ON THE WAY TO WORK, OR A BLOCK FROM HOME
Crashes here divide into two kinds, and they do not produce the same case. There is the one on the way to work — the tunnel approaches, Route 164, Frederick Boulevard and George Washington Highway, where the traffic is heavy and the other driver is a stranger you will never see again. And there is the one a block from home, where the street is narrow, everybody was going somewhere ordinary, and the only witness is a neighbor.
That second kind is more common here than in newer cities, because a great deal of Portsmouth was laid out long before streets were being designed around cars. Cradock’s were drawn in 1918. Olde Towne runs on brick with cars parked either side and doors opening into a live lane. Port Norfolk and Park View have the same narrow geometry. Which matters for a practical reason: the evidence in a Portsmouth crash file is more often a witness than a camera, and people move homes, change numbers and stop remembering.
Virginia then makes all of it harder than it should be. Under our contributory negligence rule an injured person found to carry any part of the fault takes nothing — not a reduced award, nothing. It is the best reason there is to say nothing recorded to an adjuster before you have spoken to a lawyer, and it is the first thing a carrier goes looking for.
WHY THE FIRST WEEK DECIDES IT
PORTSMOUTH BY THE NUMBERS
Virginia DMV figures put Portsmouth at 1,078 crashes across 2024. In them, 874 people were injured and six were killed. Speed was a factor in 215 of those crashes by itself, and those alone accounted for 206 of the injuries — which is to say roughly a quarter of the crashes in this city produced nearly a quarter of everybody hurt.
Read against the geography, that lands about where you would expect. Speed is not really a tunnel-approach problem; it belongs to the open stretches — Route 164 out to the west, the long runs of Airline and Frederick, George Washington Highway. The tunnel approaches produce volume rather than velocity, and VDOT counts more than a hundred thousand vehicles a day through the two of them. Both patterns fill this practice, and they fill it with completely different kinds of file.
This is the practical argument for calling an attorney who works this city rather than the region in general. Name the intersection and we will know within a sentence whether the case hinges on sight lines, on signal timing, on how stopped traffic was moving, or on the fact that nobody was going anywhere near the posted limit. That determines what we go and get in the first week, and the first week is most of it.
IN PORTSMOUTH AND ACROSS HAMPTON ROADS
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62
injury clients represented in Portsmouth in the last two years
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16,000+
injury clients represented firmwide since 1995
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65+
years in Hampton Roads courts
TELL US WHICH ROAD IT WAS
That one answer tells us most of what we need. Free consultation, no obligation — call 757-622-3317 any time.