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Heavy Equipment Accidents
QUESTION:I am thinking about buying a piece of land that has
an existing easement for the neighbor next door.
If someone where to drive on the easement and get hurt
or cause an accident. Or lets say that the neighbor
has a party and one of their guests vehicle is damaged
driving on the easement. Am I responsible since this is
legally my property?
Any idea if an easement will make insurance higher?
Does an easement mean, I can not do anything on the
piece of land?
ANSWER: It's my understanding that most residential properties have a whole
pile of easements on them, for utilities, covering something like
10 feet (I'm sure this varies with the area and lot size) from every
edge (which tends to leave not much easement-free in the middle).
This means things like the power company has the right to run power
lines along the back edge of my property (which they do). I can
plant trees back there. The power company has the right to trim
them so they don't interfere with the power lines. As far as I
know, I have every right to build a swimming pool in the far back
right next to the power lines (but I'd be an idiot to do so, and
I'd have no complaint when a windstorm blows down the power lines
into the pool. This happened once, with the power lines landing
where the hypothetical pool might have been.)
I can put up a fence along the back edge of my property (there was
one already there when I bought the property, and it's still there,
as are similar fences for neighbors on the block). In theory, they
could rip out the fence if they needed to to get heavy equipment
in to repair the power lines. They haven't done that in 25 years.
I found it interesting to watch them replace the transformer (those
things are big! and heavy!) on a pole in one corner of my lot after
the old one started smoking WITHOUT ripping down any of my fences.
The easement along the front of the property means I am allowed to
run a driveway out to the road. The gas company gets to dig up
parts of my driveway when they need to to repair a gas leak in
buried pipe (and they did once - they also repaired it after a few
days but in a way I considered a bit ugly but not worth trying to
sue over, and they may not have been required to do that much).
If your neighbor has an easement on part of your land so he can get
to/from his, you can still use it if it doesn't interfere with his
use. You can pave it and park on it if he can still get in and
out. Putting up fences or a swimming pool in that area would not
be allowed, if they completely block his path (unless you are willing
to spring for a bridge or tunnel :-) ). You could put in a garden
if you still allowed him to drive on it (not a good idea, in my
opinion. It's just something to fight over.). I suppose you could
put in a softball diamond if you could tolerate occasional interruptions
to the game.
I don't know what the situation with insurance is. If one car hits
another car, it doesn't seem relevant whose land it is, unless they
are claiming obstructed view by trees or something. If a car hits
the house or a fence, it seems like it's the driver's fault. If a
pedestrian trips and twists his ankle, then you might have problems.
An easement may reduce the value of the property slightly but it's
nearly impossible to buy a house without one. It depends on what
the easement is. There's a large difference in value reduction
between an easement that lets your neighbor drive over a 5-foot by
5-foot chunk on a corner of your property where his driveway was
built in the wrong place, vs. one that lets the telephone company
put a 5-foot-by-5-foot cable junction box in the middle of your
bedroom and they get access to it every time they install someone's
phone. (I seem to recall this really happened, in a house that
used to be occupied by the only telephone operator in town. The
operator is long gone, and modern switching equipment was installed
elsewhere, but the cable junction stayed. comp.dcom.telecom might
have more info on this).
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