe speed," "faulty evasive action," "changed lane when unsafe" — gets ticked from that narrative. Then a report goes into the state system with your name on the wrong side of it, and every adjuster who touches the file for the next year reads that document first.

Three things to know.

A contributing-factor box is an opinion, and it is not binding on a jury. An officer's conclusion about who caused a crash is generally not admissible as such, and the report itself is not the last word on fault. The problem is practical rather than legal: the adjuster treats it as gospel, and the number they open the file at is anchored to it.

Errors are correctable, and it gets harder with time. Texas law provides for supplementing and correcting a crash report, and the mechanism is the same officer or agency filing a supplement. What makes a supplement possible is new information — a witness the officer never spoke to, a business camera, a photograph of the resting position, your own account once you can give one. What makes it impossible is waiting eight months.

Get the report and read every line. Reports typically post to the state system about ten days after the crash. Read the diagram, the direction-of-travel arrows, the posted speed, the light and weather conditions, the vehicle descriptions, and the witness block. On motorcycle reports we most often find errors in the diagram's lane assignment and in the witness list, which is frequently just empty.

What to do now. If you are able, or if someone can do it for you this week: photograph the intersection from the driver's approach at the same time of day, in the same light. Write down what you remember while you remember it. Get the names of anyone who stopped. And ask whoever recovered your bike not to release, repair or scrap it — the reason for that is two sections down.

Helmets in Texas: the law, and what the other side is allowed to say about it

Most motorcycle pages on the internet get this wrong. Here is the actual state of Texas law, and it has two halves that people confuse constantly.

The traffic law

Texas Transportation Code § 661.003 makes it an offense to ride, or carry a passenger, on a public street or highway without protective headgear meeting the department's safety standards. Subsection (c) is the exception everybody knows about: it does not apply if the person required to wear headgear was at least 21 years old and either completed an approved motorcycle operator training and safety course under Chapter 662, or was covered by a health insurance plan providing medical benefits for injuries from a motorcycle collision.

Two details worth having right. The old $10,000 minimum-benefits figure was removed from the statute by the 2009 amendment, so any page still quoting it is quoting repealed text. And § 661.003(c-1) says a peace officer may not stop or detain a rider for the sole purpose of checking whether they completed the course or carry the health plan. An officer may still stop and inspect the headgear itself for compliance with the safety standards under § 661.004. The penalty for the underlying offense is a fine between $10 and $50.

The civil law, which is a completely different question

Here is where most competitor pages state the opposite of the law.

In Nabors Well Services, Ltd. v. Romero, 456 S.W.3d 553 (Tex. 2015), the Texas Supreme Court overruled its own 1974 decision in Carnation Co. v. Wong and held, in the Court's words, that "relevant evidence of use or nonuse of seat belts is admissible for the purpose of apportioning responsibility in civil lawsuits." The Court's reasoning was that the proportionate-responsibility scheme directs a jury to assign responsibility for the harm — the injury and the death — and not merely for the underlying collision, and that a plaintiff's own pre-crash, injury-causing conduct is therefore in play.

That reasoning is not limited to seat belts. It is about safety equipment and about which harms a plaintiff's own conduct helped cause. Which means that in Texas, helmet non-use can be raised on comparative responsibility even where no helmet was legally required. A 34-year-old rider with a qualifying health plan who was riding entirely lawfully without a helmet has committed no offense, and the defense may still ask a jury to assign that rider a share of responsibility for a head injury.

Anyone who tells you the helmet exemption ends the argument is telling you what the law was before 2015.

What that actually means for your case

It means considerably less than the other side would like, and here is why.

The defense does not get to simply say the word "helmet." Nabors admits relevant evidence, and relevance on this issue is a causation question: the defendant has to connect the absence of the helmet to the specific injuries claimed. That takes expert proof about the injury mechanism, and it is proof that falls apart quickly where the injuries are to the pelvis, the femur, the shoulder, the wrist, the spine below the neck, or the skin. A femur fracture on Menchaca Road has nothing to do with headgear, and a jury can see that.

