Baltimore Transit Co. v. Brooks

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The successful plaintiff below was injured as he stepped from a trackless trolley onto an isolated patch of sheet ice on the street between the curb and the trolley, and fell. The owner of the trolley appeals on the ground that the case should not have gone to the jury because “the conflicting and speculative evidence” offered by the plaintiff “failed to disclose any breach of duty on the part of the Defendant to provide the Plaintiff with a reasonably safe place to alight.” Implicit in the question presented, as the appellant poses it, is that the law is that the operator of a streetcar owes a passenger alighting from the car the duty of furnishing a reasonably safe opportunity, means and place to alight. We agree that the law imposes on the streetcar carrier the duty to guard against such dangers or perils incident to alighting, as might readily be discovered in the exercise of that high degree of care which carriers owe to their passengers.

Smith v. Baltimore Transit Co., 214 Md. 560 . This is not to say that the carrier is an insurer or that it is always to be held liable for injuries resulting from the condition of the street to which the passenger descends. Essentially the dividing line between the case which must ²⁴⁴ go to the trier of fact for determination and the case in which there is no liability as a matter of law, is whether the operator saw, or in the exercise of that high degree of care compatible with the distracting and difficult undertaking of piloting a car or bus, should have seen the defect, peril or hazard and done more than he did to avoid exposing the passenger to it. Where the defect, peril or hazard was small or unlikely to have been seen, or the driver had no way or place to go to avoid potential danger to the passenger, as in Smith v. Baltimore Transit Co., supra, where snow and ice covered the entire area, it has been held there was no violation of duty.

Where it was large or prominent, it is for the trier of fact to decide whether it should have been seen, or avoided. The two lines of cases are collected in an annotation in 9 A.L.R. 2d 938 . Discussion of those in which the carrier was negligent in failing to foresee and guard against that which was readily to be noticed or anticipated, begins at page 946; those in which the defect, peril or hazard was of such trifling character or so small or unlikely to have been noticed as not to have required discovery in the exercise of reasonable care are detailed on page 948, and the pages following. Cases in which recovery by the passenger was allowed include Schwartz v. Brooklyn and Queens Transit Corp., 36 N. Y. S. 2d 70, and Cordes v. Surface Transportation Co., 40 N. Y. S. 2d 878, in both of which the facts were essentially similar to those of the case at bar.

Schwartz was distinguished in the Smith case, to which we adverted, on the ground that the ice was an isolated patch and there were clear stretches of street on which the passenger could have