What to Do After Being Struck as a Pedestrian in Pennsylvania

I am Sean Quinlan, and the calls I get from people struck while walking almost always start the same way: the driver said they never saw me, the police report has two sentences in it, and an adjuster has already called asking for a recorded statement. What happens in the first two weeks tends to decide what the case is worth two years later. Here is the order I tell people to work in.

Get evaluated, and be complete about it

A pedestrian absorbs impact directly. There is no crumple zone, no belt, no airbag. That is why these files skew toward traumatic brain injury, spinal injury, and pelvic and lower-extremity fractures, and it is why symptoms that seem minor on day one matter enormously later. Tell the emergency department about everything — headache, nausea, light sensitivity, memory gaps, numbness, tingling, and any loss of consciousness however brief. A concussion that goes unrecorded on the first chart becomes an argument two years later about whether it happened at all.

Then follow the treatment plan. Gaps in care are the most common thing an insurer uses to discount a serious injury, and they are entirely avoidable.

Understand the duty the driver owed you

Most people assume that if they were not in a crosswalk, they have no claim. That is not Pennsylvania law. 75 Pa. C.S. § 3542 imposes on every driver an independent duty to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian, to give warning by sounding the horn when necessary, and to exercise proper precaution around children and any obviously confused or incapacitated person. That duty applies regardless of who technically held the right-of-way.

On top of that, 75 Pa. C.S. § 3543 requires a driver to yield to a pedestrian crossing within a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection, and 75 Pa. C.S. § 3544 governs how pedestrians walk along a roadway where no sidewalk is available. Section 3549 addresses the driver’s obligations toward blind pedestrians using a white cane or guide dog. Taken together, these provisions give a jury something concrete to measure the driver’s conduct against.

Do not give a recorded statement

The adjuster who calls in the first week is not gathering information to pay you. They are building a comparative-fault record. The questions are designed to elicit uncertainty about where you were, how fast you were walking, what you were wearing, and whether you looked. You are under no obligation to give a recorded statement to the other driver’s insurer, and you should not, and you should not sign a blanket medical authorization either.

Preserve the evidence that disappears

Pedestrian cases are usually won on material that has a shelf life measured in days.

• Business and residential video. Storefronts, doorbell cameras, transit vehicles, and municipal traffic cameras. Most overwrite within a week or two.
• Signal timing data. Held by the municipality or PennDOT. It establishes the phase sequence and proves who had the walk indication.
• The striking vehicle’s event data recorder. Speed, throttle, and braking in the seconds before impact — gone the moment the vehicle is repaired or salvaged.
• Sight-line photographs taken from the driver’s actual eye height, at the same hour, in the same light, showing that you were visible.
• Independent witnesses. Frequently present and frequently missing from the police report.

Getting a preservation letter to the driver, their insurer, and any business with a camera is the single highest-value thing that happens in the first week.

Find every insurance policy in your household

This is the step people skip, and it is often worth more than everything else combined. As a pedestrian you were not an occupant of any vehicle, so there are no first-party medical benefits attached to the crash the way there would be if you had been driving. Health insurance becomes the primary payer.

What fills the gap is uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage, which in Pennsylvania follows the insured person rather than the insured car. If you own an auto policy with UM/UIM, or if you are a resident relative in a household that does, that coverage generally responds when you are struck while walking — including in a hit-and-run where the driver is never identified. Bring every declarations page in the household to the first meeting, not just the one for the car you usually drive. Where stacking was not waived across multiple household vehicles, the available limits can multiply.

Your tort election is also less of an obstacle than you may fear. Under 75 Pa. C.S. § 1705(d)(3), a person injured while occupying a motor vehicle that is not a private passenger motor vehicle is not bound by a limited tort election, and where there is no household policy at all, § 1705(b)(3) is the operative provision. I verify this against the actual declarations pages in every file.

Expect to be blamed, and plan for it

Pennsylvania applies modified comparative negligence under 42 Pa. C.S. § 7102. Your damages are reduced by your percentage of fault, and you recover nothing only if your share exceeds 50 percent. Insurers open pedestrian files at inflated percentages on the assumption that a jury will blame you for being outside a vehicle. Moving an allocation from 40 percent to 15 percent is frequently the most valuable result the investigation produces, and it is achieved with reconstruction, sight lines, and signal data rather than with argument.

If a sidewalk, curb ramp, or signal defect contributed

Where a broken sidewalk, a missing curb ramp, an unlit crossing, or a malfunctioning signal played a role, a government entity may be a defendant — and that runs on a much shorter clock. Written notice is required within six months under 42 Pa. C.S. § 5522. Immunity applies except within the enumerated exceptions of 42 Pa. C.S. §§ 8522 and 8542, and damages are capped at $250,000 per plaintiff and $1 million per occurrence against the Commonwealth under § 8528(b) and $500,000 per occurrence against a local agency under § 8553(b). In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, abutting property owners frequently carry sidewalk maintenance duties by ordinance, and a private owner is not protected by those caps.

Know the deadlines

Two years from the date of the crash under 42 Pa. C.S. § 5524. If someone died, the wrongful death claim under 42 Pa. C.S. § 8301 runs two years from the date of death and the survival action arises under § 8302. A child’s own claim is generally tolled until their eighteenth birthday, though a parent’s claim for medical expenses is not. And any municipal notice deadline runs long before any of these.

For the full picture of how I work these cases, see my Pennsylvania pedestrian and bicycle accident lawyer page, the comparison of pedestrian and bicycle claims to car accident claims, and the Philadelphia pedestrian accident guide if your crash happened in the city.

Talk to me about what happened

If you or someone in your family was struck while walking, the evidence is already on a clock. Consultations are free and confidential, and there is no fee unless we recover. Request a free case review.

Serving injured Pennsylvanians in: Harrisburg.