In Hedayatzadeh v. City of Del Mar, published January 22, 2020, the Fourth District Court of Appeal, Division 1 affirmed summary judgment in favor of the defendant city. A city street terminates at a guardrail on an ocean bluff. There is no barrier preventing pedestrians from walking past the guardrail, and pedestrians would pass by the rail onto the right-of-way. Past the guardrail is a sloped dirt embankment that leads down to railroad tracks, located on a right-of-way owned by a transit district and not the city. A young man was part of a group that walked down the embankment, trespassing on the transit district property. He tried to take a selfie with an oncoming freight train. The train struck and killed him. His father sued the city, alleging that the street was a dangerous condition of public property because it was adjacent to the tracks and right-of-way, and allowing people to access the right-of-way exposed the public to a substantial risk of injury when used in a reasonably foreseeable manner. The trial court granted summary judgment on the ground that the property was not in a dangerous condition.
The appellate court agreed that, as a matter of law, the city property was not a dangerous condition of public property. Public property may be dangerous because of a hazardous condition on adjacent property. That occurs where a condition on property adjacent to a public highway is so connected with or in such proximity to the traveled portion as to render those traveling it unsafe; or where the public entity take an affirmative act, such as locating a public facility in a certain place or providing a particular means of access to an adjacent hazard, that puts users of the property in danger. But merely failing to erect a barrier to prevent users of the entity's property from leaving the property and willfully accessing a hazard on adjacent property is not a dangerous condition of public property. The city did not create any condition of public property that necessarily endangered users of city streets. Users are not required to walk around the guardrail, down an embankment, and toward the train tracks. Nor does anything about the property entice or encourage the public to put themselves in harm's way by entering the hazardous area.
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