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Criteria for Negligent Highway Design Explained—Qualified Immunity Is Part of the Analysis of Liability

The Third Department explained the analytical criteria associated with allegations of negligent highway design, including qualified immunity. Here it was alleged that a rock outcropping obscured on-coming traffic and the measures taken by the state to reduce the hazard were inadequate.  The case was dismissed because the plaintiff was unable to demonstrate the highway-design problems constituted the proximate cause of the collision:

“[I]n the field of traffic design engineering, [defendant] is accorded a qualified immunity from liability arising out of a highway planning decision. . . . Under this doctrine of qualified immunity, a governmental body may be held liable when its study of a traffic condition is plainly inadequate or there is no reasonable basis for its traffic plan. Once [defendant] is made aware of a dangerous traffic condition it must undertake reasonable study thereof with an eye toward alleviating the danger” … . If defendant’s response to an identified hazard is unreasonably delayed, defendant must demonstrate either that the delay “was necessary in order to study and formulate a reasonable safety plan, that the delay was itself part of a considered plan of action taken on the advice of experts, or that the delay stemmed from a legitimate ordering of priorities with other projects based on the availability of funding” … .

Although the parties continue to debate whether, consistent with the foregoing principles, defendant’s response to the acknowledged hazard was adequate and, further, whether the documented delay in cutting back the offending outcropping was unreasonable, these issues need not detain us. Assuming, without deciding, that defendant’s efforts in this regard indeed were inadequate and/or unreasonably delayed, thereby establishing that defendant was negligent, claimant failed to demonstrate that such negligence was the proximate cause of decedent’s accident. Graff v State of New York, 2015 NY Slip Op 01847, 3rd Dept 3-5-15

 

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