Most crashes have a shape the law reads at a glance: a car and a person outside it, or two cars with one better protected than the other. A motorcycle meeting a person on foot has no such shape. Neither one has anything around them. So the law does not begin by naming a victim. It begins by dividing the fault, and it lets whoever was hurt bring a claim.
The pattern. A motorcycle and a person on foot come together on a Texas street, and in the first hours it is not always clear which of the two was hurt worse. This page is pegged to no single crash and names no one. It is here because the collision is one Texas law treats unlike almost any other, and because the person hurt in it, rider or walker, rarely knows that.
Two bodies, no shell. A car carries its driver inside a cage built to crush and absorb. A motorcycle carries its rider on top of the engine, with the same nakedness a person standing in the road has, which is the point The Cage makes about why a rider is hurt so much worse than a car’s occupant in the same impact. When the two meet, the energy has nowhere to go but into two people. The federal study of motorcycle crashes, reading the records of trauma-center patients, found that “lower-extremity injuries were the most common injuries sustained in motorcycle crashes,” about forty-seven percent of the trauma-center patients it counted, with the leg hurt more than any other part of the lower body and fractures of the tibia and fibula making up an estimated ninety-five percent of leg injuries, and that “while lower-extremity injuries were more frequent, head, chest, and abdominal injuries tended to be more severe.” The person on foot is struck and then meets the ground, and as The Wrap and the Ground explains, that second impact, the one with the pavement, is often the one that kills. Speed decides how much of it a body survives. For a pedestrian struck by a car or light truck, the AAA Foundation’s study found “the average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph.” Those figures are for cars and light trucks, and a motorcycle weighs far less, so the numbers differ, but the shape of the curve carries: the faster the two were closing, the less either person walks away from, which is the arithmetic Seven Times the Energy runs.
The law. In most crashes the law can see at the start who was protected and who was not, and that often sorts the victim from the defendant. Take the steel off both sides and the sorting is gone. Texas then does what it does whenever fault is shared: it divides responsibility under its proportionate-responsibility rule and lets each injured person recover the part that was not their own, barring recovery only when that person’s share is greater than fifty percent, the division Comparative Fault lays out. The duties run both ways. Under the Transportation Code, “the operator of a vehicle shall” “exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian on a roadway,” “give warning by sounding the horn when necessary,” and “exercise proper precaution on observing a child or an obviously confused or incapacitated person on a roadway,” and a motorcycle is a motor vehicle under the Code’s own definitions. And “a pedestrian shall yield the right-of-way to a vehicle on the highway if crossing a roadway at a place” “other than in a marked crosswalk or in an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection,” the duty Failure to Yield warns is a conclusion and not the facts behind it. So either one can carry part of the fault and either can still hold a claim. The defense is likely to raise the helmet, which the law requires of a rider under twenty-one and of an older rider who has neither taken the safety course nor carried health insurance that covers a motorcycle injury, and whether a helmet left at home is weighed the way a seat belt is weighed is an argument to be ready for. When the rider is the one hurt and the person on foot has nothing to collect from, the rider’s own personal injury protection, which pays without regard to fault, is often where the case starts; uninsured motorist coverage, by its terms, answers for an uninsured motor vehicle, and a person on foot is not one. One crash, two people with nothing around them, and the law does not decide in advance which one it was built to protect.
Dispatch is the Night Docket’s news strand: what happened on Texas roads and in Texas courts, reported from credible outlets and agency releases, with no names and no conclusions about open investigations, then connected to the entries that explain the science and the law. General information, not legal advice.
