By Jason Tenenbaum
A lot of what moves in the Bronx belongs to the government. Bx buses on the Grand Concourse. Sanitation trucks on Tremont. New Yorker City Police (NYPD) cruisers on the Cross Bronx. School buses on every side street at 7:40 in the morning. When a private car hits you, New York gives you three (3) years to sue. When one of those vehicles hits you, you may have ninety (90) days to do something most people have never heard of, and if you miss it the case is usually over before it starts.
I have handled injury cases in New York City and on Long Island for more than twenty years. The notice-of-claim deadline is the one that ends more good Bronx cases than any other, and it is entirely avoidable.
What a notice of claim is
Before you can sue the City of New York, a city agency, or most public authorities, General Municipal Law section 50-e requires you to serve a written notice of claim within 90 days of the accident. It has to state your name and address, the nature of the claim, and the time, place and manner in which it arose. For the City that means service on the Comptroller. For the MTA’s buses, run by the New York City Transit Authority and MaBSTOA, Public Authorities Law section 1212 imposes the same 90-day notice, and the lawsuit itself has to be started within one year and 90 days. For Health + Hospitals, if the injury happened at Jacobi or Lincoln, the same 90 days applies under the corporation’s own statute.
Courts treat the notice as a condition of the lawsuit, not a technicality. A judge can grant permission to file late, but only within the one-year-and-90-day window and only if you can show the City had actual knowledge of the essential facts in time, or a good reason for the delay and no prejudice. Not knowing about the rule is not a good reason. Being in the hospital sometimes is. Do not plan on it.
The 50-h hearing
After the notice is served, the City has the right to examine you under oath before any lawsuit, at what is called a 50-h hearing. It is a deposition without a case. Everything you say is on the record and will be used at trial. This is not the place to guess about speed or distance or what you would have done differently. Prepare for it the way you would prepare for testimony, because it is testimony.
Emergency vehicles play by a different rule
If you were hit by an NYPD car, an FDNY truck, or an ambulance responding to a call, the ordinary negligence standard does not apply. Vehicle and Traffic Law section 1104 lets an authorized emergency vehicle engaged in an emergency operation run lights, exceed speed limits and go the wrong way, and the Court of Appeals held in Saarinen v Kerr in 1994 that the driver is liable only for “reckless disregard for the safety of others,” a much harder thing to prove than carelessness. Whether the vehicle was actually in an emergency operation, whether it was doing one of the privileged things, and whether the conduct crossed into reckless disregard are each fought over. A police car that ran a red light with lights and siren going to a call is one case; a police car that was making a routine patrol turn is another, and the reckless-disregard standard does not protect the second one.
Sanitation trucks and plows have their own version. A vehicle “actually engaged in work on a highway,” which includes plowing and salting, gets the reckless-disregard standard under section 1103(b). A sanitation truck driving between stops does not.
The bus cases
Bus cases in the Bronx are mostly two kinds. A passenger thrown by a sudden stop or start, where the question is whether the movement was “unusual and violent” rather than the ordinary jerks of city driving, which the courts say passengers assume. And a pedestrian or cyclist struck by a bus turning, where the bus company’s own camera footage is the case. MTA buses carry multiple cameras. The footage is retained for a limited period and then overwritten, and the Transit Authority does not preserve it for you. A written preservation demand should go out the week of the crash.
The other clocks are still running
The notice of claim is the extra deadline, not a replacement for the ordinary ones. Your own no-fault application still has to reach your insurer within 30 days for the $50,000 in medical and lost-wage benefits every New York policy carries. If you were a pedestrian, the vehicle that hit you pays no-fault, and for a city vehicle that means the City itself, which is self-insured and processes those claims through its own office. Your accident report, form MV-104, is still due to the DMV within ten days if you were driving.
And since May 27, 2026, New York’s new fault rule for car cases, CPLR 1411(b), bars recovery entirely when the plaintiff was more at fault than the defendant. A pedestrian who crossed mid-block on Fordham Road against the light is now at risk of recovering nothing, which makes the crosswalk, the signal timing, and the bus’ speed, all of which the City’s own records can establish, the evidence that decides the case.
What to do this week
Get the bus number, the vehicle number, the plate, and the agency. Photograph the scene. Get the police report number. See a doctor. Write down the names of witnesses, because in a bus case there are usually a dozen and in a week there will be none you can find. Then get the notice of claim served, correctly, on the right entity, within 90 days. Serving the wrong entity, the City instead of the Transit Authority for example, does not count.
I lay out how we handle these cases, the deadlines by agency, and what a Bronx client should expect from the 50-h hearing on our page for a Bronx personal injury lawyer, Jason Tenenbaum. Ninety days goes fast when you are hurt. Start the clock in your own favor.
About Jason Tenenbaum
Jason Tenenbaum is the principal of the Law Office of Jason Tenenbaum, P.C., a personal injury and employment law firm serving New York City and Long Island. He has practiced since 2002 and has written about New York injury and insurance law since 2008.
Featured image credit: DepositPhotos.com
