Way back when, in Driver’s Ed, I learned something that’s stuck with me: Every accident is preventable. By you. Got T-boned at an intersection? Should have looked more closely. Got rear-ended? Should’ve moved. Got run off the road by a semi with faulty breaks? Should’ve sped up or moved aside. Crashed due to icy conditions? In extremis, well, you shouldn’t have been out that day to begin with.
The line between empowerment and victim-blaming was somewhat blurred.
The more rational version of this is that accidents are always the fault of the people involved. Not necessarily the drivers, but the human beings there at the time who did the things which ended in the crack-up. Was the road potholed? Drivers are expected to deal with that, even the real axle-breakers. Was the road not plowed, or plowed incompetently? Again, that’s on you, member of the traveling public.
So, my question is, is that always the case? Is there any case where the courts will find the road was so incompetently built and/or maintained that accidents were primarily the fault of the jurisdiction responsible for the road?
Or will they just say, well, you shouldn’t have been on that road, now should you?
Depends entirely on the law of the jurisdiction where the accident happens, and on the duties the law places on the statutory authorities charged with maintaining the roads.
At a minimum, if the highway authority actually damages the road through the work it does, there are probably quite a few jurisdictions that would make the authority liable for losses suffered as a result of the damage they did to the road.
If the authority knows that the road is in a dangerous condition, but chooses to do nothing, some jurisdictions would allow someone who suffers loss as a result of the dangerous condition to recover damages.
If the authority simply fails to maintain the road as it should be maintained, there might be some jurisdictions that would impose liability on the authority for losses resulting. But I suspect not many.
Ultimately, this is a political choice. Do we want the costs resulting from having roads in poor physical condition to be born by motorists (and their insurers and, therefore, by motorists at large, rather than by the individual motorists who happen to have accidents)? Or do we want them to be born by the highway authority (and, therefore, by the taxpayers at large)? In a world in which virtually all motorists are taxpayers, and virtually all taxpayers are motorists, you can answer this question either way and it might not make a huge difference to the eventual spread of the financial burden of accidents.
Presumably, a poorly-maintained road is similar to an icy road in a winter storm – the driver is supposed to not drive ‘too fast for the road condition’. So the direct cause of the accident is the driver, who failed to slow down enough to avoid the poor pavement.
Also, the comment “and virtually all taxpayers are motorists” is way off the mark – there is a sizeable percentage of the population that is not motorists. Just at first thought, I can see young people under 16, many old people from about age 70 up, the blind, disabled people, sufferers from epilepsy, severe diabetis, etc.
OK, what about a poorly-designed road? Blind curves, city-maintained plants in inopportune locations, angle-in parking which blocks important sight-lines, etc. etc. etc. In short, turds which cannot be polished, and have a demonstrably higher accident rate due to that.
I understand the point about shifting costs, but I don’t see how it could be a wash: If two drivers get into an accident, and responsibility is divided 50:50, they’re on the hook for quite a lot of money as individuals. If responsibility is divided 5:5:90, with the jurisdiction eating the 90%, the cost is divided among a huge number of tax payers.
No cite, but ive been told the state of iowa got sued for poorly maintaining some roads in wintertime and had to pay damages. Now at the slightest hint of winter weather, the plows are out, at least on state highways…
Your question could be answered as either a legal question, or as a “causality” question. I can’t speak to the former, but the answer to the latter is absolutely yes. Government failure to properly design and maintain roads is an important factor in traffic casualties.
Road safety engineers consider crashes to be the result of the interactions among three variables: the driver, the vehicle, and the road conditions. Many crashes involve more than factor. Moreover, the severity of the crash is often determined by the quality of the road infrastructure. Barriers that absorb shock, designs that allow cars to run off the road without rolling over/hitting something, etc. - all of these can make the difference between a minor scratch and a fatality.
For evidence that improvements in road design and “furniture” (odd term, I know - but it means things like signage, guard rails, and the like) make a difference, one need only look to localities that have made a concerted effort to improve their roads. Vic Roads (responsible for roads in Victoria, Australia) is an example of an institution that has dramatically improved road safety as a result of attention to engineering. I don’t have the stats at hand, but I know that their roads have gone from among the worst, safety-wise, to among the very best in the world.
For a famous and extreme case of legal liability for accidents caused by faulty design and construction, see Boston’s Big Dig. There were a number of fatal accidents that led to lawsuits. One was for a slab of concrete that fell from the tunnel ceiling, killing one person and injuring another. The family sued the contractor that made the faulty epoxy that failed to hold up the ceiling, and the state filed manslaughter charges. Several people were seriously injured and killed by dangerously placed guard rails, again leading to wrongful death lawsuits. There was another set of cascading lawsuits between the state, contractors, and subcontractors.
I believe almost all of these cases were settled out of court for 7-9 figure sums with no admission of fault by the defendants.
Going back to more routine sorts of damage caused by poorly maintained roads, some municipalities are eventually liable for damage caused by potholes if they don’t repair them fast enough. Though even if the municipality is (or should be) liable, a lot of times they’ll reject your claim out of hand.
