[B’ Spokes: Some legal issues on roads being dangerous by design, even for motor vehicles.]
from Litigation and Trial by Max Kennerly, Esq.
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My suspicion is that the road design was likely a cause of this accident. The intersection of Bordentown-Chesterfield Road (County Route 528) and Old York Road (County Road 660), which can be seen on Google Maps, is undeniably unsafe. There’s no signal or stop light, and only one road, Old York, has to stop. It’s not necessarily a problem when only one road stops; at least where drivers aren’t distracted, we assume that drivers on Old York will obey the stop sign then look both ways before crossing, and that drivers on Bordentown-Chesterfield Road will slow down if they see someone cross in front of them.
The problem is visibility.
The New Jersey Road Design Manual instructs:
Intersection designs should provide sufficient sight distances to avoid potential conflicts between vehicles turning onto or crossing a highway from a stopped position and vehicles on the through highway operating at the design speed. As a minimum stopping sight distance must be provided.
In other words, when you design an intersection, make sure that “vehicles turning onto or crossing a highway from a stopped position” can see far enough on the cross street that they can tell if cars are coming, and “vehicles on the through highway operating at the design speed” can see cars crossing from far enough way to come to a stop if someone is crossing.
There are two problems with the intersection here. First, the roads don’t intersect at right angles, but rather what looks like 120°/60°. If there’s nothing obstructing visibility at all, that’s more an annoyance than a hazard, but in this case the angles of the road mean that, even if a driver inches right up to the intersection and then looks perpendicular to their vehicle — as you can do at a 90°/90° intersection and see all the way down the road — they still may not see cars who are less than “stopping sight distance” away.
Second, as you can see on Google Maps, visibility at the intersection itself is obstructed by numerous trees. My guess is that The school bus driver traveling northeast on Old York could barely see the dump truck heading southwest on Bordentown-Chesterfield, and vice versa. Bordentown-Chesterfield is a 45 mph road, so it’s unlikely any cars approaching like that can see each other “stopping sight distance” away.
Presumably the intersection (and maybe the trees on its shoulder) are owned by the State of New Jersey or the Chesterfield township, and so their liability is defined by the New Jersey Tort Claims Act:
The New Jersey Tort Claims Act (TCA), N.J.S.A. 59:1-1 to 12-3, specifies the circumstances under which a public entity can be held liable for injuries to another. Generally, immunity for public entities is the rule and liability is the exception The exception relevant to this case is found in N.J.S.A. 59:4-2, which provides that public entities may be liable for injuries caused by a “dangerous condition” on the property of a public entity.
A successful plaintiff under this subsection of the TCA must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that at the time of the injury the public entity’s property was in a dangerous condition, that the condition created a foreseeable risk of the kind of injury that occurred, and the action the entity took to protect against the dangerous condition or the failure to take such action was palpably unreasonable. The term “palpably unreasonable” connotes behavior that is patently unacceptable under any given circumstance.
Within the TCA, a “dangerous condition” is defined as “a condition of property that creates a substantial risk of injury when such property is used with due care in a manner in which it is reasonably foreseeable that it will be used.” N.J.S.A. 59:4-1a. A dangerous condition under that provision refers to the “physical condition of the property itself and not to activities on the property.”
Wymbs v. Township of Wayne, 750 A. 2d 751, 756 (N.J. 2000)(edited for clarity). (Regular readers will recall similar sovereign immunity / tort claims issues in my post about the Ashley Zauflik school bus accident in Pennsbury.) In sum, the state government can be held liable for defective road design or maintenance if they were “palpably unreasonable” in creating or allowing a “dangerous condition” to exist.
The Wymbs case is particularly relevant to this accident, because, as the Associated Press reported, “Police have recorded 15 accidents at the same four-way intersection since 2007 — including a minor one on Friday.” In Wymbs, the New Jersey Supreme Court held that plaintiffs alleging defective road designs can use prior accidents as evidence at trial that the road had a “dangerous condition” as long as they meet two criteria:
We hold that prior accidents can be used to prove the existence of a dangerous condition on public property if the following threshold standard is satisfied: (1) the same or substantial similarity of circumstances between the prior accident and the one involved in the case on trial, and (2) the absence of other causes of the accident.
Were the prior fifteen — and likely more if you go back further — accidents “substantially similar,” and did they not have “other causes?” I bet that’s true for at least a few of them, though those “other causes” raises another major issue: driver error.
The driver of the school bus had both a stop sign and a blinking red light, while the driver of the dump truck had the right-of-way and a yellow warning light, so the driver of the school bus is presumptively at fault. And maybe he or she is; the initial burden of safely crossing an intersection falls on the person who entered into another driver’s right of way. Even if — especially if — the intersection has limited visibility, the driver shouldn’t cross until they can confirm it’s safe to do so. I assume the NTSB will borrow an identical school bus, drive it out to the intersection, and assess just how much of the oncoming traffic the school bus driver could see.
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Truth is, all car accidents are in some way preventable, and so they are all tragedies in the classic sense. That the victims were children makes it worse. That the accident was likely caused in part by a known, correctable flaw in the intersection itself makes it inexcusable.
https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/02/articles/attorney/automobile-accidents/chesterfield-nj-school-bus/oldId.20120222185025847