Court Opinion

ID: 9684100
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 13:46:38.301132+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:52.760583
License: Public Domain

ROBERTSON, Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
This case takes us to the outer boundaries of causation. The facts are compelling; the injury cries out for compensation. The critical question, however, is whether these defendants’ failure to install a speed bump in the parking lot is a sufficient cause of the injuries sustained by Kimberly Ann Jackson to require defendants to compensate her. Because I do not believe that plaintiff has shown the necessary causal connection between the absence of the speed bump and the injuries sustained, I dissent.
The critical element in the trial of this case was the testimony of plaintiff’s expert, a consulting mechanical engineer. The expert testified that the speed of the bicycles at the time of impact was 16.4 miles per hour. Although there was no evidence as to how much a speed bump would have slowed the bicycles, he testified that a properly designed speed bump would have caused the bicycles to “become airborne” at speeds of greater than 10 miles per hour. He also testified that, assuming the bicycles had crossed the speed bump at 3 to 4 miles per hour, they could have accelerated to approximately 11 miles per hour before reaching the plaintiff’s path. I have no reason to doubt the expert’s testimony.
The expert testified that the purpose of a speed bump is to control the speed at which the bump can be crossed. However, the expert did not testify, and there is no other reason to believe, that a speed bump would have prevented these bicycles from riding down the parking lot. Therefore, it is a given fact that under the circumstances of this case, irrespective of whether a speed bump exists, the paths (expressed as lines) of the two pertinent actors would have crossed. The introduction of a speed bump would have had either of two different consequences: first, it could have changed the moment in time at which the bicycle’s path intersected that of the plaintiff, by reducing the bicycle’s speed at the location of the speed bump; second, it could have changed the location at which the plaintiff’s and the bicycle’s paths intersected, by requiring the bicycle to alter its angle of approach to the dirt path from the top of the drive.
In the first instance, the speed bump provides no more than a wrinkle in time, causing the bicycle to arrive at the inevitable intersection with Kimberly’s path at a slightly later time. It may be inferred that if this delay were significant enough, Kimberly would likely have passed beyond the intersection during this added moment. However, under such a scenario, the absence of a speed bump is no more a “cause” of the collision than is the failure of the boys, even for a moment, to delay their departure from the top of the hill, or the act of Kimberly’s mother in sending her to get her father at the particular instant she did. Any such factor with the capacity to cause a momentary change in the time sequence has an equivalent potential to prevent the accident, and is therefore equally “causative.” The absence of a speed bump simply combined with a wide universe of events (both those which happened and those which could have, but did not) to allow the forces set in motion by the boys and Kimberly’s mother to merge into tragedy.
Conversely, the causative significance of the speed bump must be viewed in the context of all those factors which, assuming the speed bump were in place, could *677have operated to offset the delay it caused, placing both actors back on the same collision course which actually occurred in the present case — in effect, an offsetting wrinkle in time. Therefore, I cannot agree that the absence of a speed bump was a “cause” of this accident under the first scenario.
In the second instance, the speed bump alters the intersection of Kimberly’s path and that of the bicycle’s. Again, however, the accident happens or fails to happen depending not on whether the speed bump is in place, but upon when Kimberly leaves the apartment, how quickly she walks, and when the boys depart the hill, and the angle and speed of the descent. The mere fact that this accident may have been avoided by a change in timing does not provide the necessary predicate for defendants’ causal responsibility in this accident.1
In determining causation, “[t]here is in truth little to guide us other than common sense.” Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99, 104 (1928) (Andrews, J. dissenting). Here, the speed bump does not provide enough effect, in terms of preventing the boys’ negligence, to render its absence a legally sufficient cause of the collision. Such a “cause” is too attenuated, too remote, to impose liability on these defendants.2
In an appropriate case, I would consider the adoption of the “substantial factor” standard for causation. However, such an opportunity does not arise in the present case, as the conduct of each putative wrongdoer, acting alone, would not have been sufficient to cause the accident. Prosser & Keeton on Torts, 266 (5th ed. 1984).
For the reasons stated, I would affirm the judgment n.o.v. entered in favor of defendants by the trial court.

. Even were the speed bump to produce a combined time and place alteration, which in all likelihood it would have produced, the fact remains that the paths of these actors would have crossed.

. As an additional point in this regard, were the situation inverted so that a speed bump actually had been placed in the driveway, plaintiff could well have argued that defendants were negligent in this respect. In such a case, the argument would be that the speed bump encouraged the boys to race across the bump in order to experience the exhilaration of being lofted into the air on their bicycles.