Texas Pedestrian Accident Lawyers
When 4,000 pounds of steel hits a person, the injuries are catastrophic. We make sure the driver and their insurer take responsibility.
Why Families Across Texas Trust Patterson Law Group
Texas is one of the deadliest states in America for pedestrians. Walkers struck by cars at even moderate speeds suffer broken bones, traumatic brain injuries, internal organ damage, and worse. The driver's insurance company will be on the phone within hours, looking for any reason to blame the pedestrian and reduce the value of the claim.
Patterson Law Group has more than 30 years of experience holding negligent drivers accountable when they hit pedestrians. We've recovered over $100 million for injured clients across Texas, and pedestrian cases — where injuries are typically severe and liability is often disputed — are where experience matters most.
The consultation is free. We work on a contingency fee.
Offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Every case is taken on a contingency fee — no recovery, no fee.
Pedestrian Cases We Handle
Pedestrian crashes happen in many settings. Our attorneys handle every variant:
Texas Pedestrian Law
Texas Transportation Code §552.001 et seq. governs the rights and duties of pedestrians and drivers. At marked crosswalks and unmarked crosswalks at intersections, pedestrians generally have the right of way. Drivers must yield. Pedestrians outside crosswalks must yield to vehicles — but a driver still has a duty to exercise reasonable care to avoid striking a pedestrian.
Even when a pedestrian is partially at fault (crossing mid-block, distracted by a phone, in dark clothing at night), Texas's modified comparative fault rule (CPRC §33.001) allows recovery as long as the pedestrian's share of fault is 50% or less. Insurance carriers love to over-assign fault to pedestrians — we push back hard.
Statute of limitations is two years from the date of the incident under CPRC §16.003. Surveillance footage from nearby businesses and traffic cameras can disappear in days or weeks.
How We Work With You
Our process is simple. You focus on your recovery. We handle everything else.
- 1 Call us. Tell us what happened. Free, confidential, no obligation. We'll give you an honest answer about whether you have a case.
- 2 We investigate. Police reports, surveillance footage, medical records, witness statements, expert consultations. We build the case the right way from day one.
- 3 You focus on healing. We handle every insurance call, every demand, every negotiation. If they refuse to pay fairly, we take them to trial.
Local Offices & City Pages
Patterson Law Group serves all injured Texans from our physical offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. For city-specific information on this practice area:
How this complements existing sections
The Astro page currently uses the standard 8-H2 template. The sections below are additive and sit between the existing "Texas Pedestrian Accident Law" block and the existing "How We Work" block. No duplication of the existing FAQ items; SOL and partial-fault FAQs can stay in the FAQ block since the H2s below treat the same statutes in a different frame.
Tone: confident, plainspoken, Texas-led. No fabricated case results, testimonials, or statistics. All statutory citations verified.
Where and Why Texas Pedestrian Accidents Happen
Pedestrian crashes in Texas are not random — they cluster in predictable places, and the patterns tell us where the fault usually lies. Knowing the typical scenario is the first step in proving the case.
Uncontrolled intersections and crosswalks. Texas drivers routinely treat a marked crosswalk as a suggestion. Under Transportation Code §552.003, drivers must yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing a roadway in a crosswalk when no traffic-control signal is in operation. The failure to yield is the most common cause of crosswalk strikes in Fort Worth, Arlington, San Antonio, and every Texas city.
Right-turn-on-red. A driver looking left for a gap in traffic, foot already off the brake, fails to scan right for the pedestrian stepping off the curb. These crashes hit at low speed and still cause serious injuries — the front bumper catches the leg, the hood catches the torso, and the pedestrian lands on pavement.
Parking lots and big-box driveways. Walmart, H-E-B, Costco, mall parking lots, hotel valet lanes, and apartment complex driveways produce a steady stream of pedestrian strikes. The combination of distracted drivers, tight sightlines, and pedestrians weaving between parked cars is dangerous, and the property owner may share liability if signage, lighting, or traffic-flow design is inadequate.
