What Can a Riverside Injury Attorney Do About Road Design Defects?

In the state of California, claims involving road design and defects can be quite challenging for Riverside injury attorneys because unlike many other claims which are fairly straight forward, these have strict criteria that a lawyer and the claimant need to follow.

In many cases, the fault is often deemed to be driver error. This may either be driving too fast for the conditions of the road, driving without undue care and attention or driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. However in some instances, road design defects are to blame and sometimes this is wrongly accredited to driver error. Road design defect cases can be notoriously hard to proven as getting liability to stick on government departments can be difficult at the best of times and this is why you will need the services of a Riverside injury attorney.

So with this in mind, what constitutes a road design and defect?

In essence this can be put into 3 categories and these are:

1. Sign and signal defects
   
   These are basically signs and signals that are supposed to warn motorists of upcoming danger. They can include such things as broken traffic lights, missing signs, poorly marked out construction zones, or broken or unnoticeable exit/entry and street signs.
   
   
2. Unmaintained areas
   
   These are areas or roads that have been badly maintained, that may cause hazard . These can include slippery or uneven pavements, debris on the roads which hasn't been cleared away, potholes in the road's surface, and overgrowth such as low hanging tree branches which interferes with road sight
   
   
3. Design flaws
   
   Design flaws occur when there are problems with the initial design and layout of a road and these can include: badly designed intersections, insufficient or no road shoulders or bad drainage which can lead to road flooding and aquaplaning.
   
   

How can Riverside injury attorneys help?

One of the first things your lawyer will do is to talk with you so that they can get all the facts. This is usually done through a free consultation, which any good law firm will offer. During this time they will be able to ascertain as to whether you have a case and also be able to answer any questions or concerns that you have.

Upon agreement your lawyer should have the financial backing in place so that they can call upon a whole host of experts to help. In this instance a crash investigation expert would examine the scene of the accident and from this will present their findings back to the Riverside injury attorney. It is then down to the lawyer to find out which department the road belongs to so that a claim can be filed. In the state of California, it is often down to Cal Trans (California Transport) although not always.

Once this is done your lawyer has 6 months in which to get all the paperwork together to file a claim. On many occasions, when it comes to a design flaw defect, the first reaction by Cal Trans is to throw out the claim. The reason for this is that by law they cannot be sued for a design flaw if the 'alleged' design fault had been approved at the time of it being built.

If this is the case then how can your Riverside County injury attorney get around the problem?

A good lawyer can exploit this law if they can prove that the people that gave the go ahead for the original design had failed to give their due diligence and not take into consideration the risk element that had caused your accident. If an attorney can also prove that conditions have considerably changed since the alleged defect was built, such as excess road traffic, then the claimant stands a much better chance of damages being awarded.

As you can see road design defect cases are far from being straight forward, and while a faulty traffic light or a badly maintained road may be easier to prove, a flaw in an original road design isn't. An experienced Riverside injury attorney will know the avenues to go down to initiate a full and fair compensation claim and will know exactly what to do to get the right result.