There are certain places where road accidents commonly occur. The more common ones are roundabouts, from side roads, car parks, and petrol station forecourts / garages. For this article, as the title suggests, I’m going to focus on claims on a petrol station forecourt involving cars.
You fill up your car with overpriced petrol, wincing at the price that comes up on the screen at the pump, and then begrudgingly make your way to the kiosk to tear a huge hole in to your pocket given the high price you have to pay to keep your car on the road. This naturally means you’re likely going to walk across a petrol station forecourt – which of course is full of cars moving around after they’ve finished filling up and paying. Right there is one of the primary reasons you can be injured on the forecourt; because there are generally no designated traffic routes around.
The only luck you have on your side is that cars aren’t generally moving too fast on the forecourt; but if they hit you it’s probably still going to hurt! The general rules are that there is an obvious duty for both drivers and pedestrians to look out for each other and avoid causing an accident. If you are hit as a pedestrian because a driver isn’t driving with enough due care and attention, than you likely have a claim against the drivers insurance. It’s obviously foreseeable that pedestrians will be walking around (as stated above) so there is a greater duty on the driver to keep a careful look out and keep speeds to a low minimum.
However, as I said, as a pedestrian you can’t just go running around and jumping out from behind petrol pumps in the path of a poor driver whose already having a bad enough day as it’s just cost him more than £80 to fill his car up! So it works both ways.
Pedestrians aside, cars are just as likely to end up in a collision on a forecourt. Cars are constantly moving away from parked positions and turning around tight bends to navigate out of the forecourt. In a lot of situations, you can end up with a 50/50 accident, which basically means that both drivers are equally to blame. Each driver can still make a claim against the other, but you will only get 50% of the compensation amount to reflect a 50/50 situation. Liability splits can be on any variant of percentages – so it could be 90/10, 80/20, 70/30 etc…
Of course, you might just be innocently in your car when the other driver reverses in to you, or pulls out from a parked position in to you.
The great thing about petrol station forecourts is that they will almost certainly have CCTV footage of the accident. This is key to establishing who is to blame. It’s not uncommon for people to go on the defensive and allege a totally different set of circumstances to you. But to coin a common phrase, the camera never lies!
The best thing to do is to request a copy of the footage or request that it be retained. Some companies can be a bit funny about giving you the footage due to data protection rules. So the best thing to do is give us a call now on our free claims helpline on 0800 634 75 75 and we’ll do all this for you! We regularly request CCTV footage from third parties, so we know how the system works and we can make sure we safeguard the vital evidence that may well be the making or breaking of your claim!
IMPORTANT: Most places don’t keep footage for long! So get in touch with us as soon as you can after an accident to stop the vital evidence for your claim being erased!
