Keep the Rear Lights Burning!
Page 70
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Although Vehicles Must Have Two Rear. Lights By as from October 1, a Defence is Still Possible if Our Legal Adviser They Become Extinguished ON October 1 the provision of Section 2 of the Road Transport Lighting Act, 1953, becomes fully operative, the principal one being that as from that date vehicles must display two red lamps to the rear. These must be kept "properly trimmed, lighted and in
a clean and efficient .condition."
The efficiency or otherwise of rear lights can play an important part in road safety, and in view of the volume of night traffic now on the highways—and of its speed —the question of civil liability which arises through one vehicle running into the back of another is topical. A recent action for damages may now be seen in perspective, as contributing a notable clarification to a somewhat obscure subject.
The question of liability when one vehicle runs into the back of another unlighted one has concerned the courts for many years. At one time, the court's attitude was entirely against the driver of the following vehicle. Thus in 1933 Lord Justice Scrutton put the current view succinctly when he said that a person must drive at night so that he can pull up within the limits of his vision, and that if he collided with something, either he was driving too fast or he was not keeping a proper look-out.
No Certainty in Law
But, as in a later case the same year, an overtaking motorist who ran into an unlighted vehicle was held entitled to recover; it did not really need the combined wisdom of the Court of Appeal in another decision in 1934 to pronounce that on the whole these cases did not lay down any general principle of law, and that it all depended on the particular facts of each case—a " pronunciamento " which, if inevitable, neither assisted in the development of any certainty in the law, nor went beyond what most motorists of common sense would have said.
The matter was taken a little further in 1946—so far as the changing climate of public opinion showed—when it was emphatically stated by the Court of Appeal that there is no rule of law that a driver must drive within the limits of his vision.
From the point of view of the driver of the unlighted vehicle, his liability for any accident will depend upon whether he has been negligent or not. In this connection it is important to remember that there is advice in the Highway Code about seeing that one's side and tail lamps are alight. If it could be shown that a driver started a journey with a defective rear light, that would be the clearest evidence of negligence, but not unnaturally such a fact is hard to establish, for the fact 'of the lights being in working order or not would be something wholly within the driver's knowledge (or possibility of knowledge).
But bulbs and connections fail or lights become obscured during the course of a journey. Does any liability attach to a driver who keeps going in blissful ignorance of what has happened at the rear of his vehicle? The Highway Code tells us to see that our tail light is alight—how often must we do that, bearing in mind that by Section 45(4) of the Road Traffic Act, 1930, "a failure on the part of any person to observe any provision of the Highway Code may in any civil proceedings be relied upon by any party to the proceedings as tending to establish any liability which is in question "?
The question was directly in issue in Sieghart v. British Transport Commission decided at Chester Assizes on February 17. [Publication of The Commercial Motor had been suspended at that time by the London printing dispute.] The facts were that on a dark and rainy night the defendant's driver stopped his lorry on a straight length of road with visibility of not less than 20-30 yd. and parked it properly on his near side. Having assured himselfthat no traffic was approaching from either direction, he got out to adjust his windscreen wiper, and he was in the act of so doing when his lorry was struck from behind by the plaintiff's car. The evidence showed that at the time of the accident the lorry's rear light was not working although the driver was unaware of the fact, and that the lorry had been checked at the defendants' depot some miles back on the road.
The plaintiff and his wife claimed damages for their personal injuries, alleging negligence and nuisance. (In parenthesis, it may be pointed out that while a stationary and unlighted lorry on a highway is undoubtedly a
• nuisance in law, it is necessary for a plaintiff to prove negligence just as in an action of negligence—at least in these sort of cases.)
Mr. Justice Finnemore gave judgment for the defendants, holding that the statement in the Highway Code about seeing that one's side and tail lamps are alight does not require a driver stopping for a few minutes who has no regson to suspect that his lamps are not all right, to examine the rear lamps.
Crew Left the Vehicle This case may be contrasted usefully with that of Ware v. Garston Haulage Co. (1944), where a lorry with a trailer broke down at night. The men in charge of it went off to get hurricane lamps from the police, and when they left the vehicles the tail lamp was burning. Some 20-30 minutes later, while they were still away, the light was out and a motorcyclist ran into the trailer. There the men were held to be negligent because when leaving the vehicles on a busy highway at night they had not made sure that the light would continue to burn. This seems a harsh decision, but is supportable on the ground that extra precautions must be called for when leaving a vehicle unattended.
One cannot, unfortunately, get away in law from thehorribly non-committal statement that each case depends on its own facts. This must be so, however, for no human ingenuity could legislate to cover every possibility of facts or every nuance of carelessness, from the kind that is not blameworthy because no reasonable person would regard it as such, to the kind that is commonly called "criminal," although the expression means nothing in the criminal law.
Sieghart's case does seem to show, however, that there is a growing acceptance of the possibility that some accidents are pure accidents, being no fault of the principal protaganists, but because of outside circumstances.