Pedestrian Accident Lawyer in Santa Monica

What do Santa Monica’s crash figures show for pedestrian accidents?

In the California Office of Traffic Safety rankings for 2023, where rank 1 is the worst in the group, Santa Monica ranked 3rd of 103 cities its size for pedestrians killed and injured, with 62 victims, and 3rd of 103 for pedestrians aged 65 and over, with 11. For pedestrians under 15 it ranked 61st of 103, with 2 victims, toward the better end of its group. Set that against the city’s overall position, 39th of 103 with 417 traffic victims, and the shape of the problem is clear: an ordinary city in its group for traffic as a whole, close to the worst of it for people walking. These rankings are rate-based, adjusted for population and daily vehicle miles travelled, so they say the city is worse than comparable cities rather than that it has California’s highest raw counts, and the Office of Traffic Safety cautions that they are indicators of potential problems to be read against local circumstances.

The City’s own figures point the same way, and that agreement between two independent public sources is what makes this more than a statistical quirk. In a Vision Zero study session report to the City Council on 8 September 2026, its Public Works Mobility Division counted 77 pedestrian-involved fatal or severe injury crashes between 2021 and 2025, 16 of them fatal. Crashes of that kind rose in every year of the period, from 9 in 2021 to 22 in 2025, while all-mode crashes of that severity fell from 62 in 2024 to 52 in 2025, and 16 of the 21 traffic deaths in those five years were pedestrians. The City adopted its Vision Zero commitment in February 2016 through its Pedestrian Action Plan, and in this report it told its own Council, in its own words, that it did not achieve the goal of eliminating fatal and severe injury crashes by 2026. The same report publishes what the collision reports recorded about fault, which few cities do: of the 77 crashes a motorist was recorded at fault in 48, a pedestrian in 21 and no fault in 8, and the most frequent factor where a driver was at fault was a driver’s violation of a pedestrian’s right of way, recorded 23 times. Those are police determinations, not findings by a court and not measures of civil liability, and the distinction matters because an insurer’s first move is usually to place you in the smaller group.

A pedestrian collision on a Santa Monica street is investigated by the Santa Monica Police Department, and its Records Unit at 333 Olympic Drive holds the report, on (310) 458-8491. The department publishes no flat fee and sets one after a request is submitted. Who owns the road matters as much as who wrote the report. Interstate 10 inside the city limits is a state highway maintained by Caltrans, recorded as the Santa Monica Freeway and, from postmile R2.155 to postmile R4.267, as the Ricardo A. Crocker Memorial Highway, and it begins in the city at State Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, also a state highway. A complaint about a crossing, a signal or a sight line on a state highway runs against a state defendant; the same complaint about a city street runs against the City.

Claims against the City have to be built differently in Santa Monica, and the reason is in the City’s own report. It found the 2021 to 2025 fatal and severe injury crashes widely dispersed, with no single intersection carrying more than three and no corridor more than 12 percent of the total. Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard accounted for 26 each and Pico Boulevard for 22, and the City concluded that what remains needs a systematic approach across the whole network rather than a few hot-spot projects. So there is no single corridor to blame, and a claim that leans on a street’s reputation will not get far. What does the work is the record for your crossing: the High Injury Network the City is updating, the priority locations in its Local Roadway Safety Plan of 2022, and its Pedestrian Action Plan of 2016. None of that decides a case, and a public entity has defences of its own, but it changes the starting point on what was known and when.

Where is a Santa Monica pedestrian accident case filed, and what are the deadlines?

California is a pure comparative fault state, so being partly responsible reduces what you recover rather than ending the claim, which matters in pedestrian cases more than any other because the argument is almost always about the percentage. The deadline is generally two years against a driver and six months for a written claim against a public entity, which here includes Big Blue Bus, operated by the City itself, so a person struck by a City bus or hurt boarding one is on the shorter clock. Cases are filed in the West District under Local Rule 2.3(a)(1)(A).

There is more on the Santa Monica personal injury page, and the wider practice on the Los Angeles pedestrian accident page. Santa Monica’s other collision pages cover car, bicycle 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 Santa Monica.