Sheehan v. City of New York

On a clear morning on East 138th Street in Bronx County, an eastbound bus operated by appellant Timothy Sheehan and owned by appellant Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA) was brought to a gradual stop at the street’s intersection with Jackson Avenue for the purpose of permitting any passengers who wished to do so to board or alight. While so stopped, the bus was struck from the rear by a sanitation truck operated by respondent Anthony Loria and owned by respondent the City of New York (City). Sheehan and respondent Walter Novak, Jr., a passenger in the bus, were injured.

The appeals here are in two separate personal injury actions which were tried together before a jury, one brought by Sheehan against the City and Loria, the other by Novak against the owners and operators of both vehicles.

Before the trial court charged the jury, it denied motions for dismissal of Novak’s case against MABSTOA and Sheehan and for a directed verdict in favor of Sheehan, each urging a failure of proof to establish either negligence in the operation of the bus or legally cognizable cause between its manner of operation and its collision with the truck. During its charge, the court recited section 122 of the New York City Traffic Regulations, which reads: "Bus stops. No driver of a bus shall pick up or discharge passengers on any street except at bus stops designated by the Commissioner of Traffic” in writing. Over exception, it then responded to a request that it "charge that the mere stopping of the bus in the traffic lane is in and of itself not negligence” in the following language: "I so charge. You take into consideration all the other facts and circumstances in the evidence.”

At the conclusion of its deliberations, the jury brought in a verdict in the amount of $50,000 against both drivers and owners in Novak’s case, apportioning the negligence between them under Dole v Dow Chem. Co. ( 30 NY2d 143 ) and,

In the case before us, we are not faced with the kind of issues of fact, heavily disputed and imbued with shadings and inferences, which so often characterize a negligence suit. This case is singularly appropriate for the exercise of the trial court’s screening function since there is so little factual controversy. Both sides agree that the truck struck the bus in the rear, that the bus had been within the truck driver’s uninterrupted view continually for a long distance before the impact and long after the signal of its intended stop had been transmitted to the truck, that it at no time had left the truck’s path, that its stop was engineered slowly so that no element of surprise was involved and that it was the failure of its brakes which propelled the truck into the bus.

The only factual dispute was as to whether other automobiles then occupied the designated bus stop, a matter which here is irrelevant to the determination of proximate cause. Assuming the designated stop was available for the bus’s use, if it had in fact stopped there and, having discharged or boarded its passengers, pulled back into the traveling lane before proceeding across the intersection, it would, properly, have been in exactly the same position at which it found itself when it was hit. Or, if observing no prospective passengers in the stop and having none who wished to alight at that corner, the bus driver had decided not to go through the proper practice of pulling in and out of the stop, but, preparatory to crossing, had merely stopped in the traveling lane at the corner before doing so, his bus would have been in precisely the same position. In short, the bus at the time of the accident appears merely to have been at one point in the street where it had a right to be (the traveling lane) rather than at another point in the street where it had a right to be (the bus stop). The result of the sanitation truck’s brake failure would have been no different, if, perchance, a pedestrian or a vehicle other than the bus had been using the street at that point at

Unlike the situation in O’Neill v City of Port Jervis ( 253 NY 423 ), where defendant’s active obstruction of a street compelled the injured party to detour to a place of danger, or that in Commisso v Meeker ( 8 NY2d 109 ), where the partial blocking of a two-lane noncity highway took place at an hour of the night when heavy traffic was to be expected, no act of the bus in the case before us caused the sanitation truck to be any place other than where it was. We conclude, therefore, as a matter of law, that the conceded negligence of the sanitation truck was the sole proximate cause of the injuries and that the continued presence of the bus in the traveling lane at the time it was struck merely furnished the condition or occasion for the occurrence of the event rather than one of its causes (cf. Rivera v City of New York, 11 NY2d 856 ; Ryan v New York Cent. R. R. Co., 35 NY 210 ; Klein v Herlim Realty Corp., 184 Misc 852 [Botein, J.], affd 269 App Div 934 ). This is especially so in the light of the fact that the absence or presence of prima facie proof of proximate cause was not dependent on pure logic alone but was rather to be determined by the trial court "upon mixed considerations of logic, common sense, justice, policy and precedent” (Pagan v Goldberger, 51 AD2d 508 , 510 [Hopkins, J.], quoting Prosser, Torts [4th ed], § 42, p 249, which in turn quotes 1 Street, Foundations of Legal Liability, p 110).

In addition, it appears quite clear that, if the bus’s stop in the traveled lane could, on any view of the circumstances here, be regarded as a proximate cause of the accident, the failure of the truck’s brakes might have been an independent, supervening cause. Though, where either of two independent acts of negligence may be found to be concurring, that is, direct causes of an accident, the perpetrator of either or both may be found responsible for the whole harm incurred (Dunham v Village of Canisteo, 303 NY 498 , 504; Slater v Mersereau, 64 NY 138 ; see, also, Prosser, Joint Torts and Several Liability, 25 Cal L Rev 413 , 435-439; 1 Harper and James, Torts, §§ 10.1-10.2), when such an intervening cause "interrupts the natural sequence of events, turns aside their course, prevents the natural and probable result of the original act or omission, and produces a different result that could not have been reasonably anticipated,” it will prevent a recovery on account of the act or omission of the original wrongdoer (1