And on the facts, the argument is weaker than its reputation. TxDOT's own 2025 table shows that of the 559 motorcyclists killed in Texas that year, 359 were wearing a helmet and 173 were not. Wearing one is the norm among Texas riders who die. The defense narrative that a rider who is hurt must have been reckless runs into the state's own count.

If you were wearing a helmet, say so early and keep it. If you were not, say so early too. It is not the end of the case, and we would rather build around it from day one than find out about it in a deposition.

Lane filtering is not legal in Texas, and what that means for your case

Riders ask about this constantly, and the answer changed recently enough that a lot of published material is out of date.

Texas has never authorized lane splitting or lane filtering. What is new is that since September 1, 2023, the prohibition is express. Transportation Code § 545.0605, added by H.B. 4122 in the 88th Legislature, says the operator of a motorcycle may not "operate the motorcycle between lanes of traffic moving in the same direction" and may not "pass a motor vehicle while in the same lane as the vehicle being passed." So the current position is a statutory prohibition, not a legislative silence. Two motorcycles riding two abreast in one lane is permitted; three is not.

The same section carries something riders should know is on their side. § 545.0605(a)(1) says the operator of a motorcycle "is entitled to full use of a lane" and that a motor vehicle "may not be driven in a manner that deprives a motorcycle of the full use of a lane." That is a duty owed to you, and it is the statutory hook for a whole category of Austin crashes: the driver who drifts into your lane on MoPac, the pickup that comes across the line on Menchaca, the car that merges onto a lane you are already occupying. Austin recorded 41 same-direction sideswipes involving motorcycles in 2025. That is what § 545.0605(a)(1) is for.

What happens if you were filtering. A violation of a traffic statute is not a verdict. It is evidence of negligence that goes to the jury alongside everything the driver did, and Chapter 33 makes the jury apportion. A rider filtering between stopped lanes who gets hit by a driver making an unsignaled lane change into a gap has a real case, and a percentage problem. Under § 33.001 the claim is barred only if the rider's share exceeds 50 percent, and under § 33.012(a) the award is reduced by whatever the share is. The distance between "we recover nothing" and "we recover eighty percent" is the argument, and it is worth having a lawyer make it rather than an adjuster.

Do not tell an adjuster you were filtering before you have talked to someone. Do not tell a lawyer you were not, if you were. Those are two different mistakes and the second one is worse.

Gear, speed and the story the defense wants to tell

Strip away the file and every motorcycle defense is one story: this rider chose risk, and this is what risk looks like. It gets told in pieces so it does not sound like a story.

"He was riding aggressively." Usually built out of nothing more than the absence of skid marks, or a witness who says the bike "was moving." Motorcycles often leave no useful skid because ABS is standard equipment on most modern machines and because a rider's braking loads the front tire in a way that does not mark pavement the same way a car's does. Absence of a mark is not evidence of speed.

"Look at the bike." A sport bike photographs badly for a jury and everyone in the case knows it. Expect the defense to make sure the make and the model are in the room. The counter is not to apologize for the machine. It is to establish what it was actually doing, and to keep the discussion on the driver's conduct.

"He wasn't wearing real gear." Or, on the other side, "look at all that gear, he knew what he was getting into." Both versions get run. The first is a comparative-responsibility play in the same family as the helmet argument and is answered the same way: connect it to a specific injury or it is noise. The second is just prejudice and does not survive being named out loud.

"He'd been riding for thirty years, he should have seen it coming." The experienced-rider version of blame. Experience is not a duty to compensate for another driver's failure to yield.

How this gets handled. The defense's story only works while it stays vague. We break it into individually testable claims and test them: what was the actual approach speed, what was the actual sight line, what was the actual injury mechanism. Each one that fails takes a piece of the story with it. That work is also what moves the number, because a carrier that can no longer say "the jury will blame him" has to price the case on the medicine.

Gravel, edge drops and road conditions that only hurt riders

Ninety-three of Austin's 303 motorcycle crashes in 2025 were coded as a single vehicle going straight, and those 93 carried seven deaths — the deadliest row in the table. Some of those are rider error. A meaningful number of them are the road.