And all of a sudden a whole pile-up of good answers. Thanks, everyone; it looks like the basic factual question (governments have been successfully sued for not maintaining and/or building roads properly) has been answered in the affirmative, but by all means continue the thread. I hate “asked-and-answered” closures unless the thread is actually beginning to turn nasty.
It’s not a perfect correlation by any means, but there’s also a sizeable population that doesn’t pay taxes- such as most of those under 16. And while not everyone may drive, everyone does use the roads.
It’s a wash because 1) the jurisdiction is eating the costs of a number of accidents , not just yours, and 2)for every taxpayer/motorist who ends up better off because the jurisdiction eats the costs of his accident there’s another taxpayer/motorist who ends up worse off because his taxes are raised ( or funds are spent reimbursing for accidents rather than on other projects) but he wasn’t involved in an accident where the the jurisdiction was partially responsible. The *average *cost per motorist per year will probably be about the same either way - less than the person who is “on the hook for a lot of money” but more than the person who didn’t have any accidents.
The other point socially is that lawsuits are a very inefficient way to allocate resources.
Lots of money gets spent by all sides on the process. Many middlemen consume a lot of the value. Finally, the process is hit-and-miss enough that some very deserving cases go uncompensated and some undeserving cases get massively overcompensated.
A more mature approach would have everybody involved shouldering their responsibilities. Designing the overall a system so that’s the path of least resistance is, or ought to be, the goal of all enlightened citizens and governments.
Wasn’t there a story recently about a huge sinkhole swallowing a number of cars, somewhere in the US? One can debate how much fault the government had in that case, but it certainly wasn’t the fault of any of the drivers: Once the collapse started, there was nothing any of them could do about it, and before the collapse started, there was no indication available to any of them that that stretch of road might be best avoided.
There was a case about twenty years ago in the Supreme Court of Canada where a motorist sued the British Columbia highways department because of a rockfall onto the road, which caused an accident.
Highways said, “Well, what do you expect? it’s a road through mountains? Rocks fall.”
SCC said, “Yes, and knowing about that risk, what mitigation measures did you take to reduce the possibility of rockfalls that could hurt motorists?”
Highways: “ummm…”
Now, when you drive in BC, there’s netting attached to the rockfaces near roads that are likely to have rockfalls. The netting won’t stop rocks from falling, but is designed to reduce the impact and keep them away from the road. Still a possibility of being hit by rocks, but efforts have been made to reduce the likelihood.
sure, but when someone is killed because of a poorly designed or maintained road, the government usually wants to avoid taking responsibility. Then you need a lawsuit.
There are recognized standards for road design. The people in charge of roads know about them. When they negligently fail to follow the known standards, and someone gets hurt as a result, I’m okay with a lawsuit.
In the real world, these cases are tough to win. Juries blame the drivers most of the time, and many jurisdictions provide immunity to the government if the failure to maintain the safe road was due to insufficient budget (beyond their control). Here’s a summary
15 years ago the highways around metro Detroit were in horrible condition. I was nearly pitched off of my motorcycle when I hit a monster pothole that bottomed out my suspension and badly bent both rims. Two new rims + 2 new tires = $1400. Insurance took care of my damage, but only after a $500 deductible on my part. I dug around and found out that Michigan had a form you could fill out to request reimbursement for damages due to inadequate road maintenance. The catch was that the DOT had to have already known about the problem and not done anything in a reasonable amount of time. The state had not been informed about that specific pothole prior to my encountering it, so they denied my claim, but the important thing to note is that the mechanism for pointing a finger at the state and asking for compensation does indeed exist.
Governments often have immunity to lawsuits, so even if it IS their fault, you can’t collect.
AND it isn’t uncommon for governments to contract out a lot of the work they are responsible for, so the contractor may be held liable.
Until recently, I worked for a company that operated and maintained the water and sewer systems for a municipal government, and this was a big issue when we had to trench to repair a leak.
We could repair most leaks in a day or two, but it often took up to a week or more to get the paving contractor in to pave over the trench, and the road needed to be opened for traffic, so we’d lay temporary gravel over the trenched area, which might wash out with a heavy rain. Then we’d end up paying to repair a few cars.
As a result of a lot of bitching on my part about atrocious and confusing signage and road conditions, my wife (a lawyer) explained that there are two primary things mitigating a government body’s liability for these things.
First, they’re only really liable if they fail to “promptly” remedy whatever problem is causing the issue. If there’s a pothole, and it just opened up 4 days ago, and the city can’t get a crew there because of weather, supply issues, etc… you’re SOL. If it’s like a year later, then maybe you have some ammunition.
Second, and this is the big one, governmental bodies have what’s called “sovereign immunity”, which basically means that they can’t be sued unless they consent to it, i.e. they admit some degree of culpability. Which they’re not likely to do for a pothole or some other thing like that.
I suppose it would be incentive, if the average Joe knew that a formal avenue for reimbursement existed. I suspect most people are completely unaware of it.