57 Pa. Super. 306 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1914
Opinion by
Walnut street in the defendant borough is fifty feet wide and is crossed by a small stream twelve feet wide. For more than twenty years the stream, throughout the entire width of the street, was covered with a wooden bridge, so that (adopting the language of the viewers’ report) the street presented a solid and continuous roadway suitable for all the purposes for which a street is constructed. The plaintiff’s lot abuts on Walnut street at this point, and, after the construction of the bridge, she or her predecessor in title erected a barn on the rear end of the lot, which spanned the stream and faced the bridge, or, as it appropriately may be called, the planked roadway of the street. The barn stood back from the line of the street about six feet, and the intervening space was planked over, so that she had direct access to the street.- This was her only mode of ingress and egress to and from her barn and the street. In 1912, the borough authorities substituted for the plank bridge a concrete bridge, with a driveway twenty feet and seven inches in width, and footwalks on either side six feet and three inches in width. These structures do not cover the entire stream where it crosses the street, as did the plank roadway they replaced; but there are left between the new roadway and the footwalks open and uncovered spaces about seven feet in width, and between the footwalk and the plaintiff’s barn a space of about the same width. Permanent guard rails thirty-six inches high were erected and are maintained on either side of the roadway and of the footwalks. By reason of these guard rails and the open and uncovered spaces to which we have referred, the mode of ingress and egress which the plaintiff formerly had when the
Bearing in mind that the wooden bridge was part of the highway, in fact as well as in law (Power v. Ridgway Boro., 149 Pa. 317; Westfield v. Tioga Co., 150 Pa. 152; Lafean v. York, 20 Pa. Super. Ct. 573), there can be no doubt that the changes that were made in that part of the street, which cut off the plaintiff’s access and resulted in the lessening of the value of her property, constitute a special injury in law, differing not only in degree but in kind, from any loss or inconvenience which may have been sustained by the public in general. "The injury is not of the same kind, differing in degree only; it is an additional injury, caused by the impairment of an entirely distinct right, the special right of ingress and egress. The interest of the public in a highway consists wholly in the right of passage with the incidental right to do all acts necessary to keep it in repair; the owner of land fronting on a highway' has an additional interest which must be regarded as property and which, when the right to recover has been given by the state, will sustain a claim for. compensation:” In re Melon Street, 182 Pa. 397. It was said in the same case, that as affecting this right of the abutting owner no distinction can be drawn between a partial and a total deprivation of access; the impairment of the right is a legal injury, differing in degree only from its total destruction. See also, to the same effect: Lafean v. York County, 20 Pa. Super. Ct. 573.
The assignments of error are overruled and the judgment is affirmed.