A car crosses the following things without the driver noticing. A motorcycle does not.

Loose gravel and aggregate. Chip-seal overrun, gravel tracked out of a construction entrance, sand left after a storm. On the hill roads west of Austin this is a year-round hazard. Two wheels on loose material in a curve is a low-side.

Pavement edge drop-off. Where a resurfaced lane sits an inch or two above the shoulder or the adjacent lane, a rider crossing it at an angle gets the front wheel caught and steered. The engineering literature has treated edge drop-off as a hazard for decades and the recognized fix is a wedge, not a vertical face.

Uncovered or sunken utility cuts. A steel plate that has shifted, a trench cut that was never brought back to grade, a manhole ring sitting proud of the surface. Common in the parts of central and east Austin where the utilities are old and the street keeps being opened.

Bad work-zone transitions. A lane shift with no taper, a temporary striping pattern that contradicts the old striping still visible underneath, a plate at the start of a shifted lane. Austin recorded 32 motorcycle-involved crashes in construction zones in 2025, and the Austin area has been one long work zone for years.

Standing water, tar bleed and thermoplastic markings when wet. All three change available traction without changing how the road looks.

Debris and cargo from someone else's truck. That one is a claim against a driver or a company rather than a road authority, and it is often the easier case of the two.

What to do now, and quickly. Photograph the defect itself, not just the bike. Get it from the rider's approach angle and from directly above, and put something in frame for scale — a phone, a tape, a boot. Note the nearest cross street and the direction of travel. If there is a work zone, photograph the signs, the barrels and the striping, because the layout of a work zone changes weekly and next month's photograph proves nothing about the day you went down. If a city or state crew is working the site, get the name on the truck.

Suing a city or the state over a road defect, and the clock that starts immediately

Once a claim points at TxDOT, Travis County, or the City of Austin, it stops being an ordinary negligence case and becomes a Texas Tort Claims Act case under Chapter 101 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code. Four features of that chapter decide whether a rider has anything.

The notice deadline, which is the one that kills cases

Section 101.101(a) entitles a governmental unit to written notice within six months of the incident, reasonably describing the injury, the time and place, and the incident itself. Section 101.101(b) then ratifies city charter provisions requiring notice within a shorter charter period — and Austin has one. The City of Austin's own instruction to claimants is blunt: "You must send this letter within 45 days of the incident."

Forty-five days. From a hospital bed. That is the entire reason a road-condition case has to be identified in the first weeks rather than the first year.

There is a narrow saving provision in § 101.101(c): the notice requirement does not apply if the unit has actual notice that a death occurred, that the claimant was injured, or that property was damaged. Actual notice is a real doctrine and it is also a fight, and no rider should plan a case around winning it.

Ordinary defect versus special defect

Section 101.022(a) says that on an ordinary premise defect the governmental unit owes only the duty a private person owes a licensee, which in practice means you must show the unit actually knew about the condition. Section 101.022(b) says that limitation does not apply to the duty to warn of special defects such as excavations or obstructions on highways, roads, or streets, nor to the duty to warn about missing or malfunctioning traffic signs and signals under § 101.060. On a special defect the duty is the higher ordinary-care duty, and actual knowledge is not the gate.

Whether a given condition is a special defect is a question for the court and it is where these cases are won and lost. An excavation across a travel lane is the paradigm. A large trench cut, a washed-out section, an obstruction in the roadway — all argue as special defects. Long-standing wear, a settled patch, or a condition off the traveled portion tends to argue the other way. On a toll road, § 101.022(c) applies the licensee standard to premise defects regardless.

The signs-and-signals limitation

Section 101.060 walls off a set of claims. A unit's initial discretionary decision about whether to place a sign or signal is out. The absence, condition, or malfunction of a sign or signal is out unless the responsible unit failed to correct it within a reasonable time after notice. Removal or destruction by a third party is out unless the unit failed to fix it within a reasonable time after actual notice. Notice is the pivot in all three, which is why a work-order and complaint-history request goes out early in these cases. Section 101.060(c) preserves the duty to warn of special defects.

