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New York City Sidewalk and Pothole Injury

City officials have long attacked the maps as nothing more than a useless collection of “700,000 squiggles,” created by greedy lawyers, that has forced them to parse the intricacies of geometry — is that line horizontal or vertical? — and cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards and settlements.

But now, a recent court ruling has dug a sizable gouge in the pothole map.

In a decision issued Dec. 18, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, for the first time echoed the city’s argument that the maps are inaccurate and unclear.

The court said the city was not liable for sidewalk injuries suffered by two people in separate cases because, in each, the symbols drawn on the maps did not sufficiently describe the actual defects that caused the injuries.

The ruling raises the burden for many sidewalk-injury lawsuits pending against the city, said Brian J. Isaac, the lawyer for Pasquale D’Onofrio, one of the injured people whose claim the Court of Appeals rejected. Although production of the maps ceased in 2003 after a new city law shifted liability in most sidewalk-injury cases to the adjacent property owners, the maps are still being used in thousands of lawsuits that predate the change.

“What they’re saying is that in order to establish a sidewalk case in New York, you have to be able to match a specific condition on the map to the actual condition that caused the accident,” Mr. Isaac said.

In other words, if you trip over a crack in the sidewalk, but the symbol on the map indicates a hole at that location, City Hall is off the hook.

In the midst of a budget crunch, any roadblock to a lawsuit is welcome news for the city, which paid about $600 million in sidewalk injury cases from 1997 to 2006, the latest year the figures are available.

 Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/nyregion/04pothole.html?em