Court Opinion

ID: 9758805
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 23:47:08.560797+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:56.096390
License: Public Domain

Smith, J.,

dissenting:

I would affirm. I sat in Creaser v. Owens, 267 Md. 238, 297 A. 2d 235 (1972), and I am still of the opinion that it was *433correctly decided. To my mind, the essence of the reasoning behind the boulevard rule was stated by Judge Offutt for the Court in Greenfeld v. Hook, 177 Md. 116, 8 A. 2d 888 (1939), when he said:
“ [T]he safety of the travelling public demands that the rules defining the relative rights of travellers on through highways and on highways intersecting them be clear, unmistakable, and definite. If the duty of stopping and of yielding right of way is positive and inflexible, the inhibited traveller may know that he violates it at his risk, while the traveller on the favored highway may know that he may safely exercise the privilege of uninterrupted travel thereon, which the statute gives. If however, the relative rights of travellers on the two types of highway are held to depend upon nice calculations of speed, time, and distance, the rule would encourage recklessness and the privilege of uninterrupted travel would mean little more than the privilege of having a jury guess in the event of a collision whose guess was wrong. If the traveller on a stop street were required to slow down and bring his car into control at every intersection there would be no perceptible difference between such a street and any other street on which traffic is controlled by the general rules of the road.” Id. at 126. (Emphasis added.)
To have decided Creaser otherwise would have involved “nice calculations of speed, time, and distance.” On that score Judge Hammond for the Court in Harper v. Higgs, 225 Md. 24,169 A. 2d 661 (1961), echoed Greenfeld when he said:
“The relative rights of travellers on the two intersecting roads are not to be held to depend on nice calculations of speed, time and distance lest the obvious and essential purposes of the boulevard rule to accelerate the flow of traffic over the through highway at the permitted speed, without interruption, be frustrated. The favored driver has *434a right to assume the unfavored driver will stop and yield the right of passage and therefore, in most instances, even though the favored driver does not see the unfavored car he will not be guilty of negligence proximately causing the accident for, if he had seen it he could, unless put on notice to the contrary, have assumed it would stop.” Id. at 31.
This is a different case. If the testimony of the unfavored driver is believed here, then there was no way he could see the approach of the favored vehicle since there was no moonlight or other illumination. I have done some walking at night in unilluminated areas when there was no moonlight. I assure my brethren of the majority that in such circumstances the oncoming favored vehicle just could not be seen by the unfavored driver prior to his entering the boulevard. This case then, unlike Creaser and similar boulevard cases, involves no nice calculation of time, speed, and distance. I think the jury should have been permitted to determine whether the favored driver concealed evidence of his presence on the highway by travelling without lights. If he did, then I am unable to comprehend how the unfavored driver could be guilty of negligence by entering a boulevard in an unilluminated area on a moonless night. The peculiar facts of this case should make it an exception to the boulevard rule.
Judge Levine authorizes me to say that he concurs in the views here expressed.