Palm Beach Gardens personal injury lawyer

Palm Beach County publishes the list of streets that produce its worst crashes. Seven Palm Beach Gardens roads are on it, and four of the seven are flagged for bicycle crashes.

The Palm Beach Transportation Planning Agency maintains a High Injury Network: the roadway segments carrying the heaviest concentration of fatal and serious injury crashes in the county. Its 2025 Vision Zero Action Plan puts that network at 130 corridors covering 276 miles and reports that 38 percent of fatal crashes and 36 percent of serious injury crashes happen on 4 percent of the county’s streets. Ninety-five percent of the network is posted at 35 miles per hour or higher. Palm Beach Gardens adopted a Vision Zero policy on June 6, 2024 and an action plan of its own on November 6, 2025, one of only three municipalities in the county with a plan on record with the agency.

The agency publishes that network as mapped data, scored four separate ways — all crashes, pedestrian crashes, bicycle crashes, and crashes in the dark or on unlit roadway. A road that qualifies on all four is the worst case the county measures. These are the Palm Beach Gardens streets on the 2025 network, with what the data flags and who is responsible for the pavement.

PGA Boulevard is the longest single stretch on this list anywhere in the north county: more than four miles inside the city, four to six lanes, posted 40 to 45. But the pattern across all seven corridors is about bicycles, not volume. PGA Boulevard, Alternate A1A, Northlake Boulevard and Jog Road all carry a bicycle flag separate from the all-crash measure.

That is a specific kind of claim and it is one insurers handle badly. A cyclist struck by a driver has the same personal injury protection and uninsured motorist questions a driver has, which most people do not know, plus a road-design question nobody raises for them: whether the bike lane ended, whether the shoulder was usable, whether the driveway cut across the lane without sight distance. What a Palm Beach County bicycle claim actually involves.

Military Trail is the other one to read closely. It is flagged on every measure the county scores plus pedestrian crashes, it runs six lanes at a posted 45, and the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department sits on it at 10500 North Military Trail. The most common fatal and serious injury crashes on the network overall are angle, left turn and rear end collisions.

Angle and left-turn crashes are the ones insurers fight, because who had the right of way is rarely settled by the damage alone. That is where Florida Statute 768.81 does its work: a claimant found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing, and below that line the recovery is cut by the share assigned. An adjuster asking about your speed and your line of sight at PGA Boulevard and Military Trail is not making conversation. What the 51 percent bar covers, and what it does not.

Rear-end crashes carry the opposite problem. Fault is usually conceded and the fight moves to the injury: whether a neck or back complaint came from this crash or from something older. That argument is won or lost in the medical records, which is why the 14-day deadline in Florida Statute 627.736(1)(a) ends more claims than any dispute about fault. How Paul handles a Palm Beach County car accident claim.

Four of the seven carry a dark-roadway flag: PGA Boulevard, Prosperity Farms Road, Jog Road and Orange Boulevard. Where lighting, sight lines or signal timing contributed to a crash, the question stops being only about the two drivers.

Three practical facts about a Palm Beach Gardens claim that are easier to establish now than six months from now.

The hospital. Florida has verified only two Level I trauma centers in Palm Beach County — Delray Medical Center and St. Mary’s Medical Center — on the Department of Health’s trauma center list updated July 23, 2026. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue splits them geographically: St. Mary’s covers traumatic injuries north of Southern Boulevard, Delray Medical Center covers the south. Palm Beach Gardens sits north of that line, so a serious trauma out of Palm Beach Gardens is normally taken to St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach. That matters to the claim because the trauma record is the spine of it: the imaging, the admission note and the discharge summary are what an adjuster and later a jury read. If you went by ambulance, the 14-day treatment deadline took care of itself. The claims that die on that deadline belong to people who declined transport, felt worse on day three, and waited. Pain that starts days after a crash, and the order coverage pays your medical bills in.

The road. Who owns the pavement decides who can be sued if the pavement helped cause the crash. PGA Boulevard and Alternate A1A are state roads under FDOT. Prosperity Farms Road, Jog Road and Orange Boulevard are county roads. Military Trail and Northlake Boulevard are partly county and partly state. A claim against any of them runs through Florida Statute 768.28, and the rules there are unforgiving: the claim must be presented in writing within three years, recovery is capped at $200,000 per person and $300,000 per incident unless the Legislature passes a claim bill, and the agency has six months to respond before silence counts as a denial. One wrinkle that is easy to get wrong — a claim against a city or a county goes to that government only, while a claim involving a state road also has to be presented to the Department of Financial Services. Three years sounds generous until you put it beside the two-year deadline for the underlying injury suit. Every deadline that can end a Florida injury claim, with the statute for each.

The courthouse. Palm Beach Gardens is in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit. Under Florida Statute 34.01(1)(c)3, county court handles actions filed on or after January 1, 2023 where the amount in controversy is $50,000 or less; anything above that is a circuit court case. Circuit civil sits at the Main Judicial Complex, 205 North Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach — downtown, where Paul’s office is. The North County Courthouse is in Palm Beach Gardens itself, which makes this the one city on our list with a courthouse of its own; the other branches sit in Delray Beach and Belle Glade. Most claims settle and never see a courtroom, but the venue is why a Palm Beach Gardens case is a West Palm Beach case, and why having the attorney in that courthouse’s own city is not a small thing. What Paul Shalhoub handles across Palm Beach County, and the trial background behind it.

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