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Price v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation11/24/2000
. Although a municipality generally has no duty to erect a particular traffic safety device, "the common law requires . . . that once the municipality takes action to install such devices, it must do so in a non-negligent manner." Jones v. Bountiful City Corp., 834 P.2d 556, 560 (Utah Ct. App. 1992).
Even assuming that the signs were improperly placed or reflectorized, Plaintiffs offer no credible evidence that either condition caused the accident. Each witness at the accident stated that they knew they were approaching a railroad crossing. Both the first and second car came to a stop where the stop sign and crossbucks marked the railroad crossing. Thus, Plaintiffs offer no evidence that the signs did an inadequate job of warning motorists to stop because they were at a railroad crossing. Plaintiffs thus preserve no genuine issue of material fact as to whether South Jordan's allegedly negligent installation or maintenance of the passive warning devices caused the accident. Summary judgment for South Jordan on this issue was therefore appropriate.
Accordingly, we conclude summary judgment for South Jordan on all claims against it was appropriate.
CONCLUSION
We conclude that the Railroad Defendants had no duty to upgrade the warning devices; that the Plaintiffs' excessive speed tort claim is preempted by federal law; that Amtrak did not have a duty to brake; that there is no genuine issue of material fact as to whether Amtrak sounded its horn in a timely manner; and that Plaintiffs have not shown, and there is no evidence in the record to suggest that sounding the emergency horn pattern would have prevented the accident.
As to defendant South Jordan, we conclude that the city exercised basic policy, evaluation, judgment, and expertise and acted under statutory authority. We also conclude that there is no genuine issue of material fact as to whether the city breached its duty to properly maintain the safety devices at the crossing.
Accordingly, we affirm.
Judith M. Billings, Judge
I CONCUR:
William A. Thorne, Jr., Judge
ORME, Judge (concurring in part, concurring in the result in part, and dissenting in part):
I concur in parts IA, IB, and ID of the main opinion, and I concur in the result reached in part IC, although I do not agree with all of the analysis in that section. I also concur in part IIB. With respect to part IIA, I respectfully dissent.
I am not prepared to hold, as a matter of law, that the municipality's failure to do anything to improve the safety at the crossing was the product of a careful policy judgment made in the course of discretionary decision-making. On the contrary, there are indications in the record that over the course of many years, UDOT called the unsafe condition of the crossing to South Jordan's attention, repeatedly beseeched it to do something, and offered to help plan and fund the improvements. Rather than responding with thoughtful analysis of why such improvements would not, on balance, be in the city's best interest, there are indications the city simply dropped the ball, essentially ignoring UDOT's expressed concerns and doing nothing. This does not appear to be a situation where the city actually came to grips with the problem and made a rational decision to leave the crossing as it was for reasons deemed sound by the municipality after a thoughtful inquiry.
I do not mean to suggest that, as a matter of law, the city did not have the protection offered by the discretionary function variant of the sovereign immunity doctrine. I mean only to say that the record in this regard is such t
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