Key West injury attorney

E-bike-Pic-300x201 Electric bicycles, aka “e-bikes,” have become incredibly popular here in the Sunshine State. If you’re unfamiliar, these are pedal-operated bicycles equipped with an electric bike motor to assist. U.S. sales of e-bikes topped $1.3 billion in 2022, and Floridians love them, as they’re allowed on most roads, bike paths, and trails where traditional bikes can operate.

That said, a Key West injury lawyer can tell you their introduction hasn’t been a super-smooth ride. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) says that micromobility device injuries treated at hospital emergency rooms nationwide have increased 23 percent every year since 2017. (This includes not only e-bike injuries, but those involving hoverboards and e-scooters.)

But such increases do make sense for the simple fact that these devices didn’t even exist a few years ago. The risks they pose are worth knowing, but none of it really changes the fact that the bigger safety threats on South Florida roads are:

Infrastructure that wasn’t designed to safely accommodate alternative modes of transportation (i.e., wide roads, high speed limits, no sidewalks, etc.).
Reckless motor vehicle drivers.

If you’re injured in a Florida e-bike accident, a Key West injury lawyer can explore all avenues of compensation (i.e., defective helmets, rental bike agency liability, product liability claims against the e-bike manufacturer, etc.). But such cases are probably going to closely mirror conventional Florida bicycle accident claims than anything else – and those are most typically against motor vehicle drivers.

E-Bike Injuries Often Resemble Conventional Bike Injuries

Questions have been raised about whether e-bikes are better classified as “motor vehicles” – more aligned with motorcycles than traditional bicycles.

But in one study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, researchers looked at injury patterns involving e-bike operators, bicyclists, and motorcycle operators. They found that the injury patterns of e-bikers resembled that of bicyclists “much more” than that of motorcyclists. Continue reading

Key West injury lawyer tort claims

If you have ever done a cursory search on filing a personal injury claim in Florida, there is a good chance somewhere along the way you ran across the phrase “tort claims.” But what is a tort?

As a Key West injury lawyer can explain, “tort” is a legal term for a personal injury caused by civil wrongs. The goal of tort law is to right the civil wrongs by “making whole” (to whatever extent possible) the person who has sustained injury, suffering, unfair loss, or some other harm caused by someone else’s careless, reckless or criminal action.

The goal in most Florida tort claims is to recover financial losses and possibly prevent the same type of situation from happening to someone else. Financial Damages can include lost wages, mental and physical pain and suffering, loss of life enjoyment, and medical bills. These are losses already incurred and those reasonably certain to occur in the future. Continue reading