El Monte Bus and Train Accident Lawyer | San Gabriel Valley
You were a passenger on a bus or train, and you got hurt. Now you are dealing with a claim against a government agency, and those rules are completely different from a typical personal injury claim.
First, there are no seatbelts on a bus. No airbags. When it stops hard or gets hit, you go into a pole, a seat, or another rider, with nothing between you and the impact. That is why transit injuries are often worse than they look on paper, and why a passenger who was doing nothing wrong ends up with the worst of it.
When a city bus line, Metro, or any public transit agency is involved, California requires you to file a formal claim with that agency first, usually no later than six months after the accident. It is not a lawsuit, but it is a required step. Miss it and the case is over no matter how badly you were hurt or how clearly it was their fault. Those are hard facts.
Every bus and train car has cameras, and that footage is the clearest record of what happened - how hard the stop was, whether the doors closed too soon, where you were standing. It gets overwritten automatically on a schedule. Nobody at the agency is preserving it for you. You must demand it, in writing, or it will very likely be deleted. Another hard fact.
It helps if you got the driver's name, the bus number, or a police report. If you did not, it does not sink your case. A ticket stub, a TAP card, or just knowing where you boarded, roughly when, and where that bus or train was headed is usually enough to identify the exact vehicle and run. Not a big issue.
As a passenger, the rules work in your favor. Transit operators are common carriers, which means state law holds them to the highest duty of care, not the ordinary one. Sudden stops, pulling away before you were seated, unsafe driving - all of it counts. And it usually does not matter who caused the underlying crash. If another car ran a red light and caused the crash, you probably have a claim against that driver, the agency, or both.
Here's the honest part: not every incident on a bus is a case. If you stumbled, caught yourself, and were not injured enough to see a doctor, there is probably not much there. Brad will tell you that plainly if you have a case.
But if you were actually hurt, the deadline and the video are both running against you right now. We are an El Monte bus and train accident lawyer. Getting that claim filed on time and that footage preserved is how Brad Hayes Law earns its fee, paid out of the settlement if we win. But we can't win if you don't call.
Now that you know more about a bus and train accident than most,
is there anything you want to ...