For years I have heard stories about people who would, or wanted to, or a friend of someone’s neighbor’s cousin who installed anti-vehicular obstacles in the edges of his lawn to deter trespassing vehicles.
The obstacles are often described as a mostly-buried railroad rail, or a steel pile upended and filled with cement, or some other foot-high rigid object designed to damage the undercarriage of any vehicle whose owner is dumb enough or drunk enough to drive across the lawn, tear great patches out of the grass with his tires, use the lawn as a shortcut, etc.
I have never heard of such things actually being done or whether such things are legal. Anybody have any real information on if it’s really been tried, and on whether such things are even legal?
P.S. I do not have a lawn, nor do I plan to try this. I don’t even encourage people to try this (because there’d be little worse than having a drunk with a broken car on your lawn and he has no place to go and no way to get there).
My girlfriend’s grandparents apparently had a problem with the schoolbus driver cutting through part of their yard, messing up the grass. Her grandpa put a log on cinder blocks to preven that.
As for the legality? I’m not a lawyer, but my guess would be that it’s your yard, you can put whatever you please there (barring neighboorhood association regulations etc.). If someone happens to be dumb enough to drive over it, it’s their fault.
How about an obvious obstacle - a fence of some kind, a decorative line of rocks or bushes? I don’t see why anyone would want to hide obstacles. Of course, if you did, there’s always a ha-ha, not to be confused with a hoo-ha.
In the county where a grew up, one of the old country north to south routes became problematic to homeowners when meatheads would trash their lawns and occasionally strike houses. Several of those homeowners took advantage of proximity to stone quarries and had stones located along the periphery of their lawns (stones the size of a VW Beetle). The next meathead who struck them sued and won from what I remember.
Locally, I’ve seen people use larger sized stones as yard edgers for this same purpose. I’ve even seen them painted white. The placement of them was clearly to prevent people from driving past the road edge onto their lawns.
As for the legality, I think it depends on the local codes and ordinances.
I used to live in a town that had one street which had a sudden hairpin turn appear out of nowhere (it wasn’t even marked by a sign), directly in front of this guy’s house. He’d put up some cement filled pipes with reflectors on them to deter people from accidentally driving through his yard. So you can do it (since it’s been there for close to two decades now).
Legally, however, you’d be in a mess if your obstacles killed someone, since there’d be a chance that you’d be sued.
Thanks for the responses so far, even if there isn’t a clear consensus.
Again, I do not actually have a lawn, so I do not plan to consult an attorney about this. A co-worker was talking about problems he’d had with delinquent drivers and told me his proposed solution — one I’d heard often — and I decided I’d see if anybody had really done it and what happened when their defensive barriers were actually put to use.
Rocks I could see, personally; our housing development uses them so people don’t bypass the speed bump by driving on the grass. But rocks are things which might naturally occur in a landscape arrangement, and a six-foot steel pipe filled with concrete and buried 80% underground and hidden in a shrub, well, that’s something else entirely.
Doubtful a consensus will be reached. Yes, you can protect your property and person with a stone barrier, and yes you will likely be sued if a meathead hits it. Call it the American way.
I would suspect that courts would look more kindly upon visible obstacles placed to prevent people from driving on the lawn than on hidden ones placed to exact retribution if they do.
While I wish I could agree with you, what I’ve read in the paper was tantamount to saying that you have to let people hit your homes and trash your lawns, which struck me as a trampling of the homeowner rights. Those who placed large stones to protect their dwellings were found guilty of creating a hazard. Then again, I’m in PA, where common sense is negotiable.
Not surprised, unfortunately - which is why I only said that I thought the courts would be less upset over visible hazards than hidden ones, rather than not upset.
Visible hazards might arguably be there for another purpose and can be seen and avoided, hopefully. They’re supposed to be a deterrent - people see them and think, “Oh, I’d better not try to drive over his lawn.” A pipe buried in the bushes is obviously only there to, well, be a hazard. Drivers can’t try to avoid them if they’re forced onto the lawn by an accident or something, and they’re really more a form of retribution than a deterrent.
So I suppose my point is that on the courts’ Official Badness Scale, (it’s a secret, they don’t let the public see it ) visible hazards < hidden hazards, though visible hazards may be nonzero.
