Court Opinion

ID: 9763108
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:36:42.62587+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:39.437829
License: Public Domain

FARRELL, Associate Judge,
concurring:
I agree with the majority that the trial judge should have entered judgment as a matter of law in favor of WMATA, that plaintiff Brooks was contributorily negligent as a matter of law, and that the District of Columbia is entitled to a new trial on both liability and damages. I write briefly only to state my understanding of why plaintiffs’ case against WMATA failed.
The issue is troublesome, for there was abundant evidence from which the jury could find that the WMATA bus driver was traveling negligently — even recklessly— well in excess of the speed limit down the busy thoroughfare of 18th Street. As one bus passenger described it:
We started going real fast, flying like I call it, going down — right there at 18th and South Dakota Avenue ... and then *179we taken up a little more speed going down there by Otis Street at the intersection there ... I said, “I want to get home, but I don't want to get home this fast.”
One eyewitness testified that the bus had not reduced speed before entering the intersection. Even after the collision, the bus did not come to a stop until it was 200 feet past the south curb of the intersection.
The court does not question this evidence of a gross deviation from the standard of ordinary care by the bus driver, but concludes that plaintiffs’ case against WMA-TA failed on the issue of causation — at least after WMATA’s expert Bruce Enz testified about the lack of causation. The essence of Enz’s opinion is contained in the following testimony:
-Well, the speed of the bus is not the controlling factor. I mean the bus was where it was regardless of its speed, whether it was going ten miles an hour or forty-five miles an hour. So whatever speed it was traveling, it was there in the center of the intersection, and there’s nothing that the operator of the bus could have done, unless the bus was traveling maybe five or ten miles an hour, but anything above that there’s really nothing the bus operator can do to avoid this accident.
* * * * * *
[The bus] was going a speed when the accident happened. We know that. If it was going faster than that speed, then the car would have struck it further to the rear of the bus. If it had been going somewhat slower than that speed the car would have struck it in front of the bus or in front of the side.
In essence Enz testified that, unless the bus driver had been traveling under ten miles per hour when he entered the intersection (the speed limit was twenty-five), he simply could not have avoided being struck somewhere by Ms. Brooks’s car. As the court points out, plaintiffs presented no contrary expert testimony that — again measured from the point when the bus driver entered the intersection — he still could have slowed down or taken other action to avoid the collision if he had been driving at a proper rate of speed. Hence the driver did not proximately cause an accident which, according to Enz’s uncon-tradicted testimony, he could not have avoided even by the exercise of due care.
Enz, however, as I understand his testimony, expressed an opinion only as to the ability of the bus to avoid the collision once it entered the intersection where the accident occurred. A legitimate question arises whether the excessive speed of the bus causally contributed to the accident in that, had the bus driver been traveling at a lesser speed down 18th Street and keeping a more cautious lookout, he might have had an expanded zone of opportunity in which to react to sighting Brooks’s car as it entered the intersection.
On the evidence presented, the jury could reasonably find that the bus had been traveling at a greatly excessive speed for at least the length of a city block or more. The jury could also fairly infer, in my view, that had the bus been going at or under the speed limit for that distance (as the weather conditions reasonably might require), it would not even have reached the intersection when Brooks’s car came through the stop sign — it would still have been further up 18th Street — and hence the collision would not have occurred. So far as I can discern, however, this notion of causation has been uniformly rejected by the courts. That is, the fact that the defendant’s negligence brought him to the place where he could not avoid the accident, so that “but for” the negligence there would have been no accident, is insufficient to establish proximate causation. As one court has stated addressing a claim of contributory negligence: “Generally, ... negligence which does no more than place the plaintiff at the place of the accident is not sufficient to bar recovery. Plaintiff’s negligence ... was ‘remote’ in law even though close in time.” Graft v. Crooker, 263 F.Supp. 941, 942 (D.Mont.1967); see Underwood v. Fultz, 331 P.2d 375, 379 (Okl.1958) (“The speed, therefore, considered by itself, may have been a condition of the accident, but it was quite removed in the chain of causa*180tion”); Harper, James, & Gray, The Law of Torts § 20.5, at 141 (2d ed. 1986).1 This same reasoning is implicit in the result and analysis in a decision binding on this panel, Gulf Oil Corp. v. Reed, 118 U.S.App.D.C. 212, 334 F.2d 960 (1964) (uncontradicted evidence showed that accident occurred the moment child stepped from behind concrete wall into path of speeding truck; no discussion of fact that lower speed might have brought truck to place at later time).
