A bus crash leaves you with an injury and no obvious defendant. No other driver handed you an insurance card, the bus pulled away or was towed, and the only paperwork you have is a hospital wristband. Most people spend the first month waiting for someone to contact them.
What matters on day one is that the deadline depends on who ran the bus, and in Bakersfield the answer is counterintuitive. The city buses belong to Golden Empire Transit District, which is not a department of the City of Bakersfield and not a department of Kern County. It is an independent district with its own appointed board, and it is still a public entity, so a written claim must reach it within six months of the injury rather than the two years almost everyone assumes. Two published Court of Appeal decisions have treated GET exactly that way.
Culver Legal has recovered $200 Million and counting for injured people in California. We work on contingency, we advance the costs of the case, and there is no fee unless we win. If there is no recovery, you are not charged those costs either. Call (310) 600-7881 at any hour, including tonight.
Who Operated the Bus Decides Your Deadline
This is the first question in the case, and it is not always answerable from the scene.
Golden Empire Transit District. GET runs the fixed-route city buses and GET-A-Lift paratransit. Its five-member board is appointed, two by the Bakersfield City Council, two by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, and one chosen by those four. That independence does not put it outside the Government Claims Act. In Perez v. Golden Empire Transit District (2012) 209 Cal.App.4th 1228 a passenger injured getting off a GET bus took the claim-presentation question to the Court of Appeal, and in Agustin v. Golden Empire Transit District (2025) a passenger injured in a fall on a GET bus sued the district and the driver. Six months.
Kern Transit. Not GET, and this is the one people merge. Kern Transit is a division of the Kern County Public Works Department, so the defendant is the County of Kern rather than a transit district. It runs the routes out of Bakersfield to Delano, Taft, Tehachapi, Mojave and Lancaster. Six months, presented to the county.
A school bus. A district-operated bus makes the school district the defendant, its own public entity on its own six-month clock. Families most often miss this one, because a child’s injury takes time to declare itself and nobody tells the parents a clock started on the day of the crash.
A charter, tour, employee shuttle or intercity coach. All private operators, so the ordinary two-year limit under Code of Civil Procedure 335.1 applies, and they carry commercial policies. A coach crash on Highway 99 often also involves a commercial vehicle, which raises the same federal record-retention questions that drive a truck accident claim.
A car, a cyclist or a person on foot struck by a bus. You do not have to have been a passenger. The duty owed to you is the ordinary duty of care rather than the carrier duty below, but the six-month rule still applies if the operator was public. Claims from a collision with a bus, from being struck while walking, and from being hit while riding all run on the operator’s clock, not on yours.
There is good news buried in Perez. The plaintiff’s written claim was missing detail the statute requires, and the Court of Appeal still let the case proceed, reversing the dismissal. A claim with a gap in it is not automatically the end. It took an appeal to establish that, so treat it as a rescue rather than a plan.
Where Do You Actually Present the Claim?
Knowing you have six months is only half of it. A written claim has to reach the right entity, and the three public bus operators in this city are three different entities.
| The bus | What it legally is | Who the claim goes to |
|---|---|---|
| Golden Empire Transit | An independent transit district. Not a city department and not a county department | The district |
| Kern Transit | A division of the Kern County Public Works Department | The County of Kern |
| A school bus | The school district, a public entity in its own right | That district |
None of those three is the City of Bakersfield. That is the practical trap. The city’s claim counter is a real place, on the first floor of 1600 Truxtun Avenue, and it is where a reasonable person takes a claim about a bus. For a GET bus, a Kern Transit bus or a school bus it is the wrong counter, the six months does not stop while you find that out, and nothing painted on the side of the bus tells you which of the three you were riding.
Getting this right at the start is most of the work in a public-entity bus case. Getting it wrong is not usually recoverable.
A Bus Company Owes You More Than Ordinary Care
Most injury claims turn on whether someone behaved reasonably. A claim against a bus operator does not, and the difference is written into the Civil Code in plain terms.
