Other Crashes Keep Happening Where I Got Hurt. Does That Make the City a Defendant?
You noticed it after the fact, the way most people do. A crash in the news at the same corner. A neighbor mentioning one. Then you start counting, and the number is higher than it should be for one intersection.
That observation has legal weight in California, and in Los Angeles it can make the public agency that owns the road a second defendant, one with no $30,000 policy limit. A pattern of similar crashes at one location goes directly to the two hardest things to prove in a case against a public agency: that the condition was genuinely dangerous, and that the agency knew. The rest of this is California specific, so it will not transfer if your crash happened elsewhere.
What a Pattern Proves, and What It Does Not
A public agency is liable for a dangerous condition of its property only if it knew or should have known about the condition in time to have done something. A run of crashes at one spot helps on both halves of that, since an agency is expected to be aware of what happens on its own streets, and repetition is hard to characterize as freak bad luck.
Replace your impression with the record before anything else, because the actual count is usually either much better than you thought or much worse. Compare yours against these:
An Engineer's Test for a Real Pattern
My father was a traffic engineer for the City of Los Angeles, and that is where I learned what makes an intersection genuinely dangerous. If you have noticed other crashes at your corner, I can take a second look and tell you whether it adds up to a case.
See If Your Corner Has a History
Here is what a documented pattern looks like. Four corners from our own data, all on the city's High Injury Network:
Glenoaks Blvd & Paxton St
Pacoima. 9 crashes, 7 people injured.
Nordhoff St & Reseda Blvd
Northridge. 8 crashes, 7 people injured.
Saticoy St & Woodman Ave
Valley Glen. 7 crashes, 12 people injured, three crashes hurting three or more at once.
Reseda Blvd & Vanowen St
Reseda. 6 crashes, 6 people injured.
No tracked intersection matches that search.
A pattern only counts if it matches your crash. Search by street or city
This is the same way a motorcyclist who had been offered $30,000 after four months in hospital found us: he was not looking for a lawyer, he was looking up the intersection. The state's own collision database is also public, so a determined person can cross-check what they find.
There is a requirement that trips up people who simply count. The prior crashes have to be substantially similar to yours, meaning they arose from the same condition. That is the difference between a pattern and a pile.
- Helps you: four left turn collisions at a corner with no protected arrow, and yours is the fifth.
- Helps you: a series of crashes where drivers say they could not see oncoming traffic past the same overgrown hedge.
- Does not help you: a busy intersection with many rear end crashes caused by following too closely, when your crash was a left turn visibility problem. Same location, unrelated cause.
- Does not help you: a high count that simply reflects enormous traffic volume rather than anything defective.
That last one is worth dwelling on, because it is the single most common way an intersection looks damning and is not. The busiest corners in our data are freeway ramps, and they accumulate crashes mostly because an extraordinary number of cars pass through them. Volume is not a defect. One honest limit on all of this data, including ours: the underlying state records note whether people were injured and how many, but they do not grade how badly, so a high number tells you where to investigate, not how severe anything was.
Check Whether the City Already Flagged the Street
Separate from your own count, there is a list worth checking, because it can settle the knowledge question before you prove anything about the crashes themselves.
The City of Los Angeles publishes a High Injury Network, its designation of the roughly 6% of its streets responsible for about 70% of traffic deaths and severe injuries. If the place you have been counting crashes at sits on that network, the city has already classified the street as one of the most dangerous it maintains.
That is a different and stronger kind of evidence than a tally. Your count shows what happened. The network shows the city had written down that this street was a problem and still left the condition in place. It also fills a gap in the crash data, which records how many people were injured without grading how severely, whereas the network is built specifically around deaths and severe injuries.
Two caveats. It speaks to notice rather than proving the specific condition was dangerous or caused your crash. And because it is a city list, it covers city streets and not state freeways or ramps.
Which Also Changes Who the Defendant Is
If the spot you are counting is a freeway on ramp or off ramp, the responsible agency is the state rather than the city, and that matters in two ways.
The claim goes somewhere different. A claim over $12,500 involving state highway property goes to the Government Claims Program at the Department of General Services in West Sacramento, not to Caltrans, with a $25 filing fee that can be waived. A City of Los Angeles street goes to the LA City Clerk instead, independent cities like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills take their own, and unincorporated areas go to the County.
And the case is harder. Agencies are protected where the complaint is really about an approved engineering design, which describes interchange geometry almost perfectly. Cases about maintenance and operations, the faded paint, the missing sign, the dead light, the overgrown vegetation, the signal that was never retimed, are not covered by that protection. Which is why a pattern tied to a maintenance failure on a city street is the strongest version of what you have noticed.
Why This Is Worth Doing When the Driver Has $30,000
Because California does not divide medical bills by fault share. Economic damages, meaning bills, lost earnings and future care, are joint and several, so a liable agency can be pursued for all of them regardless of its percentage. Pain and suffering is the only category apportioned by fault.
An agency carrying 15% of the blame can therefore be answerable for the entire medical bill. Against a minimum policy and injuries this serious, the pattern you noticed is the difference between a token recovery and a real one.
Six Months, Which Is Less Time Than It Sounds
A claim against a public agency has to be presented in writing within six months of the crash, far short of the deadline that applies to the driver who hit you.
The reason to act on a hunch now rather than a certainty later: proving a pattern takes records, records take time to obtain, and the deadline runs while you wait for them. The claim can be presented before the investigation is finished. It cannot be presented after the window closes.
Conditions also get fixed after serious crashes. If a hedge gets cut back or a sign replaced next month, the thing that caused your crash will not be there to photograph. Photograph the approach now, from your direction of travel, at the same time of day.
The Realistic Version
Sometimes the count comes back ordinary, the prior crashes turn out to have nothing in common with yours, and the honest answer is that this was one driver's mistake at an unremarkable corner. We would rather reach that conclusion in week three than month five, and if that is the answer, the work worth doing is negotiating your medical liens down so more of the available money reaches you.
And none of this is a promise. These claims turn on notice, on immunity, and on a traffic engineer being willing to say the condition was substandard.
We handle these cases and have taken one to a $6,000,000 settlement against a government entity. Send us the intersection and the date and we will pull what the record actually shows, including the crashes you have not heard about.
Talk to a UCLA-trained attorney directly.