The caps, which change what the case is worth

Section 101.023 limits recovery under the Act. Against the state — TxDOT on a state highway — and against a municipality like the City of Austin, the limit is $250,000 per person and $500,000 per occurrence for bodily injury or death. Against another unit of local government, such as a county, it is $100,000 per person and $300,000 per occurrence. Section 101.024 says the Act does not authorize exemplary damages at all.

We say this plainly because it changes decisions. A catastrophic injury caused by a road defect on a Travis County road is capped at $100,000 no matter how severe it is. Which is exactly why a road-defect theory is almost never the only theory we develop. If there is also a driver, that driver's coverage is not capped, and the road condition becomes context that explains why you went down rather than the sole target.

The driver who hit you carries the state minimum

Texas requires financial responsibility to operate a vehicle under Transportation Code § 601.051, and § 601.072 sets the floor at $30,000 for bodily injury to one person, $60,000 for two or more in one collision, and $25,000 for property damage. Those numbers were set effective January 1, 2011 and have not moved since.

Now put a rider's medicine against them. A helicopter or ground transport, a trauma activation, a CT series, an ORIF on a tibia or a femur with hardware, three days inpatient, and outpatient physical therapy will pass $30,000 before the discharge paperwork is finished. Then add the surgeon's bill separately from the hospital's, add the anesthesiologist separately again, add a second surgery for hardware removal a year later, and add every week you could not work.

This is why the coverage question gets asked in the first conversation rather than at the end. The order of work on a motorcycle case is: find every dollar of coverage that exists, then build the case to reach it. Finding coverage means asking whether the driver was working at the time, whether the vehicle was owned by a business, whether there is an umbrella policy above the auto policy, whether there is a second at-fault driver, and whether a road authority or a commercial property owner contributed the hazard.

And it means reading your own policy, which is the next section, and which is where a surprising number of these cases are actually funded.

Your own policy: uninsured and underinsured coverage

Texas Insurance Code § 1952.101(b) requires an insurer to include uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage in every auto liability policy it issues in this state, and § 1952.101(c) says the coverage only comes out if the named insured rejects it in writing. A lot of riders carry UM/UIM without knowing, because nobody ever asked them to sign the rejection.

Pull your declarations page before you accept anything from anyone. The line you are looking for reads "UM/UIM" or "uninsured/underinsured motorists."

What UM covers. § 1952.102 treats a vehicle as uninsured where the liability insurer is insolvent, and policy forms extend it to the driver who had no coverage at all and, where the driver is unknown, to a hit-and-run. § 1952.104(3) attaches a condition to that last one: actual physical contact must have occurred between the unknown driver's vehicle and the insured or the insured's property. A rider run off the road by a car that never touched the bike is the phantom-vehicle fact pattern that condition excludes.

What UIM covers. § 1952.103 defines an underinsured motor vehicle as one whose liability limits were lower than your UIM limit, or have been reduced below it by payments on other claims from the same crash. § 1952.106 says the coverage pays what you are legally entitled to recover, up to your limit, reduced by what is recoverable from the other driver's insurer. So a $100,000 UIM policy against a $30,000 at-fault policy is $70,000 of additional room, not $100,000.

The two things about a Texas UIM claim that riders most need to know

First: your own carrier does not owe you anything until liability and damages are established. In Brainard v. Trinity Universal Insurance Co., 216 S.W.3d 809, 818 (Tex. 2006), the Texas Supreme Court held the UIM insurer "is under no contractual duty to pay benefits until the insured obtains a judgment establishing the liability and underinsured status of the other motorist." That is not a technicality. It means your carrier can decline to pay a fair number, decline to explain itself, and be doing nothing legally wrong yet, because the duty has not attached. Riders who expect their own company to behave like a company they pay are routinely blindsided by this.

