That’s one claim in a lawsuit by the government of Arlington, Virginia against such a plan. The chair of the county board says the issue never came up in county discussions and “only arose [in the lawsuit] because the environmental review includes socioeconomic impact”. [MyFoxDC via Below the Beltway]
Posts Tagged ‘roads and streets’
“It is now illegal in Louisiana to taunt someone who is riding a bicycle”
Lowering the Bar takes note of another little advance for criminalization.
Suicide barriers on scenic California bridge
Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit to block construction. [Santa Barbara Daily Sound via Popehat]
July 23 roundup
- San Jose man says PlayStation online game network is public forum and sues Sony pro se for kicking him off it [Popehat] More: Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch.
- “Teacher lets kids climb hill, cops come calling” [Santa Barbara, Calif.; Free Range Kids]
- Tip for journalists covering trials: stalk the rest rooms [Genova]
- Lake Erie villages turn off street lights in summer to avoid attracting mayflies, town now sued over driver-jogger collision [Columbus Dispatch]
- Some lawyers anticipate “astronomical” municipal liability from West Portal train collision in San Francisco [SF Weekly]
- Radical notion: before filing lawsuit charging consumer fraud, maybe plaintiff should notify merchant and ask to have problem fixed [New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Watch]
- No jurisdiction: Eleventh Circuit overturns contempt finding against Scruggs in Rigsby case [Freeland]
- Successful trial lawyer campaign against arbitration is throwing credit card business into turmoil [ABA Journal, Wood @ Point of Law, Ambrogi/Legal Blog Watch (conflict of interests at one large arbitration supplier)]
Texting teen falls into open manhole
Now the parents of the 15-year-old, from Staten Island, N.Y., are planning a lawsuit. [Gothamist, Staten Island Advance] More: Matthew Heller, OnPoint News, TechDirt. Carter Wood is reminded of Hans Guck-in-die-Luft from Struwwelpeter. And Bruce Carton wonders whether warnings on cellphones are coming (“do not text while walking, could lead you to fall in manhole…”).
Motorcyclist crashes into wild pigs on road
And many happy returns to California taxpayers for the $8.6 million, courtesy of a Monterey County jury. Lowering the Bar: “I can’t remember how many times I have tried to warn people that bad things were going to happen if we didn’t tame our state’s boars and train them to be alert for drunk drivers when crossing the street. Why don’t people listen?”
Annals of environmental justice
Or what passes by that name: lawyers for the ACLU say the design of a Milwaukee highway project is unfair to minorities (Rick Esenberg, Prawfsblawg; complaint, PDF, at WisPolitics.com).
“Pothole pay-outs cost more than fixing them”
The liberalization of contingency fees in England has brought about a marked rise in pothole claims against local government authorities; it’s not clear whether that necessarily translates into an improvement in the target value of actual road safety. “Officials complained that a compensation culture has been created by no-win, no-fee lawyers and said legislation needed tightening to prevent ‘spurious’ claims.” (Independent (U.K.), Oct. 8).
College should have warned student not to run on street
From the “Not About the Money” files; reader D.W. writes:
Seguin is about 35 miles east of downtown San Antonio. The deceased student/athlete was an adult, chose to run on a busy street despite ample on-campus facilities, and chose to run with traffic instead of facing it. The story doesn’t say, but the street in question is actually US90, possibly the heaviest traveled street in town aside from I-10. So naturally it’s the university’s fault she was struck and killed. Oh well, it could have been worse, at least they were only held 5% responsible.
(Ron Maloney, “Jury finds TLU partially responsible”, Seguin (Texas) Gazette-Enterprise, Aug. 29; more background here and here).
City streets not safe to drive 100-120 mph on
Amanda Laabs was a passenger in a Porsche Carrera that was being driven at somewhere between 100 and 120 mph in Victorville, Calif., suggesting that the occupants were in quite a hurry to get to their destination, an In-N-Out Burger. Her driver did manage to slow down to an impact speed of 72 mph at the intersection at which he collided with the Mitsubishi of innocent driver Dorothy Specter. Have you spotted the allegedly responsible party yet? Yes, the city of Victorville, for designing the road with “inadequate sight distance and lack of warning signs, devices and signals”, so that Specter couldn’t see the Porsche coming, all that aside from the light pole that was too easy to run into. After pages of tortuous analysis, made more tortuous by the division of authority over the road between the city of Victorville and the County of San Bernardino, an appeals court upheld a trial court’s disposal of the case on summary judgment, but also declined the city’s request for fees, saying the city had not shown that an attorney would have assessed the claim as objectively unreasonable. (Laabs v. City of Victorville, courtesy Law.com; Civil Justice Association of California press release).
Update: The following was received April 14, 2010 from a commenter identifying herself as Amanda Laabs: “…You commented and had to make your business. If you had read it correctly we were not on our way to In-n- Out, we were turned around going the opposite direction for your information. I lost both of my legs in that accident and a good friend who was sitting behind me. This is a horrible site that allows people to be rude and insensitive to the people and family who were really hurt.”