The Crash on the Van Wyck: What Most Queens Drivers Don’t Know About New York’s No-Fault System

The first thing most people learn after a car accident in Queens is that almost nothing about the insurance process matches their expectations.

A driver gets rear-ended on the Van Wyck. Another gets hit by a turning vehicle on Queens Boulevard. A pedestrian gets clipped crossing Northern. The instinct in all three situations is the same: file a claim against the other driver’s insurance, get paid for the medical bills and lost time, move on. That is how it works in most states.

It is not how it works in New York.
If you have been in a motor vehicle accident in Queens, the first thing to understand is that New York is a no-fault insurance state, and the rules that govern what you can collect, when you can collect it, and from whom are different from anything you have probably encountered before. Here is the version of the system that is genuinely useful to know.

No-fault is the starting point — and it has nothing to do with fault.
Under New York Insurance Law Article 51, every motor vehicle registered in the state must carry no-fault insurance — also called Personal Injury Protection, or PIP. The minimum coverage is $50,000 per person, and that money pays your basic economic losses regardless of who caused the accident. Medical bills, lost wages up to a statutory cap, and certain other expenses come out of your own no-fault carrier first.

This catches drivers off guard. A pedestrian struck by a delivery truck assumes they will be claiming against the truck’s insurance. They will eventually, for some categories of damages. But the medical bills and the initial lost wages come out of the truck’s no-fault coverage — which the pedestrian, as the injured party, has the right to access even though they were not in the vehicle.

The 30-day deadline is the one most people miss.
To preserve your right to no-fault benefits, you must file an NF-2 application with the no-fault carrier within 30 days of the accident. Miss the deadline, and the carrier can deny the claim outright. Hospitals will sometimes file the form on behalf of the patient as part of their billing process; sometimes they do not, or they file incorrectly. The safest practice is to assume nothing has been filed and to handle the application yourself or through counsel.

The serious injury threshold is what gates everything else.
The trade-off for no-fault coverage is that New York limits when an injured person can sue the at-fault driver for pain and suffering. Under Insurance Law Section 5102(d), you can only pursue a personal injury lawsuit if your injuries meet one of the statutory categories of “serious injury” — which include death, dismemberment, significant disfigurement, fracture, loss of a fetus, permanent loss of use of a body organ, member, function or system, permanent consequential limitation of use, significant limitation of use, or a “90/180” category covering injuries that prevent normal activities for at least 90 of the first 180 days.

The 90/180 category is the one most contested in routine cases. Soft-tissue injuries — neck and back strains, the kind of injuries that come out of moderate-impact rear-end collisions — often hover around the threshold, and whether the case can proceed depends heavily on consistent medical treatment, documented limitations, and credible medical narratives. Defense attorneys and their insurance carriers fight serious injury threshold motions hard, and the cases that survive them are the ones where the medical record was built carefully from the start.

Comparative fault still applies.
Even when serious injury is established and a lawsuit is filed, New York follows a pure comparative negligence rule under CPLR 1411. Any percentage of fault attributed to the injured plaintiff reduces the recovery proportionally. Unlike many states, there is no threshold cutoff — a plaintiff who is 80 percent at fault can still recover 20 percent of their damages. The rule is generous to plaintiffs but it also means that establishing the other driver’s fault carefully matters.

SUM coverage is the protection people forget they have.
Supplementary Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist coverage — SUM — is the part of your auto policy that protects you when the at-fault driver does not have enough insurance to cover your damages. Given the volume of underinsured drivers on New York City roads, SUM coverage is the difference between full recovery and a partial one in many serious cases. The amount of SUM you carry is something worth checking on your own policy before anything happens.

The 90-day notice for city vehicles.
If the accident involved a vehicle owned or operated by the City of New York or one of its agencies — an MTA bus, a sanitation truck, an NYPD vehicle, a Department of Education school bus — different rules apply. A Notice of Claim must be filed with the city within 90 days of the accident, and a lawsuit must be filed within one year and 90 days. Miss either deadline, and the claim is generally barred. These cases come up regularly in Queens given the density of city operations, and the deadlines are unforgiving.

If you have been in an accident in Queens, the early decisions — about what gets filed, when, and how the medical record gets built — shape everything that follows. The system rewards preparation and punishes assumptions.