On This Page
How These Guides Are Written
Injury pages on law firm websites usually open with a statistic. This one does not, and the omission is deliberate.
Every number on this site is a figure fixed in a statute or a regulation, cited to the subsection that fixes it. For injury incidence, recovery rates, and severity distributions, we could not tie the figures to a named dataset and year — so they are not published. An uncited statistic on a law firm’s website is worth less than no statistic at all, and a reader cannot check it.
What these guides carry instead is the part that is actually useful to an injured person: how the injury happens to a rider specifically, what documents it, how it fits Florida’s legal framework, and what changes about the claim as a result.
The Guides in This Section
Traumatic Brain Injury
The injury most often missed at the roadside — and why helmet non-use cannot be held against you.
Spinal Cord Injury
Where identifying every available coverage decides the outcome.
Facial and Dental Injuries
Visible, permanent, and given their own threshold category by § 627.737(2)(c).
Road Rash and Degloving
Consistently underestimated, and proved photographically or not at all.
Broken Bones and Fractures
Why a united fracture is not the end of the injury or the loss.
Burns
Battery fire and inhalation injuries — a product claim, not a road negligence one.
Internal Injuries
The injuries that present late, and why the delay becomes the argument.
Wrongful Death
Who may bring the claim and what the Wrongful Death Act allows.
Every guide in this section is written. Each covers mechanism, documentation, and legal consequence for that injury type.
Why an E-Bike Rider Is Hurt Differently
This is not sentiment; it is the reason the injury profile in these cases differs from a car crash, and it matters to how a file is assessed.
- No restraint and no structure. A vehicle occupant meets crash forces through a belt, an airbag, and a crumple zone. A rider meets them through whatever part of the body arrives first.
- Two impacts, not one. The collision, then the roadway. Each does its own damage.
- The face and head arrive first when a front wheel arrests — which is why facial, dental, and head injuries dominate.
- Abrasion is inherent. Sliding across a road surface removes skin. There is no equivalent injury inside a car.
- Handlebar impact concentrates force on a small area of the upper abdomen, a recognized mechanism for injury to what lies beneath.
- E-bikes add speed and mass to all of it, without adding protection.
An adjuster who evaluates a “bicycle versus car” file from a car driver’s intuition will underestimate all of this. Documenting the mechanism, not only the diagnosis, is what corrects it.
David I. Shiner, Esq.
Founder, Shiner Law Group · AV Preeminent® rated · Florida Bar member since 2002
David I. Shiner founded Shiner Law Group and has been a member of The Florida Bar since 2002. He is a graduate of Nova Southeastern University’s law school and holds an AV Preeminent® rating from Martindale-Hubbell. The firm represents injured people across Florida from offices in Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Pierce, Orlando, Wellington, and Belle Glade, and handles these cases on a contingency basis with free consultations and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery.
The Four Categories the Law Cares About
Where Florida’s permanent injury threshold is in play, Fla. Stat. § 627.737(2) limits recovery for pain, suffering, mental anguish and inconvenience to injuries consisting in whole or in part of:
| Paragraph | What It Covers, and Which Injuries Reach It |
|---|---|
| (a) | “Significant and permanent loss of an important bodily function.” — organ injury, permanently restricted movement, contracture. |
| (b) | “Permanent injury within a reasonable degree of medical probability, other than scarring or disfigurement.” — brain injury, post-traumatic arthritis, retained hardware. |
| (c) | “Significant and permanent scarring or disfigurement.” — facial injury, abrasion scarring, burns, surgical scars. |
| (d) | “Death.” |
Two points of drafting worth noticing. Paragraph (b) excludes scarring and disfigurement, and (c) then provides for them separately — so they are alternative routes, not overlapping descriptions. And an injury may satisfy more than one paragraph: a burn causing contracture engages both (a) and (c).
Whether the threshold applies to an e-bike rider at all is unresolved, because it is bound up with whether that rider was entitled to PIP. A line of Florida decisions holds that a plaintiff excluded from PIP need not satisfy it. See PIP and e-bike riders, and treat it as a question for a lawyer on your facts.
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What Documents Any Injury
The specifics differ by injury type, but four things carry every one of these claims.
- Get examined promptly, and say it was a crash. A gap between the crash and the first medical record is the most common causation argument insurers make, and it is far easier to prevent than to answer.
- Report symptoms as they occur, so they enter the record with a date. Contemporaneous notes outweigh recollection months later.
- Photograph what is visible, in a dated series, and keep going past healing. Scarring matures over a year or more, and the late photographs are the ones that establish permanence.
- Record the functional consequences — what you cannot do, specifically, and by date. That is what § 627.737(2)(a) and (b) are assessed against, and it is what loss of earning capacity under Fla. Stat. § 768.81(1) is built from.
And preserve the bicycle. If a component failed, the machine is the claim rather than evidence of it — see evidence that proves the case. All of it runs against the two-year period in Fla. Stat. § 95.11(5)(a).
Who Pays for an Injury to an E-Bike Rider
This is where e-bike injury claims diverge most sharply from car claims, and it is worth understanding before the medical bills start arriving.
No insurance attaches to the machine. Fla. Stat. § 316.20655(2) exempts an electric bicycle and its operator from the laws relating to financial responsibility, licensing, registration, and title. And no personal injury protection can be written on it, because Fla. Stat. § 627.732(3) defines a PIP “motor vehicle” as a self-propelled vehicle “with four or more wheels.”
So every route to payment runs through somebody else’s policy, and identifying all of them early is the single most valuable thing done in the opening weeks of a serious injury claim.
| Route | Note |
|---|---|
| The at-fault driver’s bodily injury liability | Primary where the driver is identified and adequately insured. In catastrophic injury cases the limits are frequently exceeded. |
| Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage | Fla. Stat. § 627.727(1) requires it on a Florida policy unless a named insured rejected it in writing on a form whose heading appears in 12-point bold type. Riders routinely assume they have none and are wrong. |
| A product claim | Where a battery, brake, fork, or frame failed. Fla. Stat. § 768.81(1) brings products liability inside the same fault framework. |
| A government body | Where the road surface or design caused it — capped at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident by Fla. Stat. § 768.28(5), with written presentment required within 3 years by § 768.28(6)(a). |
| Health insurance | Often the practical source of early treatment funding while liability is contested. |
| PIP under a household auto policy | Contested. Fla. Stat. § 627.736(4)(e) turns on “self-propelled vehicle,” which chapter 627 never defines. |
Fault runs alongside all of it. Under Fla. Stat. § 768.81(2) an award is reduced in proportion to the injured person’s own share, and § 768.81(6) bars recovery entirely above 50 percent. That is why the arguments made against riders — lane position, lighting, speed — matter as much as the medicine, and why § 316.2065(18) taking helmet non-use off the table is more significant than it first appears.
What this site will not do is tell you what any of it is worth. There are no case results, settlement figures, or average values published here, and there will not be. The injuries, the treatment, the apportionment, and the coverage actually available decide it — and a lawyer can assess those where a web page cannot.