With the advent of cold weather here in the New York area, it’s almost time for snow and ice. And with that cycle of freezing and thawing, comes the bane of motorists everywhere in the state: Potholes. It may just be us, but it really seems as though the pothole problem just gets worse and worse every year. With so few streets actually being repaved properly, and most major defects being handled with a style of patching that really isn’t all that effective, we’re left with roads that are more suitable for the Lunar Rover than your Range Rover.

It’s one thing to have your vehicle damaged by a road defect; bending a rim, blowing out a tire, or even losing a suspension component. What’s even more infuriating, are car accidents caused by potholes. It happens all the time. In the event of trying to avoid a road defect, or directly because of hitting one, a car accident occurs. And over the years there have been some really crazy ones.

One that immediately comes to memory is a vehicle that struck a massive pothole in NYC around 2014, and actually was thrown off the highway and fell into the oncoming lane of traffic. This accident seemed to have made people pretty curious about the laws surrounding damages and liability at the time, and that ended up being a shocking moment for many of those people.

Long story short, if NYS hasn’t been officially notified of the pothole in question 15 or more days prior to any accident, they legally can not be made liable for that road defect. If that doesn’t quite sound fair, you are not alone in thinking that. And so, many groups of people and legal practitioners made it their job to crowdsource this job of “reporting” these road defects.

It’s to be expected that lawyers such as ourselves would have gotten involved in promoting this reporting process, but what was relatively unexpected were the groups on online platforms such as Reddit and Facebook. And as a result, in the 10 or so years since then, significantly more people have been able to properly claim damages from NYS, which sounds a lot more fair to us.

Of course, NYS agencies will do everything they can to try to deny these claims regardless of the rules that they set up themselves. And if that is the case, firms like us are always ready to help out. If you’re involved in an accident caused by a pothole, you should go about the same process of documenting the accident that we have described in our guide from our last issue, including contacting an attorney. Hopefully you have great luck out there this year and don’t need our help. But if you do, give us a ring.