Alexander v. Eldred

• Decision Date: 20 November 1984
• Parties: , 472 N.E.2d 996 Scott L. ALEXANDER, Respondent, v. Frank D. ELDRED et al., Respondents, and City of Ithaca, Appellant.
• Court: New York Court of Appeals Court of Appeals

Page 168

483 N.Y.S.2d 168

63 N.Y.2d 460, 472 N.E.2d 996

Scott L. ALEXANDER, Respondent, v. Frank D. ELDRED et al., Respondents, and City of Ithaca, Appellant.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Nov. 20, 1984.

Robert A. Small, Syracuse, for appellant

Paul K. Lange, Rochester, for Scott L. Alexander, respondent.

Nancy L. Pontius, Syracuse, for Frank D. Eldred and another, respondents.

OPINION OF THE COURT

COOKE, Chief Judge.

One who is injured in a traffic accident can recover against a municipality if it is shown that its failure to install a traffic control or warning device was negligent under the circumstances, that this omission was a contributing cause of the mishap, and that there was no reasonable basis for the municipality's inaction. As plaintiff here has satisfied his burden of establishing these factors, he is entitled to damages against defendant City of Ithaca.

On this appeal challenging the sufficiency of the evidence to support a verdict for plaintiff, as often recited, the testimony presented to the jury is viewed in the light most favorable to plaintiff (see Cohen v. Hallmark Cards, 45 N.Y.2d 493, 499, 410 N.Y.S.2d 282, 382 N.E.2d 1145; Flamer v. City of Yonkers, 309 N.Y. 114, 117, 127 N.E.2d 838). This court, therefore, is generally unconcerned with conflicting evidence unless it renders plaintiff's evidence incredible as a matter of law so as to remove any rational basis for the verdict (see Blum v. Fresh Grown Preserve Corp., 292 N.Y. 241, 54 N.E.2d 809).

Plaintiff was injured while riding his motorcycle on the evening of July 20, 1978, in the City of Ithaca when struck by a cab owned by defendant Terminal Taxi, Inc., and driven by defendant Frank D. Eldred. The accident occurred at the intersection of Stewart Avenue, a winding road, and Edgecliff Place, a private road with an extremely steep incline to Stewart Avenue. These conditions resulted in a limited line of sight for cars leaving Edgecliff Place, which was exacerbated by dense foliage on the roadside. There was no stop sign or other traffic control on Edgecliff Place, although there was a stop sign on Thurston Avenue, a City road almost directly opposite Edgecliff Place.

Plaintiff did not see the taxi until just before the collision. He testified that he saw the cab when it was about 10 to 15 feet down Edgecliff Place and moving toward Stewart Avenue at around 15 to 20 miles per hour. Plaintiff asserted that, without ever stopping, the taxi entered Stewart Avenue and struck plaintiff, throwing him some 30 feet to the other side of the road. Plaintiff suffered serious injuries to his right foot.

At trial, plaintiff presented an expert on highway safety who stated unequivocally that there should have been a stop sign on Edgecliff Place. He also testified that a "stop line" or "stop bar"--a white line painted on the pavement to indicate where a vehicle should stop--would have been helpful, but only in a limited fashion as the severity of the upgrade would have prevented a driver from being able to see it from very far down the hill.

The Traffic Engineer for the City of Ithaca testified that he was responsible for deciding whether traffic controls should be installed by the municipality. He admitted that traffic counts were completed at the intersection of Stewart and Thurston Avenues in 1960 and 1976, but he never saw the latter study until after the 1978 accident. The engineer also declared that he never considered putting a stop sign on Edgecliff Place because he believed that, as a private road, it was outside the City's jurisdiction.

The jury returned a verdict for plaintiff, finding him free of any contributory negligence. It found the City of Ithaca to be 30% liable and Terminal Taxi and Eldred to be 70% liable. The jury award of $85,000 was set aside, however, and the trial judge ordered a new hearing limited to the issue of damages unless plaintiff consented to a reduced judgment for $55,000, which he did not do.

All the parties appealed to the Appellate Division, 100 A.D.2d 666, 473 N.Y.S.2d 864. That court unanimously reinstated the jury's award of $85,000 for damages. Three justices also upheld the verdict against the City of Ithaca, but two justices would have reversed on this issue for differing reasons.

The City has appealed to this court, arguing three grounds why the verdict against it should be set aside. It claims that its decision whether to install a stop sign is not justiciable. Next, the City asserts that, by virtue of a local law, it could not be responsible for injuries caused by the absence of a stop sign because no prior written notice of the "defect" was given. Lastly, the City posits that, as a matter of law, the lack of a stop sign was not a proximate cause of the accident. As none of these are persuasive, we now affirm.

The City's first argument relies on the principle that courts generally will not substitute their judgment for governmental decisions on allocating public resources. In the field of traffic engineering, the modern lead case is Weiss v. Fote, 7 N.Y.2d 579, 200 N.Y.S.2d 409, 167 N.E.2d 63. That litigation concerned the "clearance time" programmed into traffic lights to allow all cars to travel through an intersection before cross-traffic received a green light to proceed. This court declined to "go behind the ordinary performance of planning functions by officials to whom those functions were entrusted" (id., at p. 584, 200 N.Y.S.2d 409, 167 N.E.2d 63). It was recognized then that planning decisions might be the result of conflicting expert decisions that required a choice to be made among one or the other (id., at p. 586, 200 N.Y.S.2d 409, 167 N.E.2d 63). "To accept a jury's verdict as to the reasonableness and safety of a plan of governmental service and prefer it over the judgment of the governmental body which originally considered and passed on the matter would be to obstruct normal governmental operations and to place in inexpert hands what the Legislature has seen fit to entrust to experts" (id., at pp. 585-586, 200 N.Y.S.2d 409, 167 N.E.2d 63). Absolute immunity was not granted to municipalities, however. "for injury arising out of the operation of a duly executed highway safety plan may only be predicated on proof that the plan either was evolved without adequate study or lacked reasonable basis" (id., at p. 589, 200 N.Y.S.2d 409, 167 N.E.2d 63).

In the present matter, plaintiff adduced evidence sufficient to establish both inadequate study and an unreasonable basis for the City's traffic plan at Edgecliff Place and Stewart Avenue. At the time of the accident, the City's Traffic Engineer had never seen a traffic count for that intersection that was less than 18 years old; he admittedly did not review a more recent study until after the accident. He also conceded that the conditions required one to stop on Edgecliff Place before proceeding onto Stewart Avenue and that the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control...