Oliver v. Baltimore Transit Co.

HornPy, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The question on this appeal is whether the trial court should have submitted the issue of negligence to the jury instead of directing a verdict for the defendants at the close of the case for the plaintiffs. ⁶²⁷ The injured plaintiff-appellant is Mary Oliver, who was a passenger in a bus of the defendant-appellee, the Baltimore Transit Company. The husband of the passenger, Vernon Oliver, is also a plaintiff-appellant. The Commissioner of Motor Vehicles was made a party-defendant below and is named as an appellee here.

The facts seem not to be in dispute. The bus was proceeding easterly on Eastern Avenue in the center lane of traffic. The passenger was standing in the aisle of the bus holding on to a vertical pole when the bus made a sudden and abrupt stop. She was injured as the result of being thrown against a seat.

The sudden stop was necessitated by an unidentified automobile stopping in front of the bus to avoid striking an unidentified pedestrian crossing the street in front of the automobile. The bus was moving slowly, about fifteen to twenty miles per hour, and was approximately seventy-five feet behind the automobile. The bus driver was looking straight ahead when he saw the brake lights of the automobile go on and applied the bus brakes normally, but when he saw a woman run across the street in front of the automobile ahead of the bus, he “mashed” on the brakes harder and brought the bus to an abrupt stop behind the automobile. The unidentified pedestrian crossed from the curb to the center lane and then, seeing that the automobile had stopped, retraced her steps to pick up a can of beer she had dropped.

The bus driver acknowledged that the stopping of the bus was unusual and extraordinary and stated that he did not cut around the automobile because he would have struck it had he attempted to do so. In the declaration against the transit company, the passenger and her husband alleged that the bus driver and the unidentified motorist were negligent and that such negligence was the proximate cause of the injuries she sustained. We think that the direction of a verdict in favor of the transit company and unidentified motorist was proper and that the Jones case, relied on by the defendants, not the Pue case, primarily relied on by the plaintiffs, controls our disposition of the appeal. In Baltimore Transit Co. v. Pue, 243 Md. 256 , 220 A. 2d 551 (1966), where a passenger fell and was injured when a ⁶²⁸ bus made a sudden stop to avoid an automobile turning in front of it at an intersection and the bus driver, instead of observing the flow of traffic, was watching the traffic light to see if it was going to turn red, it was said (at pp. 260, 261) that “[t]he jury permissibly could have found that a concurrent and contributing cause of the sudden stop the bus driver was required to make was his failure to keep a proper lookout and that if he had he could have seen the intervening motor vehicle and its probable course of travel at a point where * * * 'the distance between such vehicle and his bus would have permitted him to make an ordinary and not an emergency stop’ despite its careless and unlawful maneuver in cutting the corner dangerously close to the oncoming bus” and that “had