Pedestrian Accident Rights in Massachusetts

A pedestrian struck by a car in Massachusetts can collect no-fault benefits without owning a car, a policy, or any share of the blame. The no-fault statute puts every pedestrian on the striking vehicle’s coverage. M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34A writes “any pedestrian struck by the insured’s or obligor’s motor vehicle” into the personal injury protection provisions of the driver’s policy, so medical bills and lost wages are paid up to at least $8,000 “without regard to negligence or gross negligence or fault of any kind”. If the vehicle that struck you carried no PIP, section 34A moves the same benefits onto your own auto policy or a household member’s. If no policy reaches you at all, M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34N directs insurers to maintain an assigned claims plan, although that plan is open only to a person “resident in the commonwealth” and shuts out the uninsured owner of a vehicle and that owner’s household. Fault governs everything above the no-fault layer, and it matters less than most people assume. The crosswalk duty in M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 11 applies only “When traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation”, and M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 18A provides that a violation of a local pedestrian rule “shall not, in any civil proceeding, constitute negligence or be admissible as evidence of negligence”. To talk through a pedestrian crash with a Massachusetts attorney, call Jim Glaser Law at (617) JIM-WINS; the first telephone consultation is free.

You Are on the Driver’s Policy Whether You Own a Car or Not

The Massachusetts no-fault system is usually explained from the driver’s seat, which leaves people on foot assuming they are outside it. The statute says otherwise, and it says so in the definition itself.

M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34A defines personal injury protection as provisions of a motor vehicle liability policy that pay “the named insured in any such motor vehicle liability policy, the obligor of any motor vehicle liability bond, members of the insured’s or obligor’s household, any authorized operator or passenger of the insured’s or obligor’s motor vehicle including a guest occupant, and any pedestrian struck by the insured’s or obligor’s motor vehicle”. The pedestrian is the last item in that list and is not qualified by anything. No residency requirement, no policy of your own, no relationship to the driver.

What that coverage pays is set out in the same section: “all reasonable expenses incurred within two years from the date of accident for necessary medical, surgical, x-ray, and dental services, including prosthetic devices and necessary ambulance, hospital, professional nursing and funeral services,” plus, for people who were working, “any amounts actually lost by reason of inability to work and earn wages or salary or their equivalent”. The limit is “at least eight thousand dollars on account of injury to or death of any one person,” and wage replacement is capped at “seventy-five per cent of any such person’s average weekly wage or salary or its equivalent for the year immediately preceding the accident.”

The phrase that matters most to someone who has just been told the crash was their own fault sits at the end of the same definition. Benefits are paid for injury “caused by accident and not suffered intentionally while in or upon, or while entering into or alighting from, or being struck as a pedestrian by, the insured’s or obligor’s motor vehicle, without regard to negligence or gross negligence or fault of any kind”. A driver’s adjuster who says you were at fault is talking about the tort claim. It is not an answer to a PIP claim.

There is one wrinkle that catches pedestrians who have their own health insurance, and it is not optional. Section 34A caps PIP at two thousand dollars of medical expense to the extent those expenses “have been or will be compensated, paid or indemnified pursuant to any policy of health, sickness or disability insurance”. That coordination is automatic when you carry health coverage. It is not a deductible you elected and it is not a denial. The mechanics of that $2,000 point, and how the health plan and the auto insurer divide the bill after it, are covered in the PIP overview.

Section 34A also lets an insurer exclude a claimant whose own conduct contributed to the injury in three specific ways: while under the influence, while committing a felony or fleeing arrest, or with the specific intent to cause injury. By its terms that list is limited to conduct occurring “while operating a motor vehicle in the commonwealth”. Whether that language reaches a particular claimant is a fact-specific question, and it is worth putting to a lawyer rather than conceding to an adjuster.

When the Car That Hit You Had No PIP

The second paragraph of section 34A is the provision most people have never heard of, and it is the one that saves a claim when the vehicle that struck you turns out to be uninsured.

It requires personal injury protection to pay “the named insured or obligor and members of their households, all amounts defined in this section in any case where such persons incur such expense or loss as a result of such injury while in, upon, entering into or alighting from, or by being struck as a pedestrian by, a motor vehicle not insured by a policy or bond providing personal injury protection unless such person recovers such expenses or loss in an action of tort.”

