Bicycle Accident Lawyer in West Covina

What do West Covina’s crash figures show for bicycle accidents?

In the California Office of Traffic Safety rankings for 2023, where rank 1 is the worst in the group, West Covina ranked 46th of 62 California cities its size for cyclists killed or injured, with 14 victims. Cyclists under 15 ranked 52nd of 62, with one victim. Both sit toward the better end of the group, and so does the city overall at 30th of 62 for total people killed and injured with 438 victims. These are rate-based rankings weighted against population and daily vehicle miles travelled, so they compare West Covina with cities of its own size rather than counting crashes, and the Office of Traffic Safety’s own caveat is that the rankings are “only indicators of potential problems”.

A low count does not mean a small case. Fourteen casualties in a city of roughly 110,000 people is a thin statistical record, and that cuts both ways: there is no local pattern for an insurer to lean on, and none for you either. It throws the weight of a West Covina cycling claim onto physical evidence and onto who owned the piece of road you went down on. The city publishes no Local Road Safety Plan, no Vision Zero plan and no high injury network on its website, so no municipal document names your street as a known risk. Its published sitemap does list a Pavement Management Plan, which is the kind of record that matters when a surface defect rather than a driver is the cause.

The one city document that names specific locations is a signal project. On 1 November 2020 West Covina applied for Highway Safety Improvement Program funding for “Traffic Signal Improvements at 10 Intersections, Citywide”, carrying $3,184,700 the city records as “State funds with no local matching requirement”, covering protected left turn phasing, countdown heads, push buttons, curb ramps and striping. Several of the ten junctions are on arterials a cyclist would use, including Azusa Avenue at Fairgrove Avenue, Lark Ellen Avenue at Badillo Avenue and Amar Road at Temple Avenue. The city published no collision counts beside them, so the list shows what it asked to fix, not what it recorded happening there.

West Covina runs its own police department rather than contracting with the Sheriff, so a collision on a city street is a West Covina Police matter and the report is held at their Records unit, 1444 W. Garvey Avenue, (626) 939-8500, open Monday to Friday 7:30am to 5:30pm. Reports can be requested at the counter or by email to reportrequest@wcpd.org. The department publishes no charge at the counter and an “additional $10.00 for online reports”, supplied through LexisNexis eCrash. Interstate 10, the San Bernardino Freeway, is a state facility rather than a city street, so a collision there is normally a California Highway Patrol matter and the roadway belongs to the state.

Where the surface is the cause, a pothole, a utility cut, a drain grate, a lane drop or an obstructed bike lane, the defendant may be the City of West Covina, and that changes the timetable completely. Government Code section 911.2 requires a written claim within six months, and the city’s own Claim for Damages form requires it to be “delivered personally to the City Clerk’s Office or postmarked and addressed to the City Clerk’s Office not later than six months after the occurrence”. That office is at 1444 W. Garvey Avenue South, Room 317, on (626) 939-8433, and it is closed on Fridays while the police records counter in the same building is open. The claim page opens by asking you to be sure you are filing with “the appropriate entity”, which matters here: Foothill Transit, the bus authority a cyclist in this city shares the road with, is a joint powers authority of 22 member cities and the County of Los Angeles, headquartered in West Covina at 100 S. Vincent Avenue, and a claim handed to the West Covina City Clerk does not reach it.

Where is a West Covina bicycle accident case filed, and what are the deadlines?

Against a driver the deadline is two years from the date of injury under Code of Civil Procedure section 335.1, and where the six-month public entity claim applies it governs. California is a pure comparative fault state, so a share of blame reduces what you recover rather than ending the claim, which answers most of the arguments made against cyclists. Local Rule 2.3(a)(1)(A) requires an unlimited civil injury or wrongful death case to be filed in the judicial district where the incident arose and points the filer to the Court’s Filing Court Locator, which for West Covina addresses returns Pomona Courthouse South, 400 Civic Center Plaza, in the East District.

More on this city is on our West Covina personal injury page, and the wider practice on our Los Angeles bicycle accident page. West Covina’s other collision pages cover car, pedestrian and motorcycle claims. If your matter is a drug, device or product claim rather than a collision, Broukhim Legal PC also takes on mass tort and complex litigation work for people living in and around West Covina.