Motorcycle Accident Lawyer in Burbank

What do Burbank’s crash figures show for motorcycle accidents?

In the California Office of Traffic Safety rankings for 2023, where rank 1 is the worst in the group, Burbank ranked 43rd of 62 cities its size for motorcyclists killed or injured, with 23 victims, which puts it toward the better end of its group. We are not going to present that as a crisis. What matters more to a rider is the wider pattern: Burbank ranked 17th of 62 for total people killed and injured with 546 victims, and its own adopted safety plan found that pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists were involved in just 24 percent of injury collisions between 2018 and 2022 but 64 percent of the collisions that killed or seriously injured somebody. A rider meets that traffic with none of the protection a car gives, so the same collision that dents a bumper breaks bones.

The City’s figures say where. The Safer Streets Burbank Action Plan, adopted on 12 August 2025 by Resolution No. 25-29,639, puts 80 percent of fatal and serious injury crashes on the 16 percent of streets it calls the Focus Network, and designates nine priority corridors on Glenoaks Boulevard, Victory Boulevard, Alameda Avenue, Hollywood Way, Vanowen Street, San Fernando Boulevard, Buena Vista Street and Olive Avenue. Among its named trends are speeding on major streets and broadside collisions at signalised and side-street stop-controlled intersections, and it records that intersections are the most common crash site in Burbank across every mode, with the largest share of injury crashes on streets posted at 30 mph or higher. A broadside is survivable in a car and often not on a bike. Burbank Police logged 18 motorcycle collisions in 2025 out of 788 in total, so these are a small number of cases carrying a disproportionate share of the injury.

The practical problem in a motorcycle claim is bias, and it surfaces in two places. Adjusters routinely assume the rider was speeding or splitting lanes recklessly and assign a high comparative fault percentage early, before anyone has examined the evidence. Lane splitting is lawful in California, so the question is whether it was done at a reasonable speed in the conditions rather than whether it happened at all. Juries carry the same assumption. Both are answered the same way, with physical evidence: the gouge and skid marks, the damage geometry, the helmet, the protective gear and any camera footage, gathered before it disappears. Burbank runs its own police department, so the report comes from Burbank Police, bought online through the LexisNexis eCrash portal at least four days after the crash or collected at the Records Bureau counter at 200 N. Third Street. Confirm the counter fee on (818) 238-3000 first, because the City publishes two different figures, $20.00 and $15, on two pages of its own police department website. Camera footage is a separate request again, to City Traffic Engineering on (818) 238-3953.

Where is a Burbank motorcycle accident case filed, and what are the deadlines?

Where the road put you down, through gravel left after works, a utility cut or a surface defect, the defendant may be the City of Burbank rather than a driver, and that changes the clock. Government Code section 911.2 requires a written claim against a public entity within six months, against the two years Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1 gives you against a driver, and the shorter deadline governs. Burbank’s Claim for Damages is filed with the City Clerk at P.O. Box 6459, Burbank, CA 91510, and the City also accepts it by email, which many cities do not. Interstate 5 runs through Burbank and state routes cross this part of the Valley, and on a state highway the roadway belongs to the state rather than the City and the California Highway Patrol normally investigates, so both the report and the defendant change. California is a pure comparative fault state throughout. Local Rule 2.3(a)(1)(A), effective 1 January 2026, puts the case in the judicial district where the incident arose, which for Burbank is the North Central District, at the Burbank or Glendale courthouse.

More on local practice on the Burbank personal injury page, and on the law itself on the Los Angeles motorcycle accident page. The other collision types with Burbank’s own published figures: car accidents, pedestrian accidents and bicycle accidents. Mass tort claims are taken on for Burbank residents as well, and those are set out on the mass torts page.