$1.84 Million for a Cyclist Run Over by a Right-Turning Dump Truck

On September 8, 2022, a man was riding his bicycle in a marked bike lane when a dump truck started a right turn across his path. The truck hit the cyclist and his bike, then ran over him. Traffic engineers call this kind of crash a right hook: a turning vehicle cuts off a rider who is going straight in the lane to its right.

The injuries were severe. The cyclist suffered major chest trauma, fractured ribs, and fractures of the spine, the humerus, and the clavicle. His lungs were lacerated. Surgeons operated on him nine times. He spent five weeks in intensive care and was left with permanent scarring.

Ben Whitley of Whitley Law Firm in Raleigh represented the cyclist. Because a right-hook collision turns on exactly where each vehicle was and what the driver could see, the case came down to reconstruction. Whitley retained Steve Farlow, an accident reconstruction engineer from Raleigh, to map the truck's turn and the point of impact. He added Kevin Rider, a forensic human factors expert from Columbus, Ohio, to address what the driver should have perceived before swinging the truck to the right.

North Carolina raised an added hurdle. The state follows a strict contributory negligence rule, under which a cyclist found even slightly at fault can be barred from recovering anything. That made placing the blame for the collision on the truck driver the whole case, not a side issue.

The parties did not put the case to a jury. They settled at mediation on June 20, 2024, with Scott Hart serving as the mediator. The agreement called for the defense to pay $1,847,000.

The county, the court, and the names of the parties were not disclosed. Because the case resolved by agreement rather than by verdict, there was no appeal and no reduction or remittitur. The full $1,847,000 is what the cyclist recovered.