Chicago Pays $9.5 Million After Cyclist's Wheel Caught in Forgotten Streetcar Rails on Designated Bike Route
Won by Smith LaCien LLP.
Chicago agreed to pay $9.5 million to Catalin Dumitrescu, who suffered catastrophic injuries in 2014 when his bicycle wheel lodged in exposed streetcar rails that had been buried in an East Hyde Park street and then re-designated as a bike route without removing the decades-old hazard.
What happened
On October 25, 2014, Catalin Dumitrescu was riding his bicycle along East 56th Street near South Harper Avenue in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, a corridor the city had formally designated as part of its bike network. He never made it to his destination. His front wheel dropped into a groove cut by an embedded streetcar rail, the bike went down, and Dumitrescu hit the pavement with force severe enough to leave him, as his lawsuit would later describe, 'significantly disfigured and disabled.'
The rails that caused the crash had not carried a streetcar in roughly six decades. Chicago's surface streetcar system stopped operating in or around 1958, but the rails on 56th Street were never pulled up. Over the years, road crews periodically paved over them with asphalt patches, even as the city removed similar legacy rails at other locations across Chicago. The patching did not hold. By no later than 2011, the rail had worked its way back through the surface at the very stretch of street the city was now routing cyclists onto.
Dumitrescu's attorney, Todd Smith, built the negligence case around a sequence of institutional failures that compounded over time. The city knew the bike route existed. The city knew rails from the old streetcar network still lay beneath certain roads. And despite that knowledge, no inspection was ordered, no removal was performed, and no warning was posted before cyclists were directed down 56th Street. The lawsuit framed the rail not as a relic but as an active danger the city had the means and the obligation to eliminate.
The case also pressed the city on its maintenance record after the street was put into service as a bike route. Records showed the asphalt patches applied over the rail were inadequate to keep it submerged under the weight and stress of ordinary traffic, yet the city continued patching rather than addressing the underlying problem. The pattern, Smith argued, reflected negligence that went well beyond a single oversight.
Chicago settled the case for $9.5 million. The Chicago Sun-Times, which broke the settlement story in September 2019, reported that neither Dumitrescu nor Smith commented publicly. The settlement followed nearly five years of litigation and was among the larger bicycle-related payouts the city had faced.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Smith LaCien LLP
All Smith LaCien LLP proven verdicts →A Cook County jury awarded $51 million to John Reinke after OSF Heart of Mary Medical Center discharged him without testing his blood sugar, leading to a diabetic cardiac arrest that left him with a permanent brain injury.
A Cook County judge approved an $18.5 million settlement for Gabriela Cedillo, a 24-year-old extra who suffered catastrophic brain damage when a snapped tow cable tore through her windshield during filming of Transformers: Dark of the Moon in Hammond, Indiana.
The estate of helicopter pilot Michael Russell recovered $8.15 million, then Illinois's highest reported product-liability settlement involving a helicopter, after a defective tail-rotor drive-shaft bearing caused his Agusta 109C to spin out of control and crash near DuPage Airport. Todd Smith and Brian LaCien, who later founded Smith LaCien LLP, handled the case at their prior firm, Power, Rogers & Smith P.C.
Related premises liability verdicts
Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.
A Dallas jury awarded $1.1 billion against a trust fund heir who beat a 2-year-old into a permanent vegetative state in 2021, a verdict the firm calls the largest child-assault award in U.S. history.
A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
Joseph Bruno and Bruno & Bruno served as lead plaintiffs' counsel in a landmark class action brought by more than 8,000 Gentilly residents exposed to a butadiene tank-car fire in 1987, securing a jury verdict that included $2.5 billion in punitive damages against CSX Transportation alone, later reduced to $850 million on appeal and affirmed by Louisiana's Fourth Circuit.