Our personal injury attorney did not participate in the case described in this article.
By Seattle Personal Injury Lawyer Travis Scott Eller
Last month Division One of the Washington Court of Appeals revered the trial court’s dismissal of a wrongful death claim against the city of Seattle.[1]
On a rainy evening in February 2007 the injury victim was struck by a car driven at the intersection of South Jackson Street and 10th Avenue South in Seattle’s International District. The pedestrian suffered a severe brain injury and spent two years in a coma before dying.
He had been in a marked crosswalk at a five-lane arterial. There were no stoplights, stop signs, or pedestrian signals at the intersection. There were stoplights and pedestrian signals on South Jackson Street at the intersections both preceding and following 10th Avenue South (8th Avenue South and 12th Avenue South).
The 10th Avenue South intersection contained only pole mounted signs at the curbs warning that there was a crosswalk and an overhead “Crosswalk” sign with a flashing light suspended above the street.
The representative for the estate brought a claim of negligence against the driver and a negligence action against the city, claiming that it failed to maintain the crosswalk in a reasonably safe condition for ordinary travel.
A municipality has a duty to all travelers to maintain its roadways in conditions that are safe for ordinary travel. Although relevant to the determination of whether a municipality has breached its duty, evidence that a particular physical defect in a roadway rendered the roadway dangerous or misleading or evidence that a municipality was in violation of a law concerning roadway safety measures are not essential to a claim that a municipality breached the duty of care owed to travelers on its roadways. A trier of fact may conclude that a municipality breached its duty of care based on the totality of the circumstances established by the evidence. Xiao Ping Chen adduced several pieces of evidence raising a genuine issue as to whether the city of Seattle failed to maintain in a reasonably safe condition the crosswalk in which her now-deceased husband, Run Sen Liu, was struck by an oncoming car.
The accident was not the first serious accident that occurred in the crosswalk. As early as 1992, numerous residents from the surrounding neighborhood had petitioned the city to install stoplights at the intersection because of difficulties they had experienced while trying to cross the street.
In 1999, the city installed a pedestrian island in the center turn lane to provide a refuge at the midway point for pedestrians as they made their way across all five lanes. The city has no record of pedestrian–motor vehicle accidents reported during the time the island was in place. However, at the request of a nearby business, the city removed the island in 2002. Records prepared by city employees indicate that in the five-year period after the island was removed there were at least eight other pedestrian–motor vehicle accidents. One of these accidents in the same crosswalk also resulted in the pedestrian’s death.
In addition, Chen submitted the declarations of two engineering expert witnesses. Each of these witnesses concluded that the crosswalk did not adhere to sound engineering principles and posed a danger to pedestrians because it did not provide for adequate crossing “gaps”, i.e. a break in the flow of traffic sufficiently long to allow a pedestrian to cross from one side of the street to the other without having to stop for oncoming cars
The Court of Appeals ruled this was enough evidence to create material issues of fact for a jury, and therefore summary judgment in favor of the City was inappropriate.
[1] Chen v. Seattle, No. 62838-1-I (2009).