In short, the rule is that “[sjomething more must appear in order that it may be said that the speed of the [bus] contributed to the accident_” Underwood v. Fultz, 331 P.2d at 379. That “something more” must essentially amount to an expanded opportunity which the driver could have secured for himself at a lower speed to see the other vehicle approaching the intersection and take evasive action. See, e.g., Hobbs v. Boston & M.R.R., 184 A. 355, 356 (N.H.1936) (“Under a legal rate of speed the plaintiff would have been 50 feet from the crossing when the train passed over it. The train would have been directly ahead of him in his almost inescapable view”). In my judgment, the failure in plaintiffs’ case against WMATA is the total absence of evidence in this record that the bus driver, if traveling at a lower rate of speed, could have seen Ms. Brooks’s car from a vantage point farther up 18th Street. The unsolvable difficulty of proof plaintiffs faced is that this was essentially a ease of a blind intersection. No testimony by Officer Clark or anyone else permitted a rational inference that the bus driver could have seen a car entering the intersection at a right angle from farther up 18th Street, or before the point at which he in fact saw the car. Had there been such evidence, I am not convinced that plaintiffs would have needed expert testimony to establish an inference that a slower rate of speed by the bus would have enabled it to avoid the collision. See Davis v. Brooks Transp. Co., 186 F.Supp. 366, 369 (D.Del.1960) (where plaintiff’s car ran stop sign and struck the side of defendant’s truck, court ruled “it would be invading the province of a jury to hold that, as a matter of law, [defendant] was under no duty to have seen plaintiffs’ car and appreciated the danger sooner”). I am thus not persuaded that the gap in plaintiffs’ proof was ultimately the failure to adduce expert testimony. Rather, they simply presented no proof that a lower rate of speed and more cautious attention to the road and side streets ahead would have enabled the bus driver to see Brooks’s car early enough to avoid the collision. See Nesta v. Meyer, 100 N.J.Super. 434, 242 A.2d 386, 394-95 (App.Div.1968) (jury could find plaintiff contributorily negligent because it could have concluded that his speed while passing was related to his failure to observe defendant’s turn signal and decreased his ability to control his vehicle when defendant’s car moved to the left).
This seems on the one hand a harsh result because, under modern traffic conditions, one would expect that for a prudent bus driver, the negligence of someone like Brooks in entering the intersection without stopping would be foreseeable. But see Washington Metro. Area Transit Auth. v. Jones, 443 A.2d 45, 50 n. 5 (D.C.1982) (en banc) (“favored driver [under] no duty to anticipate that another vehicle would ignore the stop sign and proceed directly into the intersection”). We can reasonably expect bus drivers “to maintain a proper lookout and exercise reasonable care in entering an intersection,” id., especially when they know or should know the thoroughfare has blind intersections, Restatement *181(Second) of Torts § 289 comment f, illus. 4 (1965); and it is not enough for the driver to assert merely that he had the “right of way.” See, e.g., District of Columbia Transit System v. Harris, 284 A.2d 277 (D.C.1971). Still, if we are going to require proximate causation, as we must, then there must be some sense in which the bus driver’s speed or failure to keep a lookout can be said to have enhanced the risk that a car running a stop sign would collide with his vehicle. On the facts of this case, in which the bus driver could control the time of his arrival at the intersection but not the point at which he could see a car entering from the side street, his arrival at the exact moment of collision was legally fortuitous and his recklessness, except in the barest sense of “but for” causation, cannot be said to have contributed to the risk that Brooks and the children in her car would be injured.
I therefore reluctantly join the conclusion that WMATA’s liability cannot be sustained.

. These commentators suggest that the issue is more properly analyzed not as one of causation but as a question of the scope of the duty which the defendant owes the plaintiff:
[I]f [in a given hypothetical] defendant had been driving more slowly before the accident, he would not have been at the point of collision when the child was there, so that there would have been no accident. Does that establish causal relation between wrong and injury? Presumably not, but if not, that is because the prohibition against speed is not for the purpose of keeping people from being at a certain place at a certain time, but rather to prevent loss of control. Thus one is thrown back on the ... inquiry into the scope of duty and the purpose of the rule of conduct. ...”
Harper, James, & Gray, supra, § 20.5, at 141-42 n. 18.