The Oakland City Council approved a monetary settlement on February 19 with a man who sustained serious injuries after crashing his bike on Grizzly Peak Boulevard in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to his civil complaint<\/a>, Robert Solomon was riding his bicycle on May 24, 2024, on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, headed south into the valley, when he rounded a bend. That stretch of the road was in shadow, according to the complaint, partially obscuring a pothole ahead. Solomon hit the pothole and crashed violently. The complaint said Solomon fell unconscious but a driver stopped to stay with him and render aid until police and paramedics arrived.\u00a0<\/p>\n The pothole, the complaint says, was located about 1.1 miles south of the point where the road intersects with Centennial Drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n Solomon said that he suffered a fractured skull, a concussion, multiple spinal fractures, a broken nose, ligament tears, and lacerations to his face, neck, and shoulders. Solomon\u2019s Mill Valley attorneys, Carter Zinn and Jeremy Pollack, did not respond to queries.<\/p>\n The plaintiff\u2019s claim against Oakland, which governs the road, sought general damages including, \u201cpain, suffering, emotional distress\u201d and \u201cpast wage loss and the cost of past and future medical services required by his injuries.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Solomon\u2019s attorneys argue in the complaint that the presence of the pothole indicated that the \u201croadway was in a dangerous condition\u201d that \u201ccreated a reasonably foreseeable risk of the kind of injury that occurred.\u201d They claimed that the city had failed to properly inspect and maintain the roadway despite \u201cactual notice of the dangerous condition.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Oaklandside has previously reported that Oakland may face more liability than other cities in these road-condition cases because it maintains a nearly 15-year database of road defects on the Oak311 website. This documentation may allow personal injury lawyers to claim the city had a \u201creasonable\u201d amount of time to fix road issues identified there. While any Oakland resident can submit a report on the website, bike and pedestrian advocates are among the most consistent at doing so, with pedestrian and bike safety groups such as Bike East Bay adding them nearly every week.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is not the first time the city has paid out a settlement from a collision on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. In 2024, the city agreed to pay $6.5 million<\/a> to Lynne McDonald, who suffered a serious injury during a bike ride on the road in 2018.<\/p>\n In a closed session on February 19, the City Council approved the settlement with Solomon, which was negotiated between the city attorney\u2019s office and Solomon\u2019s attorneys at the Zinn Law Firm. The settlement allows the city to avoid litigation \u201cwithout admitting liability,\u201d according to a report<\/a> by the city attorney, Ryan Richardson.\u00a0<\/p>\n The $400,000 settlement amount will count toward the city\u2019s settlement and judgment totals for the 2026 fiscal year. The last time the city attorney\u2019s office detailed the total value of settlements and judgments<\/a> in a single fiscal year was in FY 2024, when two major infrastructure settlements, Van. Schoote v. City of Oakland<\/a>, and McDonald et. al. v. City of Oakland, together cost the city $13 million. In that annual report, Oakland said it had averaged $14.5 million a year in settlements and judgments over five years. We\u2019ve asked the city attorney\u2019s office for the FY 2025 totals, but the office did not immediately respond.<\/p>\n