The practical answer is that the prerequisites have to be established, and there is more than one way to establish them. In Allstate Insurance Co. v. Irwin, 627 S.W.3d 263 (Tex. 2021), the Court confirmed that an insured may use the Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act to establish the other motorist's liability and underinsured status. That gives a UIM claim a route to a decision instead of an indefinite standoff.

Second: do not accept the at-fault driver's limits without your UIM carrier's written consent. Nearly every Texas auto policy conditions UIM coverage on the insurer's consent to any settlement with the at-fault party, so it can preserve its subrogation rights against that party. Take the $30,000 on your own, and the carrier can take the position that you prejudiced its rights and forfeited the coverage sitting above it. The mechanics — tender the offer, give the carrier its window, get consent in writing or a substitute payment — are routine when someone knows to do them, and expensive to fix afterward.

You have a contract with your own insurer. You still need someone on your side of it.

Reconstruction on a two-wheeled vehicle

Reconstruction of a car crash and reconstruction of a motorcycle crash are different disciplines, and hiring the wrong expert is a real way to lose a winnable case.

There is usually no event data recorder. The crash-data module that makes a modern car reconstruction straightforward is absent on most motorcycles. Some current machines log data through the ABS or engine control module, and it is worth checking, and on many bikes there is simply nothing to download. The substitute is physical: crush and deformation on the bike, contact and transfer marks on the car, the rest positions, the throw distance of the rider, gouges in the pavement, and the direction and length of any scrape.

Throw distance is the workhorse. How far a rider travels from the point of impact is a function of impact speed, and it is the calculation that most often answers the "he was speeding" assertion with a number. It needs the rest positions documented, which is another reason scene photographs taken by anyone who was there are worth more on a motorcycle case than on almost any other.

Braking behaves differently. A motorcycle's braking is split front and rear and its limits depend on load transfer, tire condition and surface. A car reconstructionist applying a standard drag factor will get a rider's available deceleration wrong, usually in the direction that hurts the rider.

The damage on the car tells you the geometry. Impact height, the shape of the intrusion, and where the paint transfer sits together indicate approach angle and relative motion. On a left-turn case the point of contact on the car — front fender, front door, rear quarter — is close to dispositive on how far into the turn the driver was, which is the whole liability question.

Human factors get their own expert on the right case. Perception-response time, conspicuity, and how a driver scans an intersection are a separate field from vehicle dynamics, and on a "never saw him" case that is where the answer lives.

The bike is the evidence, and it is on a clock. Everything above needs the motorcycle. See the next section.

The bike, the gear and the property claim

Two things are happening to your motorcycle right now and they work against each other.

The property carrier wants to total it, take title, and move it. A storage yard is charging by the day. Every day you leave it there costs money, and the fastest way to stop the bleeding is to sign the release. That release also hands over the single most important physical exhibit in your case, and once the salvage buyer has it, the reconstruction that would have proven your speed is gone.

Do not release, repair, or authorize disposal of the motorcycle until someone has inspected and documented it. If storage is mounting, tell us and we will deal with the yard and the carrier; getting the bike moved to a controlled location and preserved is ordinary work that happens in days, not months. This is the single most time-critical instruction on this page.

Preserve the gear too, and do not wash it. The helmet, jacket, gloves and boots are physical evidence. A scuff pattern on a helmet shell records impact location. Abrasion across the back of a jacket records a slide. The condition of a boot sole records whether a foot was on the peg. And on a helmet-argument case, producing the helmet you were actually wearing settles a question the defense would otherwise be free to speculate about.

The property claim itself. A motorcycle's value is a genuine fight in a way a sedan's is not, because the market comparables are thin and because farkles do not show up in a valuation guide. Exhaust, suspension, wheels, luggage, seat, electronics, crash protection, tires with 500 miles on them. Document what was on it with receipts and photographs. Aftermarket parts are compensable, and they tend to be omitted from a first offer.

Riding gear is property too, and a full replacement set — helmet, jacket, pants, boots, gloves — is a real number that also tends to be left out unless somebody lists it.

The property claim and the injury claim are separate. Settling the property claim does not settle your injuries, and you should read anything you are asked to sign before you sign it. See /compensation/property-damage for how property recovery works in Texas generally.