Roadway walking and rural shoulders. Texas FM and state roads often have no sidewalks. Pedestrians forced to walk along the shoulder are routinely struck by drivers drifting onto the fog line, especially at night or in rain.
Backing-up crashes. Driveways, parking spaces, and loading docks. Backup cameras have reduced some of these, but not enough. Children in driveways are particularly vulnerable.
School zones and transit stops. School-zone speed limits, bus-stop arms, and DART/Trinity Metro/VIA bus stop areas all involve concentrated pedestrian traffic. Drivers who ignore school-zone speed limits or pass a stopped school bus face per se negligence findings.
Texas Pedestrian Right-of-Way and Comparative Fault Rules
Texas pedestrian law is more nuanced than "the pedestrian always has the right of way." Drivers and pedestrians both have duties under the Transportation Code, and the defense will pick at every step the pedestrian took.
The driver's duties. Transportation Code §552.003 requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks when no signal is operating. Section 545.351 imposes a general duty to operate at a reasonable speed for conditions. Section 545.401 makes reckless driving a separate basis of liability. Drivers must exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian, give warning by sounding the horn when necessary, and exercise proper precaution upon observing a child or any obviously confused or incapacitated person.
The pedestrian's duties. Section 552.005 requires pedestrians to yield when crossing outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk. Section 552.006 governs walking along a roadway: where sidewalks exist, pedestrians must use them; where they do not, pedestrians must walk on the left shoulder facing oncoming traffic. Crossing against a "Don't Walk" signal can be cited as a pedestrian's contributory fault.
Modified comparative fault. Under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §33.001, an injured pedestrian can recover as long as they are 50% or less at fault, with recovery reduced by their percentage of fault. At 51% or more, no recovery. The insurance carrier's first move in nearly every pedestrian claim is to argue the pedestrian was jaywalking, distracted, or "darted out." Our job is to lock in the eyewitness statements, traffic-camera footage, and signal-timing data that show where the pedestrian actually was when struck.
Distracted-pedestrian arguments. Defense lawyers will subpoena phone records and claim the pedestrian was looking at a screen. That argument has limits — even a distracted pedestrian in a crosswalk has the right of way under §552.003 — but it gets factored into the fault percentage.
Injuries Pedestrians Suffer When Struck by a Vehicle
An unprotected human body struck by a 4,000-pound vehicle at even 20 mph absorbs forces a car occupant never feels. The injuries are predictable, severe, and often life-changing.
Lower-extremity fractures. The bumper strikes at knee or thigh height. Tibia, fibula, femur, and patella fractures are the most common single injury group. Many require open reduction and internal fixation, external fixators, or staged surgeries. "Bumper fracture" is a real radiologic finding.
Pelvic and hip fractures. The hood line catches the pelvis or hip on adult-sized victims. These fractures range from stable pelvic ring injuries to unstable open-book or vertical-shear injuries requiring multiple surgeries, blood transfusions, and prolonged ICU care.
Traumatic brain injury. When the pedestrian rotates onto the hood and then to the ground, the head strikes the windshield, A-pillar, or pavement. TBI ranges from concussion through skull fracture, subdural and epidural hematomas, contusions, and diffuse axonal injury. Even "mild" TBI from a pedestrian strike often produces persistent post-concussive symptoms — headache, light sensitivity, cognitive fog, mood changes — that disrupt work and family life for months or years.
Spinal cord and back injuries. Vertebral fractures, disc herniations, and in severe cases incomplete or complete spinal cord injury. The mechanism — impact, airborne rotation, ground impact — produces a unique injury profile that biomechanical experts can explain to a jury.
Internal organ injuries. Splenic, liver, and kidney lacerations. Internal bleeding that requires emergency surgery. Lung contusions and hemothorax from blunt chest trauma.