And what if your house “killed” someone? I mean, what if you had no obstacles, and they struck your house, and died. What’s the difference? What if they just got “whiplash,” and sued you all the same? What if you had a concrete outhouse, and they struck it and died?
One can always be sued. Someone can you sue you for chewing gum in their presence. The question is how far it will go, and how much it will cost you to put it to rest.
Generally, if you get sued and lose, it’s because a jury of your peers felt you were at fault. If you know people drive over your lawn, and set up a hazard that isn’t readily visible, a jury may think you were being reckless. For (an extreme) example, schoolkids use your vacant lot as a passthru to the old folks home, where they read stories to blind old ladies. You set up a few bear traps in their path to discourage them. Much better to install a fence with a “No Trespassing” sign.
I can’t say how danceswithcats homeowners wound up losing, though. You would think giant boulders would be more than visible enough to say that the dumbass driver just didn’t watch where he was going.
Modern road design includes the expectation that some cars will drift out of the lanes some times. It’s a statistical certainty, the only question is exactly when and exactly where. As a result, we have road shoulders without obstacles, road sign & traffic light posts that are meant to break easily, crushable barrells ahead of abutments, etc. These things don’t reduce accidents, but they do reduice the severity of any given accident.
On a country road with no shoulders, where your lawn runs right up to the edge of the pavement we have a problem. In modern road design terms, the first 10-15 feet of your lawn IS the drift shoulder. In the my-home-is-my-castle-goddammit world of many ruralial homeowners, touching the first blade of grass off the asphalt is grounds for shootin’. Hence the dilemma.
A homeowner who built a wall of boulders within inches of the edge of the the asphalt may have been within his basic property rights, but I’d bet the local roads dept in many jurisdictions could find a statute which gives them an easement prohibiting such a construction.
At the same time, that wall of boulders set 10-15 feet back from the pavement would probably be legal.
As to sue-able, anybody can sue anybody for anything. Assuming the homeowner hasn’t violated a statue, thereby all-but-handing a win to the plaintiff, the issue becomes one of foreseeable harm.
As between protecting one person’s lawn and another person’s body, I can see a lot of juries saying screw the lawn, at least in an accident. Foiling a malicioius mischief incident might go the other way, depending on how badly how many inoocents got injured.
I think generally the town has rights to the first couple of feet of property along the road (in case they need to install pipes, etc.), so you have to put the obstacles back a few feet. (This is just what my parents told me when I was young, not hard and fast info.)
Er, are there any areas where the homeowner actually owns the property immediately fronting the road? I live in a rural area on a state road, and the 15 or so feet between the road and my property are a state right-of-way. I’m responsible for maintaining my driveway culvert (there’s a drainage ditch along the road), but the state does everything else, including spraying herbicide along the road and mowing it occaisonally.
I’d thought that pretty much everywhere else was similiar–there was a public right-of-way along public roads…
And of course there’s also easements on the frontage, but none that would prohibit a fence, barrier, or other landscaping item AFAIK…
As far as zoning laws go, you can create such a barrier as long as it doesn’t result int he removal of any required parking spaces for your home. In some communities with very strict zoning laws, there could be some problems if the barrier is visually intrusive. I can’t speak for deed restrictions and covenants that may apply to your property, or other applicable laws.
Not exactly the same… they fall under something known as “Attractive nusance”… not sure exactly what all that means, as IANAL, but the wife is a paralegal, and has told me a few things about it.
It is your responsibility to restrict access to items that may be attractive to people who may not be able to make the best decisions on their own.
As for the barrier issues, it depends on the locality in which you live, and the laws regulating the setbacks, and road easments, as mentioned above.
People (not you in particular) seem to be confusing right-of-ways and easements.
A right-of-way is a government (state, county, city, etc.) owned area immediately adjacent to the roadway. In some situations, homeowners are responsible for maintaining it even though they don’t actually own it.
An easement is an area that you own that you’ve agreed to let someone else use for a specific purpose (i.e., maintain a utility, drive across to access their land, drain to, etc.)
) visible hazards < hidden hazards, though visible hazards may be nonzero.