Read that against a common set of facts. You own a car. You were walking to it. The vehicle that hit you had no insurance. Your own auto policy, sitting on a car that was parked and uninvolved, is the source of your no-fault benefits, and so is a policy held by anyone in your household. The car does not have to be part of the accident for its PIP to reach you.

The order the statute sets up is worth stating plainly, because it is often described backwards. The striking vehicle’s PIP is the first place a struck pedestrian looks, because the definition puts every pedestrian on that policy. Your own household policy is the statutory backup, and the text triggers it on the striking vehicle having no PIP rather than on you having no policy. Coverage for the separate problem of an uninsured driver’s liability, as opposed to no-fault benefits, is a different product and is covered in the uninsured and underinsured motorist article.

When No Policy Reaches You: the Assigned Claims Plan

If the striking vehicle has no PIP and nobody in your household has an auto policy, Massachusetts does not leave the gap open. M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34N directs insurers authorized to provide personal injury protection in the commonwealth “to organize and maintain an assigned claims plan”. A claim goes to the plan, the plan assigns it to an insurer, and that insurer then has “the same rights and obligations it would have if prior to such assignment it had issued a policy providing personal injury protection applicable to the loss or expenses incurred.”

The plan is often confused with the Massachusetts Insurers Insolvency Fund. They are different mechanisms addressing different failures. The Insolvency Fund exists for the case where an insurer goes under. Section 34N exists for the case where no PIP coverage reaches an injured person in the first place, which is the situation a struck pedestrian is far more likely to be in.

Section 34N is also narrower than its description suggests, and three limits are written into the text.

The first is residency. The section reaches “any person resident in the commonwealth”. A visitor struck while walking in Boston who has no auto policy anywhere is not described by that language.

The second excludes the very people who most often need it. The section applies to a resident “other than the owner or registrant of a motor vehicle not insured by a policy or bond providing personal injury protection or a member of such owner or registrant’s household”. Someone who owns an uninsured car, and anyone living with them, is outside the plan. That exclusion is the practical cost of letting a registration lapse, and it lands on a family member who never made the decision.

The third is the two express carve-outs at the end: a person “entitled to payments or benefits under the provisions of chapter one hundred and fifty-two,” meaning workers compensation, and a person subject to exclusion from PIP under section 34A. A pedestrian struck while working is generally in the first category, and the workers compensation route replaces the PIP route rather than adding to it.

Massachusetts Has Two Different Definitions of the Word Pedestrian

This is not a drafting curiosity. Which definition applies decides whether a struck cyclist collects no-fault benefits.

For the no-fault sections, section 34A provides that the term “shall include persons operating bicycles, tricycles and similar vehicles and persons upon horseback or in vehicles drawn by horses or other draft animals.” A cyclist knocked down by a car is a pedestrian for PIP purposes and claims on the driver’s policy the same way a person on foot does.

For the pedestrian-conduct rules, section 18A defines the word for its own paragraph as including “a person in or on any conveyance, other than a bicycle, constructed and designed for propulsion by human muscular power, as well as including a person on foot.” A bicycle is expressly outside that one.

So the same person can be a pedestrian for the purpose of collecting benefits and not a pedestrian for the purpose of the local rules governing how people cross the street. The riding rules that do apply to cyclists, and what drivers owe them, are set out in Massachusetts bicycle laws.

The Crosswalk Rule Is Narrower Than Its Reputation

M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 11 is the statute everyone means by the crosswalk law, and reading it closely takes some of the certainty out of both sides of the usual argument.

The yield duty opens with a condition: “When traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right of way, slowing down or stopping if need be so to yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk marked in accordance with standards established by the department of highways”. Two limits are doing work there. Where a signal is present and functioning, the signal controls rather than this sentence. And the crosswalk has to be a marked one meeting state standards, which leaves unmarked intersection crossings to ordinary negligence principles instead of this rule.

The section then draws a geographic line. The duty attaches “if the pedestrian is on that half of the traveled part of the way on which the vehicle is traveling or if the pedestrian approaches from the opposite half of the traveled part of the way to within 10 feet of that half of the traveled part of the way on which said vehicle is traveling.” A pedestrian who has stepped off the far curb of a wide road has not yet triggered the duty of a driver in the near lane. Ten feet later, they have.