Soft tissue, road rash, and fractures of the upper extremity. From the secondary ground impact. Children struck by vehicles also suffer specific injuries — Waddell's triad of femur fracture, abdominal injury, and head injury is a recognized pediatric pattern. PTSD and psychological injury follow pedestrian strikes at high rates and are fully compensable.
How Insurance Companies Defend Pedestrian Claims
Pedestrian cases produce predictable defense arguments because the policy limits are usually fully exposed. When a driver hits a person on foot, the bodily injury limit is almost always at issue, which makes the insurer's incentive to fight fault aggressive.
"The pedestrian darted out." The single most common defense theme. The adjuster needs the jury to picture a person stepping out from between parked cars with no warning. The answer is in the physical evidence: skid marks, vehicle damage location, the pedestrian's final rest position, sight-distance analysis, and any video that captures the moments before impact.
"The driver could not have avoided the crash." A reconstructionist defense argument. Texas law requires drivers to maintain a proper lookout, drive at a reasonable speed for conditions, and exercise due care to avoid pedestrians. A reconstructionist on our side measures perception-reaction time, available sight distance, and posted speed against the driver's actual speed.
"The pedestrian was distracted or impaired." Phone-record subpoenas. Toxicology requests. Even pedestrian intoxication does not bar recovery in Texas — it factors into comparative fault. Our job is to make sure the toxicology argument is framed accurately rather than dramatically.
"It was dark and the pedestrian was not visible." The "dark clothing" defense. The answer is that drivers are required to drive within their headlight range and to anticipate pedestrians in areas where pedestrian traffic is foreseeable. Sidewalks, transit stops, school zones, and apartment-complex driveways are all foreseeable pedestrian areas.
Low first offer. A modest five-figure offer to close the file before the medical picture is clear. We do not allow a serious pedestrian client to settle while the surgical and rehab plan is still developing.
Records fishing. Blanket authorizations for every medical record going back ten years. We provide what is relevant.
How Patterson Law Group Investigates Pedestrian Crashes
The evidence in a pedestrian case starts disappearing the moment the ambulance leaves the scene. Our investigation begins the day we are hired.
Scene preservation. We send our investigator to the scene to photograph and measure: lane widths, sight distances, signal timing, crosswalk markings, lighting conditions, and any obstructions. Where appropriate, we retain a licensed accident reconstructionist to download the striking vehicle's airbag control module (which on most modern vehicles records pre-impact speed, brake application, and throttle position for the seconds before the crash).
Video. Most Texas intersections, transit stops, gas stations, and commercial properties have cameras. Most of the footage is on a 30- to 90-day overwrite loop. Our preservation letters go out within hours of intake to every nearby business and to the city traffic department where applicable.
Witnesses. Bystanders, drivers in adjacent lanes, transit passengers. We canvass the scene and contact witnesses while their memories are fresh.
The CR-3. The Texas Peace Officer's Crash Report typically posts to the TxDOT C.R.I.S. portal within 7 to 10 days. We pull it, audit the diagram and narrative for accuracy, and follow up with the investigating officer when the report misses key facts.
Insurance coverage. We identify every applicable policy: the at-fault driver's liability, the pedestrian's own UM/UIM (which can apply when the driver is uninsured or underinsured), resident-relative auto policies, employer policies if the driver was working, and umbrella coverage.
Medical work-up. We coordinate with treating physicians and, where the injuries warrant, retain a life care planner and forensic economist. Pedestrian injuries often require permanent-impairment opinions that a treating doctor will provide if we ask the right questions.
What To Do If You or a Loved One Is Hit by a Vehicle
The first hours after a pedestrian crash are the most important for the case and for the injured person's recovery. Here is what to do.
Accept the ambulance and full ER work-up. Adrenaline masks pain. Internal bleeding, fractures, and TBI symptoms can be delayed. A same-day, comprehensive ER evaluation is medical care and is the foundation of the legal case.
