A concrete wall on a Texas freeway ramp has one job, and the crash-test manual states it in four words: contain and redirect the vehicle. Read the last word twice.
Every barrier on a state highway is evaluated against a book called the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware, MASH for short, published by the association of state highway departments and adopted by Texas. The book does not ask whether a wall is strong. It asks whether a specific vehicle, driven into the wall at a specific speed and angle, is turned back into its lane without going through, under, or over. For the ordinary freeway test level the vehicles are a 2,420-pound small car and a 5,000-pound pickup, each striking at sixty-two miles an hour and twenty-five degrees. The next level up adds a single-unit truck of roughly eleven tons at fifty-six miles an hour and fifteen degrees. The wall passes if it contains and redirects the vehicle or brings it to a controlled stop, and if the forces measured inside the cabin are ones a person could survive.
Height is part of the test. The engineers who reconciled the older bridge-rail designs with the current manual found that thirty-two-inch barriers that had passed the old truck test no longer did, and set thirty-six inches as the minimum for a wall meant to hold a truck. The single-slope barrier Texas uses on its highways was tested at forty-two inches. So the top of the wall on an elevated ramp sits somewhere between thirty-two and forty-two inches off the pavement, which is about the height of a car’s hood and about the height of a rider’s hip on the seat of a motorcycle. Everything on a car that matters to the test is below that line. Everything on a rider that matters is above it.
Now the sentence the manual does not contain. There is no motorcycle in it. The research program that writes the manual’s testing guidelines says so in the first paragraph of the project it opened to fix that: the manual does not currently contain protocols for testing roadside barriers for motorcyclist impacts. The same paragraph gives the reason it matters: fixed objects along the road carry a much higher risk of death and disabling injury for motorcyclists than for people in cars, and motorcyclists accounted for forty percent of guardrail-related deaths in a recent year. The academic work behind that project found a motorcycle crash into a guardrail about seven times as likely to be fatal as a fall to the ground, and found that a rider thrown from the machine after hitting a barrier had significantly higher odds of serious injury than one who stayed with it.
Redirect, then, describes what the wall does to a mass that meets it low, tracks along its face, and has a cabin to keep the person inside. A motorcycle meets the wall low too, and the machine is redirected or stopped. The rider is not attached to the machine. He continues in the direction the machine was going a tenth of a second earlier, at the speed it was going, and on a curve that direction is across the top of the wall. The wall performed as designed, for the vehicle class it was designed for. The word is doing exactly the work the defense needs it to do, and the lawyer’s job is to show where its meaning ends.
Here is where it ends in a Texas courtroom, honestly stated, because these are hard cases and most of them are not cases. The road belongs to a governmental unit, and the Tort Claims Act does not waive immunity for a decision the law leaves to the unit’s discretion. The Supreme Court of Texas has said that the design of a public work such as a roadway is a discretionary function involving many policy decisions, and the entity may not be sued for those decisions. The height of the wall and the radius of the curve are design. A rider who goes over a wall that was built to the standard, on a ramp that was designed to the standard, generally has no claim against the state for the standard itself. And whatever claim exists must be noticed in writing within six months, which is a clock that starts at the funeral.
What the word does not close. Maintenance and warning are not design: a barrier segment that was hit last year and left displaced, a curve advisory sign that came down and was never replaced, a lighting failure the department had been told about, are conditions, not policy choices, and conditions the unit knew about are litigated. Notice is a fact question, and two riders over the same class of wall in the same city within forty-eight hours is the kind of fact that turns a design conversation into a maintenance and warning conversation, or at least into a records request. And the other driver, when there is one, is not the state: the pickup that changed lanes into the rider’s path on the ramp is an ordinary negligence case, and the rider’s own speed is comparative fault, which reduces recovery and bars it only past fifty percent.
What a lawyer measures, in order. The wall: its type, height, and test level, from the department’s own plans, and its condition that night, from the maintenance file and the photographs. The ramp: its posted advisory speed, its curve radius and superelevation, and its crash history, all of which the department keeps and all of which are public. The machine: its data, if the model has any, and its damage, which tells the reconstructionist the angle and speed of contact. And the rider’s path over the wall, which is the science of the next entry.
One word. Redirect is what a barrier is tested to do to a two-thousand-pound car and a five-thousand-pound pickup at sixty-two miles an hour. Nothing in the test describes a person, because no person in the test is ever outside the cabin. The gap between the test and the rider is the whole case, and it is a narrow one.
The pass criterion, contain and redirect the vehicle, and the Texas single-slope barrier tested at forty-two inches: TTI Report 0-6968-R5, MASH TL-4 Testing and Evaluation of Free-Standing Single Slope Concrete Barrier (TxDOT, June 2019). The test vehicles and the thirty-six-inch minimum: NCHRP Project 20-07/Task 395, MASH Equivalency of NCHRP Report 350-Approved Bridge Railings (Nov. 2017). No motorcycle protocol, and the forty percent figure: NCHRP Project 22-60, Guidelines for Crash Testing Roadside Safety Hardware for Motorcycles. The fatality and ejection findings: Daniello, Injury Mechanisms in Roadside Motorcycle Collisions (Virginia Tech, 2013), and NCHRP Research Report, Motorcycle Crashes into Traffic Barriers: Factors Related to Serious and Fatal Injuries (2022). Discretionary design: Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 101.056 and State v. Rodriguez (Tex. 1999). Six-month notice: § 101.101. Comparative fault: Comparative Fault. General information, not legal advice.