Under Civil Code 2100, a carrier of persons for reward “must use the utmost care and diligence for their safe carriage, must provide everything necessary for that purpose, and must exercise to that end a reasonable degree of skill.” Utmost care, not ordinary care.
Civil Code 2101 goes further, and it is the section most people have never heard of. A carrier “is bound to provide vehicles safe and fit for the purposes to which they are put, and is not excused for default in this respect by any degree of care.” Read that twice. If the vehicle was not fit, how carefully the operator maintained it is not a defense. Being diligent about a defect does not answer for the defect.
Civil Code 2104 adds that a carrier must travel at a reasonable speed and without unreasonable deviation from route.
This reshapes what the case is about. Maintenance records, inspection logs, the driver’s hours and training file, and the onboard camera footage matter more than the argument over right of way. All four are held by the operator, and all four sit on a retention schedule.
Do you know who actually ran the bus?
The name on the side is not always the operator. We can identify it and tell you which deadline you are on.
What Injuries Do Bus Passengers Actually Get?
City buses have no seat belts, passengers sit sideways or stand, and there is a lot of hard steel at head height. Falls while boarding, riding or getting off account for much of what these cases are, which is what both reported GET decisions involved.
Head injuries are the ones most often missed. Somebody who strikes a stanchion may walk off the bus and decline the ambulance, and the symptoms that matter arrive over the following week. A normal scan answers the emergency question rather than every question, which is why a brain injury claim so often begins with a medical record saying nothing was wrong.
Where a crash is fatal, California limits who may bring a wrongful death claim, and against a public operator the six-month rule applies to that claim too. If you were hurt on an employer’s shuttle, a claim against the operator may run alongside your workers compensation case, which does not pay for pain and suffering.
How Long Do I Have to File?
Six months to present a written claim to a public entity, under Government Code 911.2. This covers Golden Empire Transit District, school districts, the city and the county. Until the claim has been presented and the entity has responded or the time has run, there is no lawsuit to file.
Two years from the date of injury for a claim against a private operator, under Code of Civil Procedure 335.1.
Children are treated differently, but not as differently as parents expect. Code of Civil Procedure 352 pauses the ordinary limitation period while an injured person is under 18. The six-month government claim deadline is not paused in the same way. A child hurt on a school bus therefore needs an adult acting within months, not years, which is the single most costly misunderstanding in this area.
Was your child hurt on a school bus?
Being a minor does not pause the six-month government deadline. Call before it runs.
Is There a Bakersfield Bus Crash Statistic?
Not a real one. The California Office of Traffic Safety publishes crash rankings for Bakersfield, which recorded 2,073 people killed or injured in 2023, 8th worst of the 15 California cities with populations over 250,000. It has no bus category, and no state table isolates bus injuries by city. Anyone quoting you a Bakersfield bus crash figure should be asked where it came from.
Which Court Hears It, and How Do I Get the Report?
If the claim is rejected and a lawsuit follows, a bus injury case is almost always an unlimited civil case, meaning damages sought above $35,000. Those are filed at the Metro Justice Building, 1215 Truxtun Avenue, and heard in Kern County, which means a Kern County jury rather than a panel drawn from Los Angeles.
The police report is a separate errand and a cheap one. Traffic collision reports come from the Bakersfield Police Department Records Unit at 1601 Truxtun Avenue, weekdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at a flat $7. The traffic report request line is (661) 326-3883.
Expect a wait on the serious ones. The department says traffic reports usually take five to seven business days, and that injury and fatal collision investigations take several days to weeks. A bus crash with injuries is in the slower group. That is inconvenient rather than fatal, but it is a reason not to sit still: the six-month clock does not pause while a report is being written, and a claim can be presented before the report arrives.
On the medical side, the most serious injuries in this county go to Kern Medical, 1700 Mount Vernon Avenue, a Level II trauma center designated in 2001 and re-verified by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. Where the ambulance took you decides who holds the imaging and the trauma activation record, and on a public-entity claim those records often matter more than usual, because the six-month deadline means the claim is being presented while treatment is still running.
