A parking garage damaged your car in NYC: pursuing the garage while your own insurer handles the repair

Attorney Answer

Your right to pursue the garage and your own collision claim are two different things, and using one does not automatically give up the other. What your carrier pays, it will generally try to recover from the garage — and the part it does not pay, including your deductible and any loss in the car's market value, is the part that stays yours to pursue.

The deadline is the fixed point. CPLR 214 requires an action to recover damages for an injury to property to be commenced within three years, running from the date the vehicle was damaged rather than from the date the garage stopped answering you. Nothing about an insurance claim, a repair, or a long negotiation extends that period.

When you hand a car to a garage and its employee moves it, the garage is holding your property, and its responsibility for damage that happens in its custody is decided under New York's law of bailment, which is judge-made rather than statutory. The practical point is that you are not required to prove exactly which movement caused the scrape when the car went in undamaged and came out damaged; with dashcam footage of the incident itself, you are past the hardest part of that proof already. If the garage argues that you contributed to the damage, CPLR 1411(a) is the fault rule for a claim of this kind: "Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, in any action to recover damages for personal injury, injury to property, or wrongful death, the culpable conduct attributable to the claimant or to the decedent, including contributory negligence or assumption of risk, shall not bar recovery. The amount of damages otherwise recoverable shall be diminished in the proportion which the culpable conduct attributable to the claimant or decedent bears to the culpable conduct which caused the damages." Shared blame reduces a recovery here; it does not end it.

On the two items you actually asked about. The deductible is a real, provable loss, and where a carrier pays and then recovers from the responsible party, the deductible is customarily returned to the policyholder out of what is recovered — that is a matter of your policy and of the recovery, so ask your carrier in writing how it handles it. Loss in market value is a separate item from the cost of repair, and it is contested: it has to be proved with evidence about this car, usually an appraisal comparing value before and after, not asserted from a general belief that repaired cars sell for less. Small claims courts in New York hear money claims up to a dollar limit fixed by statute, and the limit and the proper court depend on where the garage is located; a New York attorney can tell you the current limit and whether the amount you have in mind fits inside it.

What you can do

1. Back up the dashcam file to two places now, with the original file dates intact, and keep the camera's own metadata rather than a re-encoded copy.

2. Ask the garage in writing for the name of its liability insurer and its claim number, and keep the request and any reply.

3. Ask your own insurer, in writing, whether it will pursue the garage and how your deductible would be returned if it recovers.

4. Get a written appraisal that separates the cost of repair from any loss in the car's market value, from someone who can explain the method.

5. Keep the estimate, the repair invoice, the photographs and any incident report the garage created, together in one file.

6. Have a New York attorney look at the numbers before you choose a route — the size of the claim, not just the principle, decides which forum makes sense.

⏱ Time limits apply. CPLR 214 gives three years for an action to recover damages for an injury to property, measured from the date your vehicle was damaged. Your own deadline depends on your facts, and no date is calculated here. Have a New York attorney confirm it before you spend months negotiating with the garage.