187 Pa. Super. 512 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1958
Opinion by
This is an appeal by the defendant transportation company from the refusal of its motion for judgment n.o.v. in a trespass action.
We are obliged to consider the testimony, together with all reasonable inferences therefrom, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff: Stewart v. Pittsburgh Railways Co., 379 Pa. 260, 108 A. 2d 767. Accordingly, the facts may be stated as follows: On May 25, 1950 plaintiff was a passenger on a P.T.C. bus eastbound on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, and injured her right ankle in alighting at 23rd Street at about 5:3Q p.m. At that time she was carrying an umbrella, coat and pocketbook and wearing very high, narrow French heels (about an inch in width and three inches high) ; with her shoes on she is five feet two inches tall. Plaintiff testified that she pushed and shoved her way through a crowded bus in order to alight. She stepped with her right foot from the bus’s bottom step onto the culvert or sewer inlet grate on Chestnut Street and her heel caught in an opening between the bars of the grate and she fell to the ground. The bus had stopped with the steps right over the culvert and because the bus had been crowded with passengers, some of whom were standing on the vestibule steps, she did not see the cul
“The law is clear that a common carrier for hire owes a duty to its passengers not only to exercise the highest degree of care and diligence in carrying them to their destination, but also must exercise reasonable diligence to give passengers a safe place to alight and pass out of danger: .... In O’Malley v. Laurel Line Bus Co., supra, p. 255, the rule is clearly stated that *. . . If the person in charge of a car used for the carriage of passengers for hire, knowingly permits one of them to get off the vehicle at a dangerous place, which is not the usual stopping place, and the dangerous character of which the passenger could not see and did not know, the carrier will be liable for the resulting injuries, if any, to the passenger:....”’ Stevens v. Read
The real question in this case is whether the plaintiff was permitted to alight from the bus at an obvious ly dangerous place. In MacDonald v. Phila. Rural Transit Co., 147 Pa. Superior Ct. 220, 225, 24 A. 2d 37, Judge Rhodes, now President Judge, said: “There is no duty on the operators of such common carriages to anticipate every uneven surface or defect in the highway proper or along the side thereof, and stop so as to avoid any remote possibility of an alighting passenger’s sustaining injury by slipping on an uneven surface or stepping in a depression not in itself an obviously dangerous place. What is a place of obvious danger is at times a question for the court, and at times, if from the facts various inferences are possible, for the jury. . . . [cases omitted] But it must be such at least that a reasonably prudent person would believe that it contained manifest characteristics of potential harm under the circumstances.”
Much reliance was placed by the court below on the Stevens case. In that case the plaintiff, alighting from defendant’s bus, stepped into a large hole approximately one and a half feet long, a foot wide and six inches deep, which was sufficiently dangerous to have caused the fall of another alighting passenger. In the present case, however, the ordinary sewer inlet grate, on which plaintiff caught her heel and fell, was admittedly non-defective and in good repair and whether wet or dry was not of such a character as might reasonably be foreseen as a hazard that would produce injury. There are thousands of such sewer inlet grates on the city streets and persons walk on them constantly, wearing all sorts of shoes and in all kinds of weather. A number of passengers preceded plaintiff from the bus and no passenger other than plaintiff fell on the sewer
Judgment is reversed and here entered for the defendant.