Liability and CSS

This section provides an overview of CSS. What it is and how it can help to shape transportation projects around the country. Feel free to browse through the topics below or search for a particular page by entering a keyword in the search box below or clicking on "Advanced Search."

Compromising safety, failure to use professional judgment, and similar issues that carry professional liability and that could encourage lawsuits have been constant concerns and companions to all discussions of Context Sensitive Solutions. Yet liability appears to be a manageable issue. Most legal experts agree that context-sensitive solutions will not cause the engineer problems as long as they are well reasoned and comprehensively documented.

Excerpt

Tort Liability, Design Exceptions, and Risk Management and Overview of Tort Issues
In tort liability, agencies are faced with defending their actions such as design decisions in the face of lawsuits stemming from traffic crashes. Six principle issues must be resolved in court. more...

from NCHRP Report 480: A Guide to Best Practices for Achieving Context Sensitive Solutions

Excerpt

Tort Liability
Tort liability: definition and procedures according to AASHTO Green Book, federal highway and state regulations. Impact of tort liability procedures on innovation. more...

from Flexibility in Highway Design

Article / Paper / Report

Context-Sensitive Design: Will the Vision Overcome Liability Concerns?
[CSS/CSD] "is a process that results in a transportation project reflecting community consensus on purpose and need, with project features addressing equally safety, mobility, and preservation of scenic, aesthetic, historic, and environmental resources. It involves policy judgments in the balancing of competing interests. "There has continually surfaced a nagging concern, even fear, that increased exposure to tort liability would result should design standards or guidelines be "flexed" because it would mean compromising safety. This lecture addresses this liability concern together with the challenge of balancing safety with other considerations in the design process."

-- Transportation Research Board (TRB)

Discussion:

No comments yet.

Post a comment »

"Engineers need the ability to explain their choices... and CSD and Flexibility provide them the tools to say: 'We're not blindly following generally accepted Green Book design criteria. We have considered those criteria and all these other factors.' If you're thinking about the qualitative, the quantitative and thinking about the context, then you've considered much more than you would by blindly sticking to Green Book guidelines."

-- Jay Smith
Transportation Research Board (TRB)

"If a highway department documents that it considered AASHTO guidelines and made a considered decision to depart from them in certain ways out of concern for pedestrian safety or other community needs, a potential plaintiff is unlikely to take a case very far."

-- Take Back Your Streets: How to Protect Communities from Asphalt and Traffic

"Don't be afraid to provide better solutions ... just be able to explain them."

-- Jay Smith

"Congress has established statutory requirements and public policy clearly demonstrating that safety, while a primary consideration in design, is not to be a paramount consideration; that safety...should be balanced with mobility, protection and enhancement of the natural environment, with preservation of community values... The CSD/CSS vision will overcome liability concerns, both in the short and in the long term."

-- Context-Sensitive Design: Will the Vision Overcome Liability Concerns?

CSS in Practice

Get Involved

Research CSS

ContextSensitiveSolutions.org

Liability and CSS

Discussion:

More Related Content: