Highway Elements Associated with Tort Liability Actions

Abstract

With the loss of sovereign immunity, risk management has become an important discipline for many state highway and transportation departments. One step in an effective risk management process is the evaluation of past tort claims and lawsuits to identify the fundamental characteristics of tort actions necessary for effective risk management decision making. This article reports the results of one such evaluation that identifies the types of highway elements alleged to have contributed to highway incidents producing tort actions, develops a profile of high‐risk elements in terms of the number of actions and the proportion of actions involving severe injuries or fatalities, and provides recommendations, supplemented with examples, on how this information should be used for safety‐enhancement decision making in such diverse activities as routine maintenance and safety programming.