A separate sentence covers the collision that happens most often and is least understood, the one where a car stops and the car beside it does not: “No driver of a vehicle shall pass any other vehicle which has stopped at a marked crosswalk to permit a pedestrian to cross, nor shall any such operator enter a marked crosswalk while a pedestrian is crossing or until there is a sufficient space beyond the crosswalk to accommodate the vehicle he is operating, notwithstanding that a traffic control signal may indicate that vehicles may proceed.” The closing clause is the important one. A green light is not a defense to entering an occupied crosswalk.

The penalty for a driver is small, “a fine of not more than $200,” which is why the citation is rarely the point. What the citation supports in the civil claim is the point, and that turns on M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 85, under which “The violation of a criminal statute, ordinance or regulation by a plaintiff which contributed to said injury, death or damage, shall be considered as evidence of negligence of that plaintiff”. The same evidentiary logic runs in the injured person’s favor when the violation is the driver’s. How that evidence is weighed alongside everything else is covered in how fault is determined in a Massachusetts car accident.

The Police Have to Investigate a Marked-Crosswalk Injury

Section 11 closes with an obligation that has no equivalent in most crash statutes, and it is worth knowing about in the first week rather than the sixth month.

“Whenever a pedestrian is injured by a motor vehicle in a marked crosswalk, the department of state police or the municipal police department with jurisdiction of the street, in consultation with department of state police if deemed appropriate, shall conduct an investigation into the cause of the injury and any violation of this section or other law or ordinance and shall issue the appropriate civil or criminal citation or file an application for the appropriate criminal complaint, if any.”

The word shall appears twice. An investigation into cause is mandatory, and so is issuing whatever citation or complaint application the investigation supports. The section adds that it “shall not limit the ability of a district attorney or the attorney general to seek an indictment in connection with the operation of a motor vehicle which causes injury or death and which violates this section.”

For an injured pedestrian, that means an official investigative file should exist, and it should exist without anyone having to ask for it. Records go stale on their own schedule, and the general practice of preserving evidence early is covered in the article on reporting a car accident in Massachusetts.

Crossing Outside the Rules Is Not Evidence Against You

The first thing a driver’s insurer usually says about a pedestrian claim is that the pedestrian was not in a crosswalk. Massachusetts has a statute addressed to exactly that argument, and it is not where anyone would look for it.

Local rules governing how pedestrians use a way are adopted under M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 18A. The same section sets the penalty at “a fine of one dollar for the first, second or third such offense committed by such person within the jurisdiction of the district court in the particular calendar year, and by a fine of two dollars for the fourth or subsequent such offense so committed in such calendar year.” It provides that “Proceedings under this paragraph shall not be deemed criminal” and that “no record of the case shall be entered in the probation records.”

Then it closes the door: “A violation of any provision of any such rule or of any provision of this section shall not, in any civil proceeding, constitute negligence or be admissible as evidence of negligence, nor shall a conviction for such a violation be shown to affect the credibility of a witness in any proceeding.”

Two consequences follow from the text. The rule violation cannot come into a civil case as evidence of negligence, and a conviction for it cannot be used to attack the injured person’s credibility on the stand. The bar also fits the structure of section 85, which makes violations evidence of negligence only where the rule violated is a “criminal statute, ordinance or regulation,” and section 18A says in terms that proceedings under it are not criminal.

What the statute does not do is make careless crossing irrelevant. It bars the citation and the rule violation, not the underlying facts. An insurer remains free to argue that a specific person stepped into traffic without looking, and a jury remains free to weigh it. The difference is that the argument has to be built out of what actually happened rather than handed over by a one dollar ticket.

Fault Still Sets What You Recover Above the No-Fault Layer

PIP pays first and pays regardless of fault. Everything beyond it, including pain and suffering and medical expense above the PIP limit, runs through an ordinary negligence claim against the driver, and there Massachusetts uses modified comparative negligence.

Section 85 provides that contributory negligence does not bar recovery “if such negligence was not greater than the total amount of negligence attributable to the person or persons against whom recovery is sought, but any damages allowed shall be diminished in proportion to the amount of negligence attributable to the person for whose injury, damage or death recovery is made.” A pedestrian found partly responsible still recovers, reduced by their share, and is barred only once that share passes the defendants’ combined share. The full mechanics are in the comparative negligence article.

Two more sentences of section 85 are worth knowing, because they allocate the work rather than the blame. “The defense of assumption of risk is hereby abolished in all actions hereunder.” And the burden of proving the negligence that would reduce or bar a recovery “shall be upon the person who seeks to establish such negligence, and the plaintiff shall be presumed to have been in the exercise of due care.” An insurer asserting that a pedestrian caused their own injury is carrying that burden against a presumption running the other way.

