Nassau County Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Protecting Injured Riders From Valley Stream to Oyster Bay

Motorcycle riders in Nassau County deal with a crowded road system. Heavy traffic. Constant turning movements. Drivers who are looking for a gap and not for a motorcycle. When something goes wrong, the rider takes the worst of it.

How We Can Help

Riders get overlooked on the road and blamed after the crash

We see these cases every day. Left turns across a rider’s path. Unsafe lane changes on the parkways. Drivers pulling out of parking lots who never looked twice. Even when riders do everything right, they get overlooked on the road and blamed after the crash.

Get a Free Case Review

There is also a local side to these cases that most people never think about. Which police department wrote the report. Who owned the road you went down on. Which court the case gets filed in. In Nassau those answers are different than they are anywhere else on Long Island, and they change how a case gets built.

Motorcyclists also face a unique legal challenge in New York. There is generally no no-fault coverage. That means no automatic payment of medical bills or lost wages. Everything depends on building a strong injury claim from the start. We cover how that works, along with crash causes, injuries, and compensation, on our Long Island motorcycle accident attorney page.

At Palermo Law, we represent injured riders with a clear focus on results. Our firm is led by Steven Palermo, Managing Partner and a five-time honoree by Super Lawyers, a selective recognition based on peer evaluation and professional achievement. We have recovered over $75 million for our clients and earned 450 five-star Google reviews.

Why Nassau County Riders Choose Palermo Law

Motorcycle cases require more than a basic understanding of accident litigation. They require strategy, preparation, and the ability to push back against insurance company bias and tactics.

At Palermo Law, every case is guided by three principles.

Where Your Nassau County Case Gets Filed

Nassau County Supreme Court hears civil personal injury cases at 100 Supreme Court Drive in Mineola. That is where your lawsuit gets filed and where it will be heard.

Mineola sits near the center of the county, so no client is far from it. Suffolk cases are heard in Riverhead, at the far eastern end of that county. Nassau riders have it easier in that respect.

Where the crash happened controls where the case is filed. Not where you live. If you were hit in Nassau riding home to Suffolk, the case belongs in Mineola.

Defense firms here know this courthouse. They work cases deep into discovery and through several conferences before they move off an opening number. We prepare for that from the beginning.

Which Department Responded Changes What Evidence Exists

Nassau does not have one police department. It has more than twenty.

The Nassau County Police Department covers the unincorporated areas and some villages. Many other villages run their own departments, and the county keeps a list of every village and city police agency. So do the cities of Long Beach and Glen Cove. The line between one department and the next often falls in the middle of a block, and there is nothing on the road to tell you.

A crash at Roosevelt Field is a Nassau County Police report. A crash a mile away on Franklin Avenue is a Garden City Police report. Two departments. Two records processes. Two different answers on how long they hold onto video.

This matters more than it sounds. The first few weeks decide what evidence still exists. We know which department to go to, and we go immediately.

Road Defect Claims on Nassau Roads

Sometimes the road itself causes the crash. A pothole. A bad pavement seam. Gravel left behind after construction. When that happens, the claim is against whoever was responsible for maintaining that stretch of road.

In Nassau, that is harder to sort out than most places. The county has three towns, two cities, and more than sixty incorporated villages, with the state parkways and county roads layered on top.

There is a second problem. Nassau County has a prior written notice law at section 12-4.0(e) of the County Administrative Code. In plain terms, the county usually cannot be held responsible for a road defect unless someone told them about it in writing before your crash and they did nothing about it.

Nassau’s version has a wrinkle that costs people their cases. The written notice has to have gone to the County Attorney’s office. Courts have dismissed claims where the county clearly knew about a condition, because the complaint was sitting in a different department’s files. The records search has to be pointed at the right office from day one.

There are ways through it. New York Highway Law § 139(2) makes constructive notice of a road defect an exception for counties, and a local law cannot take that away. The county is also responsible when its own crew created the problem. Both take evidence, and both take a records request filed early.

Any claim against the county, a town, a village, or a city also requires a Notice of Claim, usually within 90 days. That deadline comes fast when you are still in treatment.

The Southern State Parkway Problem

Motorcycles are allowed on New York parkways. Trucks are not. So the Southern State is a road riders are entitled to use, and one that was never built for the traffic it carries now.

The parkway opened in 1927 as a scenic route to the beaches, laid out for cars going about 35 miles per hour. The road never really changed. The lanes are narrow. The shoulders are minimal. The curves are tight and the on-ramps are far too short to get up to speed. The Nassau stretch now carries close to 200,000 vehicles a day.

The section between Malverne and Farmingdale has been called Blood Alley for years. Sharp curves, narrow lanes, short ramps, and three major parkway interchanges one after another at the Meadowbrook, the Wantagh, and the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway. State lawmakers have pressed the Department of Transportation for years over how little of the original design has been fixed.

All of it is worse on a motorcycle. A short ramp leaves a rider no room to match traffic speed. A narrow shoulder leaves nowhere to go. When a driver drifts into a rider’s lane, there is nothing to absorb it.

When the design of the road contributed to a crash, that belongs in the case. We investigate it.

Nassau Riding Conditions Off the Parkways

Off the parkways, the problem in Nassau is traffic and turns.

Hempstead Turnpike. Jericho Turnpike. Northern Boulevard. Merrick Road. Sunrise Highway. Old Country Road. These roads are lined with driveways and parking lot entrances, and every one of them is a place a driver can turn across a rider’s path.

Left turns are the most common way riders get hurt in this county. A driver waiting to pull into a parking lot looks for a gap in traffic. They see space where a motorcycle is. New York law requires a left-turning driver to yield to oncoming traffic. It happens anyway, every day.

Then the insurance company blames the rider. They argue you were going too fast, or weaving through traffic, or riding recklessly. We answer that with accident reconstruction, sightline analysis, and the physical evidence from the scene.

Reviewed by

Steven Palermo Esq.

Senior Partner, Palermo Law, P.L.L.C.

Steven Palermo is a Long Island personal injury attorney with more than 25 years of experience representing injured victims in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. He is admitted to the New York State Bar and the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.