New Orleans Streetcar Accident Lawyers

Understanding a New Orleans streetcar claim

Almost everything you know about how an injury claim works changes when the vehicle belongs to the Regional Transit Authority. Different defendant, different deadlines, different duty of care, different damages. Here is what actually happens - and what the timing costs you if you wait.

You are not suing a driver

In a car accident, the defendant is a person, and behind that person is an insurance company that will assign an adjuster to your file sometime in the next few days. It is an unfair fight, but it is a familiar one.

A streetcar case is a different animal entirely. The New Orleans streetcars are owned and operated by the Regional Transit Authority, a public body. The RTA has in-house counsel. It has established claims procedures. It has people who will be documenting that incident while you are still deciding whether your neck hurts enough to go to the hospital. And it operates under a body of law - the rules that govern claims against the state and its political subdivisions - that most people, and a fair number of lawyers, have never actually worked in.

None of that means you cannot win. Plenty of people recover from the RTA every year. It means the case has to be handled correctly from day one, because the mistakes here are procedural, and procedural mistakes are the kind you cannot fix later.

The onboard video, and the clock nobody tells you about

This is the single most important paragraph on this page. Streetcars carry cameras. In case after case, that footage is the best evidence in the entire file - it shows the violence of the stop, the passenger going down, the door closing on an arm, the car turning across the tracks. It has no memory to protect and no story to tell.

And it runs on a system that overwrites. Every year, cases that could have been proven outright are argued instead, or dropped entirely, because nobody sent a written preservation demand in time and the footage was gone before anyone thought to ask.

If you take one thing from this page, take this: the video clock starts the moment the incident ends, and it runs much faster than the legal deadline. Call somebody. Even if it is not us.

The cap that everybody gets wrong

Somebody has probably already told you that a case against the RTA is capped, and that therefore it is not worth much. That is half a fact, and half a fact is worse than none.

Louisiana does cap damages against the state and its political subdivisions. But it caps general damages - pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life - at five hundred thousand dollars for any one injured person. That is what the statute limits.

What the cap explicitly does not touch is your medical care and related benefits, and it does not touch your lost earnings or your lost future earning capacity. If a serious injury means surgery, years of treatment, and a career you cannot go back to, those numbers sit outside the cap entirely. And if a private party shares the blame - the driver who turned across the tracks, a contractor who maintained them badly, a manufacturer whose part failed - the cap does not apply to them at all.

So no, the cap does not make your case worthless. What it does is make it critically important that somebody proves every single dollar of medical care and lost earning capacity, and that somebody finds every defendant who is not shielded by it.

The one rule that works in your favor

Here is the part nobody at a transit agency is going to volunteer. Under Louisiana law, a common carrier - a bus, a streetcar, an operator who takes the public aboard and charges them for the ride - owes its passengers a high degree of care. Higher than what an ordinary driver owes you on the road.

That matters more than it sounds like it does. It means the question in a passenger case is not simply whether the operator did what any reasonable person would do. It is whether a careful carrier, charged with the safety of the people standing in its aisle, did what it should have done. Passengers on a streetcar are standing up, holding a strap, with no seatbelt and nothing to brace against. A carrier is supposed to operate with that reality in mind.

It is one of the few structural advantages an injured passenger has in these cases, and it should be used.

The tracks themselves

Some of the worst streetcar cases in this city never involve a streetcar at all. A cyclist crosses a wet rail at a shallow angle, the wheel drops into the flangeway, and she goes down hard into traffic. A motorcyclist hits the rails coming out of a turn on a rainy morning on Canal. A tourist catches a heel in a track gap and breaks a wrist.

Those cases raise questions about track design, maintenance, warning, and the condition of the crossing - and depending on the facts they may point at the RTA, at the city, at a contractor, or at more than one of them. They are harder to build than a simple collision, and they are frequently abandoned because nobody wanted to do the work.

We do the work. If you went down on the rails, call and let us look at it.

What we need from you

Get medical care immediately and keep going. A streetcar throws people around without a mark on the outside, and neck and back injuries that seem manageable in week one are routinely still there in year two.

Save everything: the incident number, your ticket or fare receipt, photographs, the names of anyone who saw it, and the clothing and shoes you were wearing if a fall was involved.

Do not speak with RTA's claims department, and do not give a statement, until you have talked to a lawyer. Public entity claims are not the place to freelance.

And tell us everything, including the parts you think hurt your case. Whether you were holding the rail. Whether you had been drinking. Whether you were looking at your phone. We can work with a bad fact we know about. We cannot work around one we learn about from opposing counsel in a deposition.

It costs nothing to find out where you stand

You do not owe us anything to have this conversation. The consultation is free, and if we take your case, you pay no attorney's fee unless we recover money for you. If we do not win, you owe us nothing.

Two generations of this family have spent nearly 50 years doing exactly this work for our neighbors, in a city we have never left. If you were hurt on or by a streetcar, call us at 504-483-3400, and let us get that video preserved before anything else.