Arthur Bugay is a cyclist. He completed two Ironman Events, competed in numerous Triathlons, and has ridden thousands of miles on all types of bicycles. He knows the obvious – the last thing you need is for a key bike component to fail at the wrong time. A component failure can change your life in a split second.
As a products liability attorney, Arthur offers his legal services as a trained and experienced bicycle expert focused upon finding and preserving the evidence you need to prove your case.
This photo shows a broken bicycle crank. It failed at the wrong time.
Different bicycle parts – a seat post, handlebars, the bicycle’s forks, its frame, its wheels, its brakes – are assembled and sold in one unit. Each component, made from different materials – metal compounds, carbon fiber, and other materials – are manufactured separately, often by businesses that the injured party has never heard of before, in remote places, around the world, in China and other countries as, in the component above, in Malaysia.
In Pennsylvania and in New Jersey, manufacturers, sellers, assemblers, wholesalers, retailers, are all held to a strict products liability standard of ensuring that their products and their components are sold with everything necessary to make them safe for use and without any condition that would make them unsafe to use. If a product causes your injury, every seller in the chain of sale may be held strictly liable for your damages.
And yet, Defective Bicycles and components account for only a small percentage of all bicycle deaths and injuries. Bicycle trips account for only 1% of all trips in the United States. However, bicycle riders are killed more than twice as often as other people who die in a crash involving a motor vehicle. Every year, nearly 1,000 bicyclists die and over 130,000 are injured.
Having been struck by a car more than once and having successfully litigated many cases for injured bicyclists, more often than not, bicyclists are injured by inattentive, negligent, and distracted motorists.
About a third of bicycle accidents are caused by drunk drivers. Pennsylvania and New Jersey provide enhanced damages where a bicyclist or any person is injured by a drunk driver. Moreover, other parties may be responsible for damages because they served or sold intoxicants to the motorist.
Where alcohol and drugs are not involved, here are two other examples of motorist negligence:
“Door-ing” – A parked car occupant opens the car door without properly looking to see whether it is safe to do so and causes a bicyclist to crash into the door that should not have been opened.
Car or truck turns (left or right) – The Left or Right “Hook” – Motorists underestimate the speed of bicyclists and think they can “beat the clock” and turn before the cyclist reaches an intersection, but they’re wrong and cause a crash.