The damages a rider carries that a driver usually does not

Every road-rash case is a scarring case. Riders come out of these crashes with grafts across a forearm, a hip or a back, with permanent color and texture changes over large areas, with hardware scars from an external fixator, and with the loss of function that comes with heavy scarring across a joint. Texas treats physical disfigurement and physical impairment as their own damage elements, separate from pain and separate from medical bills, and they are elements a jury can only assess if the record actually documents them.

That means photographing skin at intervals through healing rather than once at the end. It means getting the treating surgeon to say in the chart what the long-term appearance and function will be, and whether revision or graft work is expected. It means an honest account of what you no longer do with your hands or your shoulder. Disfigurement is the damage element most often left thin in a motorcycle file, and it is frequently one of the largest.

We go deep on that element here because it is the rider's element. The rest of the categories are set out where they belong: medical expenses, lost wages, loss of earning capacity, pain and suffering, disability and disfigurement, emotional distress, and loss of consortium. Where a driver's conduct was more than careless, punitive damages may be in play under Chapter 41.

Some riders come out of these crashes with a brain injury or a spinal cord injury, and those cases are built differently from the ground up — see Austin traumatic brain injury lawyer and Austin spinal cord injury lawyer. If a helmet, a tire or a component failed, that is a separate product claim and it is covered at Austin product liability lawyer. If a rider did not survive, the claim belongs to the family and is explained at Austin wrongful death lawyer.

What a rider's case costs to run, and the deadlines on it

The fee

We work on a contingency fee. You pay nothing to hire us and you owe no fee unless we recover money for you.

What matters more on a motorcycle case is the case expenses, because this is an expense-heavy kind of file and the firm advances all of it. A rider's case typically needs the motorcycle recovered from a storage yard and stored somewhere controlled — a real, recurring cost that starts before anyone knows what the case is worth. It needs a reconstructionist who works on two-wheeled vehicles, and on a "never saw him" case often a human-factors expert on top. It needs a scene inspection with survey-grade measurements while the striping and the sight lines are still what they were. On a road-defect case it needs an open-records pull of work orders, complaint history and inspection logs from the responsible entity. It needs the full medical record from a trauma admission, which on these injuries runs to thousands of pages, and it usually needs a treating surgeon's narrative on permanent impairment and scarring.

The firm carries all of that. Expenses come out of the recovery at the end and are accounted for in writing. We tell you before we spend serious money on a case whether we think the case will carry it, including when the honest answer is that it will not and you should not open the file.

The consultation is free and it is with an attorney, in English or Spanish. Immigration status does not stop an injury claim in Texas, we do not ask about it, and we do not report it. You do not have to come to Austin to start; most of this work happens by phone, text and email, and we come to you when it matters.

The deadlines

Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code § 16.003 gives you two years from the date of the crash to file suit, and on a motorcycle case the real deadline is far earlier than that, because the motorcycle itself is the evidence and the property carrier will release, repair or scrap it within weeks. If a city, county or the state may share responsibility for the road, the tort-claims notice clock described above is running right now — six months under § 101.101, and 45 days under the City of Austin's own rule.

Who works your case

Israel Ruiz Medina — Founding Partner, Medina & Medina Personal Injury Attorneys. Texas Bar No. 24130487. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Member, Texas Trial Lawyers Association; Travis County Bar Association; Austin Bar Association; American Association for Justice. Full bio

Rikki Olivia Medina — Founding Partner. Texas Bar No. 24144569. Juris Doctor, Baylor University School of Law. Admitted in Texas and Nevada. Full bio

Questions riders ask us

Sixteen questions riders ask us, answered for this page and no other.

Related pages on this site

• Car and truck collisions in the Austin metro
• Riders hit by a commercial truck
• Head injuries after a crash
• Spinal cord injuries and lifetime care
• A rider killed in a crash
• Pedestrians and cyclists hit by a vehicle

Talk to a lawyer about your crash

This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Past results do not guarantee future results.