Follow every referral. Orthopedic surgery, neurology, neurosurgery, physical therapy, neuropsychology, pain management. Gaps in treatment are the adjuster's favorite argument.
Photograph everything. The scene if you can return safely. The vehicle's damage. The crosswalk, signals, and signage. Your injuries as they heal. Your clothing and shoes (especially if "dark clothing" is going to be an issue).
Get the names of witnesses. Anyone who saw the strike, saw the driver's behavior before it, or rendered aid. Their statements lose value as memories fade.
Get the CR-3. It will be available on the TxDOT C.R.I.S. portal in roughly 7 to 10 days.
Do not give a recorded statement to the at-fault driver's insurance company. Politely decline. Do not sign medical authorizations or releases.
Call Patterson Law Group. Free consultation. Contingency fee — no fee unless we recover. (817) 784-2000. Offices in Fort Worth, Arlington, and San Antonio. Se Habla Español.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do pedestrians always have the right of way in Texas?
Not always. At marked or unmarked crosswalks at intersections, pedestrians generally have the right of way and drivers must yield. Outside crosswalks, pedestrians must yield to vehicles — but drivers still have a duty to exercise reasonable care and avoid hitting people in the roadway.
What if I was hit while jaywalking?
You may still have a case. Texas applies comparative fault — if the driver was negligent (speeding, distracted, impaired), you can recover as long as your share of fault is 50% or less. Many 'jaywalking' cases involve drivers who had ample time to see and avoid the pedestrian and didn't.
What if the driver fled the scene?
You may have a claim against your own uninsured motorist (UM) coverage if you have it on your auto policy — UM coverage applies even when you're not in a car. We routinely handle hit-and-run pedestrian cases through UM coverage.
How long do I have to file a pedestrian accident lawsuit in Texas?
Two years from the date of the crash under CPRC §16.003. Claims involving government entities (city vehicles, municipal road design) have shorter notice deadlines — sometimes six months. Call us promptly.
What if I don't have health insurance to pay for treatment?
We work with medical providers who treat on a lien basis — meaning they're paid out of your settlement. Don't let lack of insurance delay treatment. The medical record is critical to the case.
How is fault determined in a Texas pedestrian case?
Texas pedestrian-vehicle cases turn on right-of-way, visibility, distraction, and speed. A driver who fails to yield at a crosswalk is presumptively at fault. A pedestrian crossing outside a crosswalk is presumptively contributorily negligent, but contributory negligence is reduced or barred only if the pedestrian is more than 50% at fault (§33.001). We work the actual mechanism — was the driver speeding, distracted, intoxicated, or operating a vehicle with known mechanical problems?
What kinds of injuries do pedestrian cases produce?
The 'pedestrian triad' is well-documented: lower-extremity fracture from the bumper, torso impact with the hood, and head impact with the windshield or ground. Severe TBI, spinal cord injury, multi-system trauma, and crush injuries are common. The injury severity scales sharply with vehicle speed — a 20 mph collision is survivable; a 40 mph collision is often fatal or catastrophic.
Does Texas have specific protections for pedestrians?
Texas Transportation Code §552 governs pedestrian right-of-way. §552.003 establishes the duty of drivers to yield at crosswalks. §552.006 limits where pedestrians may cross. Texas does NOT have a uniform statewide 'stop for pedestrians' law applicable to every crosswalk — many municipalities have local ordinances that strengthen pedestrian protection. Where the crash happens (city vs. unincorporated) often determines what additional duty applies.
Are rideshare-related pedestrian cases different from other pedestrian cases?
Yes. When the at-fault driver was logged in as an Uber or Lyft driver, $1M of contingent commercial coverage activates. When the driver was logged off, only their personal auto policy applies (typically state-minimum). Counsel can subpoena rideshare trip logs to establish on-duty status at the moment of impact — the difference between policy coverage tiers can be the difference between a fully-paid case and a case capped at state-minimum auto coverage.
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