Are Car Damage by Pothole Claims in Poland Possible?

Are Car Damage by Pothole Claims in Poland Possible? how?

My take would be I'd be laughed out of court as the country would be bankrupt in a week...

In the UK claims are rising...

highways.gov.uk/our-road-network/land-property-and-compensation/claims-for-damage-caused-by-potholes

telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/10685311/Potholes-huge-rise-in-damage-claims-but-council-pay-outs-fall-amid-repair-backlog.html

It would take so long as to be hardly worth it, if at all. And it wouldn't surprise me if there was some way of the authorities denying responsibility.

Still, it might be worth a lawyer having a go at a test case.

krecil"I'd be laughed out of court"
Not at all. Your lawyer would encourage you to pursue this for years, and the judges, and their descendants, would enjoy watching you go old and grey. Dickens's Jarndyce v Jarndyce could have been based on the Polish legal system.

Clearly, you have never done this and you base this only on your presumptions. Which are wrong.
It is simple to do and my two friends have done it successfuly when they had their tyres, rims and part of suspension damaged in big potholes.

First you need to have a police report on the incident, so there is a legal proof. Then you check who is in charge of maintaing the particular road (a few minutes search in the Internet). Then you contact them and file official paper on this, attaching photos, mechanical expertise of the damages and police report. It doesn't have to go to court. If it will, you'd win if you do it right. It does not take years, maybe months if the court is slow.

Olaf "you base this only on your presumptions"
True in my case. Having experienced a courtroom in the last year and seen incompetent, lying traffic cops flout procedure with impunity, and a judge decide for the plaintif against expert opinion and common sense, my view of the Polish judiciary is a little jaundiced. If your friends got a good result without having to go to court, good for them.

At least in Warsaw, you're wrong. A former colleague of mine is a lawyer and took the city to court for damage to his car caused by a pot-hole. From the day of the damage to the day when he finally got money into his bank account for it was a little over three years. He estimates that with all the time he spent on the matter, it would have been quicker if he had just got a job at McDonalds and put the wages towards the repair costs (as the hourly wage at McDonalds multiplied by the number of hours spent on it results in a larger sum than that needs to make good the damage).


These days one of these things can make a massive difference: 111zl very possibly well spent.

My personal favourite with courts was the judge who accepted without question the sworn testimony from a deadbeat dad that his income in every month of the last three years was below the level that he had actually paid out in child support to his other children in every month of that time. Astoundingly enough it was the same judge who said to the mother, after a number of hearings, "You have two daughters?"....

Harry "111zl very possibly well spent."
I so regret not having had one. I was t-boned by a mad old lady whose story changed with every telling. An idiot could see what had happened. I lost thousands and plenty of peace of mind. The worst of it is that the cops just went back to work.

Apparently the thing to do these days is to turn on the video recorder on your cellphone before you even get out of the car and then just record every word they say.

Good advice. I've just checked out the cameras on Allegro. Is the one you pictured one you recommend or was it just an example? Allegro has them for as little as 59PLN.

I actually bought this model (and from this seller): facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152456703763642 - 169zl gross, so it nets to 111zl. It only arrived day before yesterday so I can't say much about how well it works in use (from the little bit I've played with it at home it seems fine).

It appears to be basically one of these camera: techmoan.com/blog/2013/12/16/g1w-the-cheapest-dash-cam-thats-worth-buying.html

That techmoan site has some excellent reviews (good videos too). I'm going to give the one I have a try over this summer and think about possibly getting a permanent power supply wired in to near the rear-view mirror so I can get one of these things:

Decent camera plus GPS records to prove how fast you were going. Ideal.

Thanks, Harry.

No worries. Pity we didn't have this conversation last year.

Thinking back to the first post in this thread, a GPS-enabled dash-cam might well be the way to go with potholes too: those things record how fast you were moving, which means the council will find it hard to claim that the damage to your car was caused by you speeding. The problem is that GPS-enabled dash-cams use a lot more battery than a simple camera, so you really would need to have it hard wired in.