The Pain and Suffering Threshold Applies to Pedestrians Too

A pedestrian claim against a driver is still a motor vehicle tort claim, so it meets the same gate every car accident claim meets. M.G.L. c. 231, sec. 6D allows damages for pain and suffering “In any action of tort brought as a result of bodily injury, sickness or disease, arising out of the ownership, operation, maintenance or use of a motor vehicle within this commonwealth by the defendant” only where reasonable and necessary medical expenses “are determined to be in excess of two thousand dollars,” unless the injury falls into one of five categories the statute lists: it “causes death,” or “consists in whole or in part of loss of a body member,” or “consists in whole or in part of permanent and serious disfigurement,” or “results in such loss of sight or hearing as is described in paragraphs (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), (f) and (g) of section thirty-six of chapter one hundred and fifty-two”, or “consists of a fracture.”

The last one closes the gate for a large share of pedestrian injuries on its own, because a person struck by a car frequently breaks something. Any fracture satisfies section 6D regardless of the medical bill. The threshold and its exceptions are worked through in detail in the serious injury threshold article.

If a Motorcycle Struck You

Motorcycle policies in Massachusetts are governed by a Division of Insurance regulation that relieves insurers of the obligation to carry PIP for people riding the motorcycle. That exemption stops at the pedestrian.

211 CMR 3.02(1) provides that no insurance company is required to provide PIP in motorcycle policies “for owners, operators or guests of motorcycle owners or operators who incur bodily injury while operating or riding as a guest on such vehicles; provided, however, that such policies shall provide Personal Injury Protection to pedestrians struck by motorcycles”. The regulation requires those policies to conform in all other respects to the requirements of M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34A and 34O and M.G.L. c. 175, sec. 113C.

So a pedestrian struck by a motorcycle claims PIP on the motorcycle’s policy in the ordinary way. The rider’s own position under the same regulation is a very different problem and is worked through in Massachusetts motorcycle accident law.

Deadlines

A tort claim against the driver is subject to M.G.L. c. 260, sec. 2A, under which “actions of tort, actions of contract to recover for personal injuries, and actions of replevin, shall be commenced only within three years next after the cause of action accrues.”

The PIP side runs on a different and much shorter clock in practice. Section 34A pays expenses “incurred within two years from the date of accident”, which limits the treatment window rather than the filing window, and insurers impose their own notice and documentation requirements well before either. Claims against a public entity, a transit authority, or a municipality carry separate and much shorter notice requirements. The deadline landscape is mapped in the personal injury statute of limitations article.

What Usually Goes Wrong Early

The pattern in pedestrian claims is not a bad decision at the end. It is a series of small ones in the first two weeks.

Benefits go unclaimed because the injured person believes no-fault has nothing to do with someone on foot. Section 34A says the opposite, and PIP is payable while the fault dispute is still unresolved.

Fault gets conceded in conversation. The driver’s insurer calls, asks how it happened, and records the answer. A pedestrian has no contract with that insurer and no duty to give it a statement, a point covered in giving a recorded statement to an insurance company and in dealing with the insurance adjuster after a Massachusetts crash.

Treatment gaps open up. Someone walks away sore, waits three weeks for the pain to resolve, and hands the insurer an argument about causation that the medical record cannot answer.

The crosswalk investigation file is never requested. Section 11 requires the investigation for a marked-crosswalk injury; nothing requires anyone to hand the file to the injured person.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: I was hit by a car while walking and I do not own a car. Who pays my medical bills?

A: The insurer of the vehicle that struck you, through personal injury protection. M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34A defines PIP to include payment for “any pedestrian struck by the insured’s or obligor’s motor vehicle,” so you do not need your own policy and you do not need to prove the driver was at fault. PIP pays at least $8,000 for reasonable medical expenses incurred within two years of the accident, plus wage loss, and it pays as bills come in rather than at the end of a case.

Q: What if the car that hit me had no insurance?

A: Section 34A has a second provision for that. It requires PIP to pay “the named insured or obligor and members of their households” for injury suffered “by being struck as a pedestrian by, a motor vehicle not insured by a policy or bond providing personal injury protection”. So if you or someone in your household owns an insured vehicle, that policy becomes the source of your no-fault benefits even though the car sat in the driveway during the accident.

Q: What if no auto policy reaches me at all?

