Court Opinion

ID: 9648196
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:08:42.471853+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:57.193742
License: Public Domain

Hammond, J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion, in which Marbury and Barnes, JJ., concurred.
The Court of Appeals properly has been zealous to uphold •the sanctity of the boulevard law to accomplish its fundamental purposes, although I have at times thought it over-zealous in extending the application of the law to situations it did not seem to me it was intended to apply, as in Shriner v. Mullhausen, 210 Md. 104.
The present case is another in which I think the decision *15reached by a majority of the Court required an unfortunate stretching of the boulevard rule to cover a situation not within its ambit.
Code (1957), Art. 66)4, § 233, provides in paragraph (a) that “the driver of a vehicle shall come to a full stop as required by this article at the entrance to a through highway and shall yield the right of way to other vehicles approaching on said through highway.” Paragraph (b) provides the same thing as to a driver who approaches a stop sign guarding a highway which is not a through highway. I take it York Road is in the latter category legally since it certainly is as a fact, being an ordinary main city street on which the free passage of automobiles is very frequently impeded by red traffic lights. However, whether paragraph (a) or paragraph (b) applies is immaterial since both—and the boulevard rule—are predicated on the fact that a vehicle is “approaching” on the favored highway. It is only to an approaching vehicle that the unfavored driver must yield. True, under the gloss the cases have put on the statute the yielding must last throughout the whole passage of the unfavored one across the favored road. Nevertheless, even under the statute as glossed, the duty to yield is only to a vehicle approaching when the unfavored one stops and enters.
In the present case, on his own testimony and that of an unbiased, independent witness, at the times the unfavored driver stopped at the stop sign and then entered York Road, no vehicle was approaching on York Road from either north or south. To the south two automobiles were at a complete standstill in lawful obedience to a traffic light which was red for York Road traffic. Since he entered the favored road when no vehicle was approaching, the unfavored driver violated no obligation under the boulevard law and was rightfully on the favored road. Merely because the traffic light turned a few seconds after he entered and the stopped vehicles then began to “approach” him, the potentially unfavored driver, lawfully where he was, did not come under a new obligation to, in some mysterious way, yield anew the right of way and get out of the path of a speeding driver who, alcoholically stimulated, paid him no heed and blindly crashed into him.
*16Green and Brown go to the outermost limits of rationality in applying the boulevard rule but they are distinguishable on the facts. In both, there was in actuality a vehicle approaching when the unfavored driver entered the favored highway and this put him under the full burden borne by an unfavored driver in such case. Here there was in actuality no vehicle approaching when the unfavored truck came into York Road at as favorable and safe an opportunity as one would be likely to get at any York Road intersection unguarded by a traffic light. To put the boulevard burden on him in such circumstances is, in my view, unreasonable and unwarranted by the law. I would affirm. Judge Marbury and Judge Barnes concur.