Write down the bus number and the route while you still can. On a public-entity claim those two details do more to identify the correct defendant than anything else you can gather at the scene.
Why Bakersfield Clients Choose Culver Legal
We come to you. If you are in the hospital, at home and unable to drive, or a long way out in the county, we will meet you where you are. Distance is not a reason to put off starting a claim, and a six-month clock does not care how far you live from an office.
Our team speaks Spanish, Farsi, Filipino, Hindi, Mandarin and Korean. Explaining your own accident in your own words is not a convenience.
The economics are simple. The firm works on contingency and advances the costs of the case, so there is nothing to pay up front and no fee unless we win. We advance the case costs, and if there is no recovery you are not charged those costs either. Culver Legal has recovered $200 Million and counting, and answers the phone 24 hours a day.
Bakersfield Bus Accident FAQs
I was hurt on a GET bus. Is my deadline really six months?
Treat it as six months and act now. Golden Empire Transit District is a public entity, so Government Code 911.2 requires a written claim to be presented to it before any lawsuit, within six months of the injury. GET being an independent district rather than part of the city or the county does not change that, and two published Court of Appeal decisions have handled claims against it on that basis.
My child was hurt on a school bus. Do we have until they turn 18?
No, and this is the misunderstanding that costs families their claims. Code of Civil Procedure 352 pauses the ordinary two-year limitation period while a person is under 18, but it does not pause the six-month government claim deadline. A school district is a public entity, so the six months runs from the date of the crash regardless of the child’s age.
Nobody gave me any paperwork and the bus drove off. Do I still have a claim?
Yes. The operator holds the records that matter, including maintenance and inspection logs, driver files and onboard camera footage, and those can be obtained. Footage is usually overwritten on a cycle measured in days or weeks, which is the practical reason to move early rather than a sales line.
The bus company says the driver did nothing wrong. Does that end it?
Not necessarily. A carrier owes passengers utmost care rather than ordinary care under Civil Code 2100, and under Civil Code 2101 it must provide vehicles that are safe and fit, and it “is not excused for default in this respect by any degree of care.” If the vehicle itself was unfit, careful driving is not an answer.
I am undocumented. Can I bring a claim without putting myself at risk?
Yes, and the protection is stronger than most people expect. Under Evidence Code 351.2, added by AB 2159, evidence of a person’s immigration status is not admissible in a civil action for personal injury or wrongful death, and discovery into it is not permitted either. It cannot be raised at trial and it cannot be asked about beforehand. It is not a question we ask you, and it is not a question the other side gets to ask.
Can I sue the bus driver personally?
The driver can be named, and in Agustin v. Golden Empire Transit District the injured passenger sued both the district and the driver. In practice the employer is the defendant that matters, because a public employer is responsible for what its employee does in the course of the job and it is the one carrying the money. The more useful point is that suing a public bus driver does not escape the six-month claim requirement. The claim still has to be presented to the entity first.
How do I find out who ran the bus I was on?
The bus number and the route are the fastest route to an answer, which is why they are worth writing down before you leave. Golden Empire Transit runs the fixed-route city buses and GET-A-Lift. Kern Transit runs the county routes out to Delano, Taft, Tehachapi, Mojave and Lancaster. A school district runs its own. Beyond that the answer comes from the police report and from the operator’s own records, and it is one of the first things we chase, because the whole deadline turns on it.
Contact a Culver Legal Bakersfield Bus Accident Lawyer
If a public operator was involved, the window is six months, and it starts on the day you were hurt rather than the day you decide to do something about it. Camera footage goes first, then the witnesses. If you were injured on or by a bus anywhere in Bakersfield or Kern County, reach us at (310) 600-7881, at any hour. Finding out which deadline you are on takes one phone call and costs nothing.
Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Culver Legal, LLP is a California law firm. The information on this page is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice.
