Baltimore Transit Co. & Penny v. Pue

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appeal is by a bus driver for the Baltimore Transit Company and the company from judgments on a verdict of a jury awarding damages to a passenger who fell while on a bus. Miss Isabel H. Pue, a maiden lady in her seventies and a graduate nurse then still actively pursuing her vocation, who was heading home in the middle of the day after leaving Keswick where she had been nursing her invalid sister, boarded a bus eastbound on Fortieth Street in front of the Maryland Casualty Company building, a long block from the intersection of Fortieth Street and Keswick Road. She paid her fare and moved toward the rear part of the long seat behind the driver, intending to sit there.

As she was about to sit down she was almost facing the rear of the bus when she felt a sudden jerk, a “twirling” motion, which threw her feet right out from under her and she was thrown flat on her back—as she put it, she fell “right straight back” and “went over backward.” She had ridden busses very frequently and had never before experienced the sensations or the consequences she described. She was seriously injured. Her lawyers had investigated the occurrence and discovered that the bus driver attributed Miss Pue’s fall to a sudden stop he was caused to make when an automobile bound west on Fortieth Street turned in front of him to go south on Keswick Road and that he had not identified the automobile which continued on down Keswick Road and has not since been found or reappeared. Armed with this knowledge, Miss Pue sued the bus driver, the Transit Company and the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles under the Unsatisfied Claim and Judgment Fund Raw.

At the trial of the case, Miss Pue, in addition to detailing the matters above set forth as to the manner of her fall and its results, testified that the bus driver, soon after she fell, told ²⁵⁹ her that he had to “swirl around quick” to avoid an automobile or he “would have killed a man and broken up the machine.” The bus driver, called as an adverse witness, testified that as he drove east on Fortieth Street from the Maryland Casualty Company stop at which he picked up Miss Pue (which he thought was “close to two blocks” from Keswick Road) at a speed he estimated at twenty-five miles an hour, there was no vehicular traffic in the vicinity except the “one car coming the other way,”' and that he did not see the other car until it had begun its turn when it was already in the eastbound lane of Fortieth Street and. the northbound lane of Keswick Road in the process of turning south. He never saw the car in its “proper lane,” that is, the-westbound lane, because as he approached Keswick Road he-was centering all his attention on the traffic light which controlled the intersection of Keswick Road and Fortieth Street “to see if it was going to stay green.” When he took his eyes-down from the light he saw the other car turning in front of him and then all he had time to do was to- “hit the brakes.” He almost hit the car as well as the brakes—came within a “couple of feet”-—but managed to stop without doing so in the middle of the intersection. When he was asked if the stop had been sudden, he replied “not real sudden,” although he admitted that in his deposition he had said he had had to make “a sudden stop.” The Transit Company produced no evidence and the only other witness on liability was called by the Commissioner. He was another Transit Company bus driver who was a passenger on the bus with Miss Pue.

He said he thought the stop at Keswick Road was a normal stop. The appellants argue earnestly that they were not legally liable and their motions for directed verdicts and subsequently for judgments n. o. v. should have been granted because the testimony (a) was legally insufficient to permit a finding of negligence on their part in that it showed that the driver of the phantom car was guilty of a clear, prominent and decisive act of negligence which was the sole proximate cause of the occurrence, and (b) otherwise amounted to no more than mere adjectival allegations and characterizations too lacking in factual basis to support legally the claim of the plaint^ ²⁶⁰ We think the determination of the negligence of the appellants properly was left to the jury and that there was no reason to disturb its verdicts. This case differs from Jones v. Baltimore Transit Co., 211 Md. 423 , and the analogous cases discussed in the opinion in that case, including Koester Bakery Co. v. Poller, Etc., 187 Md. 324 , on which appellants rely. There the plaintiff herself testified that the bus was going “a little too fast” (another witness said “very, very fast”) and that an automobile going in the same direction as the bus cut suddenly into the bus’s lane in front of it near a corner and caused a very sudden stop which injured her.

It was held (a) that a plaintiff in a negligence action bears the burden of showing that it was the negligence of the defendant that caused the harm complained of without also disclosing the intervention of an independent cause—a superseding, not a concurrent and contributing cause—which itself is the natural and logical cause of the harm; (b) that negligence of the Transit