The payouts over Oakland’s bad roads continue apace.
In a closed session of the City Council on April 16, the city approved a $512,000 settlement with a cyclist who hit a pothole on East 21st Street more than two years ago and sued after suffering serious injuries. That’s the second time so far this year that Oakland has agreed to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars for the consequences of its bad roads.
In March, the city paid Robert Solomon $400,000 to settle a lawsuit over a pothole-related collision on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in 2024.
According to a report of the council’s decision, the latest settlement went to an East Oakland cyclist by the name of Andrew Marshall-Buselt. Marshall-Buselt was riding his bicycle on October 17, 2023, when he hit a depression on East 21st Street near 26th Avenue, was “ejected” from his bike, according to his complaint, and hit the ground, suffering face and hand injuries that led to lacerations, broken bones, and nerve damage.
The settlement says Marshall-Buselt’s lawsuit accused the city of “a dangerous condition of public property” and sought a financial payout to cover “past and future medical expenses, lost wages, and general damages for pain and suffering.”
His initial claim against the city, submitted to the Alameda County Court on August 21, 2024, noted that the city “had sufficient time to repair the road” and that its “failure to maintain the road or warn of the dangerous condition created a reasonably foreseeable risk of bicyclist crashes.” (Many lawsuits against the city use data from the city’s Oak311 archive of documented complaints about potholes and other infrastructure issues to determine how long the city was aware of the problem, and to argue it had time to do repairs.)
The settlement allows the city to pay Marshall-Buselt without admitting liability.
Marshall-Buselt was not immediately reachable for comment through his attorneys at Fell Law, a San Diego-based firm. A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Marshall-Buselt has been a long-time special education teacher at OUSD schools and was recently the chair of the Special Education Department at Oakland High School. He was also the campaign manager for Alyssa Victory, an ACLU attorney, in her 2022 run for mayor.
The cycling injury settlement is not the biggest the city has paid out in the last few years.
In 2024, Oakland approved a settlement of $6.5 million to Bruno VanSchoote, who was thrown off his bike while riding downhill on MacArthur Boulevard near Lake Merritt on April 18, 2020. VanSchoote hit a seam in the pavement where one side was jutting upward and ended up with a fractured spine and a serious brain injury.
In 2025, Ty Whitehead won a settlement of $7 million, the city’s biggest ever, for a fall on Skyline Boulevard on March 25, 2017, during an AIDS/Lifecycle training ride. He fell after hitting a triangle-shaped pothole that was about a foot long on each side. Whitehead told us that he couldn’t process information like he used to before the accident and was forced to leave his job.
Usually, the size of a settlement corresponds to the seriousness of the injury, including whether it has lifelong impacts.
In the last decade, the city has paid out close to $50 million in settlements for similar collisions and falls, many involving cyclists, as well as for sidewalk falls.
The Oaklandside has previously spoken to several people who have sued the city over road-related injuries and won major settlements. They each told us, sometimes struggling to put words together, that they’d rather have their previous physical abilities — and not have endured the pain they went through — than have the money the city paid them.
Five members of the City Council approved the payout to Marshall-Buselt last week: Rowena Brown, Carroll Fife, Noel Gallo, Zac Unger, Kevin Jenkins, and Charlene Wang. Two councilmembers, Ken Houston and Janani Ramachandran, abstained. Houston and Ramachandran did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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