A: M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34N directs insurers authorized to provide personal injury protection in Massachusetts “to organize and maintain an assigned claims plan”. A claim brought through the plan is assigned to an insurer, which then has “the same rights and obligations it would have if prior to such assignment it had issued a policy providing personal injury protection”. The plan is not open to everyone. Section 34N limits it to a person “resident in the commonwealth” and expressly excludes the owner or registrant of an uninsured motor vehicle and members of that person’s household, along with anyone entitled to workers compensation benefits under chapter 152.

Q: Does the crosswalk law mean a driver always has to stop for me?

A: No, and the limits are written into the statute. M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 11 imposes the yield duty “When traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation”, and it applies to “a crosswalk marked in accordance with standards established by the department of highways”. Where a signal is present and working, the signal governs. The section also has a distance rule: the driver must yield if the pedestrian is on the driver’s half of the traveled way, or is approaching from the other half and has come “within 10 feet” of the driver’s half.

Q: Can the driver’s insurer use jaywalking against me?

A: Not the citation itself. Local rules regulating how pedestrians use a way are adopted under M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 18A, and that section provides that a violation of such a rule or of the section “shall not, in any civil proceeding, constitute negligence or be admissible as evidence of negligence, nor shall a conviction for such a violation be shown to affect the credibility of a witness in any proceeding.” That bar is about the rule violation. An insurer can still argue that the way a particular person actually crossed was careless, which is an ordinary comparative negligence question decided on the facts.

Q: How much is the fine for crossing against the rules in Massachusetts?

A: M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 18A sets it at one dollar for the first, second or third offense within the jurisdiction of the district court in a calendar year, and two dollars for the fourth or later offense that year. The section also states that proceedings under it “shall not be deemed criminal”, and that no record of the case is entered in the probation records.

Q: Is a cyclist a pedestrian in Massachusetts?

A: It depends on which statute is being applied, and the two answers differ. For no-fault benefits, M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 34A provides that the term pedestrian “shall include persons operating bicycles, tricycles and similar vehicles and persons upon horseback or in vehicles drawn by horses or other draft animals,” so a struck cyclist claims PIP the same way a person on foot does. For the pedestrian-conduct rules, M.G.L. c. 90, sec. 18A defines pedestrian for its own paragraph as a person on foot or in a human-powered conveyance “other than a bicycle”. Riding rules and driver duties toward cyclists are covered separately in Massachusetts bicycle laws.

Q: A motorcycle hit me while I was walking. Does its policy have PIP?

A: Yes. The Division of Insurance regulation that exempts motorcycle policies from carrying PIP for the rider carves pedestrians back in. 211 CMR 3.02(1) relieves an insurer of the duty to provide PIP for “owners, operators or guests of motorcycle owners or operators who incur bodily injury while operating or riding as a guest on such vehicles”, then provides “that such policies shall provide Personal Injury Protection to pedestrians struck by motorcycles”. The rider’s side of that regulation is covered in Massachusetts motorcycle accident law.

Q: Does the police report matter more in a crosswalk case?

A: There is a statutory investigation requirement that applies to marked crosswalks specifically. M.G.L. c. 89, sec. 11 provides that whenever a pedestrian is injured by a motor vehicle in a marked crosswalk, the state police or the municipal police department with jurisdiction “shall conduct an investigation into the cause of the injury and any violation of this section or other law or ordinance” and “shall issue the appropriate civil or criminal citation or file an application for the appropriate criminal complaint, if any.” That is a duty the statute places on the police, not something the injured person has to request.

Q: Is Jimmy Knows AI giving me legal advice?

A: No. This is general information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutes change and the way a rule applies depends entirely on the facts of a specific situation. For advice about a specific matter, speak with a Massachusetts attorney. The Jim Glaser Law line is answered 24 hours a day at (617) JIM-WINS, and the first telephone consultation is free.

Talking to a Lawyer

A pedestrian claim has more moving parts than its facts suggest. The no-fault benefits sit on someone else’s policy, the fallback sits on a policy in your own household, the second fallback is a statutory plan with three exclusions written into it, and the defense the driver’s insurer reaches for first is one the Legislature took off the table. Sorting out which of those apply is a question about your specific facts.

Jim Glaser Law answers its line 24 hours a day at (617) JIM-WINS, and the first telephone consultation is free. Fee terms for personal injury matters are covered in how much personal injury lawyers charge in Massachusetts.