Court Opinion

ID: 9865220
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:27:28.211521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:37:56.300496
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Burke,
dissenting.
I think instruction No. 2 was right; that it conforms strictly to the decisions of this court; that the opinion *555herein is exactly contrary to that in Hicks v. Cramer ; that taken together they leave the law on a vital point unsettled; and that the result may be the destruction of life and property by the acts of persons conscientiously endeavoring to obey it. Hence I must dissent and state my reasons.
The city of Pueblo had an ordinance which read: “Of two or more vehicles approaching an intersection the one approaching from the right shall have the right of way.
“In the event one or more of two or more vehicles shall have. entered cm intersection, the one nearest the center of the intersection shall have the right of way.”
In Hicks v. Cramer, 87 Colo. 414, 288 Pac. 887, we said: “If any meaning can be construed into this scrambled verbiage it must constitute a license to race for the intersection with the right of way awarded as a prize, not to him who first reaches it, but to him who, at some mythical moment between the start of the flight and its disastrous culmination, shall be nearer the center of the intersection than his competitor. Either the second portion of this ordinance has no meaning or it contradicts the first. Hence it is superfluous or invalid.”
Paragraph g of section 1270, p. 498, C. L. 1921, here involved reads: “The operator of a vehicle shall yield the right of way at the intersection of their paths to a vehicle approaching from the right unless such vehicle approaching from the right is further from the point of the intersection of their paths than such first named vehicle.”
We have now held the italicized portion of the ordinance bad and the. italicized portion of the statute good. If the former “has no meaning or contradicts the first” the same must be true of the latter. The principal difference in their' language is in favor of the ordinance. There the right of way is tied to “the center of the intersection.” That at least is a fixed point. Prom the time it is sighted by the drivers they have a definite guide. *556In the statute the right of way is tied to “the point of the intersection of their paths.” This is a variable point, which may shift its position several times as the cars approach each other and can never be located definitely until they pass or collide. As each driver’ swerves, the guide post moves, the right of way apparently belonging now to one car, now to the other. Any moment the left hand driver gets an inch ahead of t'he right hand driver the law gives him the right of way. If he loses his “edge” his right of way is lost. Here is that very “license to race for the intersection” condemned in the Hicks case, but with the goal a mere wind-blown thistle.
Since said paragraph g of section 1270 has been repealed no harm might result from this decision, but for the fact that a paragraph of section 87, chapter 122, page 539, S. L. 1931, has been passed in lieu of it. This new statute again confuses the entire subject by giving the right of way to the vehicle which has first £ £ entered the intersection,” regardless of whether it comes from right or left. So the race is still on. Moreover, municipalities are probably free to govern the matter, within their boundaries, by ordinance; and if some of them, guided by the court’s opinion in this case, pass this statute as a city ordinance then the confusion, on a proposition on whose clarity human life depends, becomes doubly confounded.
I am authorized to say that Mr. Justice Campbell concurs herein.