Yes, everyday people should use their noggins, but there are things that go beyond what those everyday people would expect and anyone who does those things can still be liable. Courts have upheld this "reasonable expectation" standard again and again and again, literally every day, and it's not hard to see why. If "use your noggin" was a foolproof defense, explicitly in the TOS or otherwise, companies literally couldn't be held liable for anything. That's clearly insane, so the line has to be drawn somewhere else and it has been drawn at reasonable expectation.
That’s a presumptuous statement. The crash occurred at night in very poor weather. It was likely impossible to see the missing half of the bridge under those conditions. Everyone already uses common sense. That’s why it’s called common sense. Negligence is something else, and we can’t blame the victim without hearing all the facts here.
I stand by what I wrote. If you are overdriving your headlights, you are driving negligently. You're the driver, you are responsible for looking where you're going.
I agree overdriving your headlights is reckless, however remaining stationary isn’t enough to distinguish one black void from another. This is a function of the limits on vision not speed.
Which is why the municipality should be liable for not properly closing off the road well before the bridge crossing, and putting a big, red and white reflective striped fence several feet before the edge visible from a distance after the road closing as a second barrier/sighted warning.
In theory absolutely, but that doesn’t mean you can actually sue.
“In United States law, state, federal and tribal governments generally enjoy immunity from lawsuits.[48] Local governments typically enjoy immunity from some forms of suit, particularly in tort.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity
Unless you stop, get out, and poke the road with a stick, you frequently can’t tell if the road is there. Or at least frequently compared to how far people drive.
It’s ignorable because the road is so infrequently missing not because you can always see it.
People see the edge of the road just fine, we even make a point of adding reflective paint to important bits of it. It’s the occasional black voids in the center which everyone just ignores as irrelevant.
Headlights being mounted so low results in long shadows from minor imperfections in the road surface which could hide huge holes. I can only assume you’ve become so used to this it doesn’t even occur to you that it’s an actual risk, thus proving my point.
PS: Hood geometry also plays a role here. There’s no point in casting light down at an angle that the driver would be unable to see it but that’s getting into the weeds.
Terms&conditions are not law, and deciding whether 'terms clearly say X' actually implies 'X' (or if those are just empty words, as many clauses are) does take some legal knowledge.
