Court Opinion

ID: 9736521
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:58:46.315829+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:27:07.189222
License: Public Domain

*477Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno:
A passenger who asks a street car motorman to let him off at a certain bridge does not expect the motorman to stop the car in the middle of the bridge. Another passenger who would request a motorman to take him to the Grant Building in Pittsburgh would certainly be surprised if the motorman climbed the curbstone with his car or bus, crossed the sidewalk and drove directly to the building’s entrance. Street cars have regular stops and no matter what may be the car rider’s request, the custodian of the car has no authority in law or by the nature of his employment to discharge the occupants of the car at a spot which traffic conditions Aiake dangerous. Although Eugene N. Harris, the plaintiff, indicated he wished to go to the Dixie Inn, he had reason to assume that either that place was a regular and protected car stop or that the motorman would stop at a point where it was safe for him to alight. The motorman, however, stopped directly (across the street) in front of the Dixie Drive Inn which is located between car stops. There was no sidewalk at the point where the plaintiff was required to alight. This Court has held numerously that “ ‘a common carrier for hire owes to its passengers the highest degree of care and diligence in carrying them to their destination and [in] enabling them to alight safely’ (Hughes v. Pittsburgh Transportation Co., 300 Pa. 55) and to avoid any possible danger while doing so.” (O’Malley v. Laurel Line Bus Co., 300 Pa. 311, 251, 254.) In the case of Brown v. Beaver Valley Motor Coach Co., 365 Pa. 578, 581, we held also: “While it is true that common carriers are not liable for injuries resulting from ordinary defects in the street. . . they must exercise reasonable diligence to give passengers a safe place to alight and pass out of danger.’?
*478At the time the passenger alighted, the conditions of visibility left much to be desired. It was 2 o’clock in the morning, the night was dark and misty, rain was falling. Whether the plaintiff was guilty of contributory negligence by stepping out into an atmosphere and environment in which dangers could have lurked was a question for the jury, not the court.
After the street car left, there was only one thing for the plaintiff to do and that was to cross the street. The Majority Opinion says that if the plaintiff had remained where he alighted he could not have been injured: “The only conceivable way that plaintiff would be endangered if he remained where he was standing would be the wholly fortuitous circumstance of an automobile leaving the highway at that point. . . That he subsequently, of his own accord, abandoned that site for one more perilous would not stamp the entire area as a manifestly dangerous place under the decisions of this Court.”
With all due respect, I must say that this reasoning on the part of the Majority is very strange indeed. The plaintiff could not remain at the alighting spot forever. He had to leave some time. The curb on which he stood was “just about the width of one person” standing up. He could not sleep there. He could not live there. There were no restaurant facilities there. He was on a bare ledge no more than a foot wide. To argue that he was at fault in leaving this strip of concrete at 2 o’clock in the morning is to ridicule realities. The photographs introduced in evidence showed also that a concrete moulding overhung this narrow curbing strip so that the plaintiff ' even standing on one foot could not have rested at full length with his back to the wall. The plaintiff simply had to gét away from the spot where the street'.car left him. Even if he *479abandoned Ms original intention to go to the Dixie Inn, he still could not remain on his tiny island refuge where he could become a target for other traffic: “Q. If you had stayed where you are, you could have avoided an accident? A. If I stayed where I was, a car might have come down the other way and hit me, because there was nothing there but a little curb.”
Thus, the sheer physical properties of the situation compelled the plaintiff to strike away from his stylitic* perch. While admitting that a pedestrian may legally cross a street between intersections, the Majority still sees fault in the plaintiff’s attempt to get away from his concrete traffic prison cell.
There is no evidence that the automobile which collided with the plaintiff was in sight when the plaintiff stepped into the cartway. Thus, he could not be convicted of contributory negligence for this original step. When he reached the center of the road an automobile loomed into view 160 to 170 feet away. The Majority says that “if a pedestrian voluntarily walks into the path of an oncoming vehicle when it is dangerously near, he is barred by his negligence from any recovery. Is an automobile “dangerously near” when it is 170 feet away, and the pedestrian has only 25 feet to travel? The Majority has no trouble in answering that question in the affirmative. Giving the plaintiff the benefit of every doubt, as we are required to do, I can only categorically answer that question in the negative.
The Majority quotes at length from the plaintiff’s testimony which shows that he did become flustered *480and excited as the car swept toward him. He said: “I saw the car come and I thought I could make it and I kept on going.” Was it unnatural or unreasonable for him to assume that with a car 170 feet away he could negotiate 25 feet before the car reached him? The driver of the car apparently travelled faster than the plaintiff assumed he was travelling or perhaps even increased his speed as he bore down on the plaintiff, and the plaintiff became excited. If, in that stress of circumstance, he did what he should not have done the test of contributory negligence is not what, in retrospect, might have been the wise thing to do but whether he acted as a reasonably prudent person would have acted. As the plaintiff himself stated: “I tried to run. I got excited. Everybody would try that ” In a split second he had to decide whether he should pass in front of the car, dash back, or stand still. Any one of these possibilities offered a danger of its own. Whether his judgment was that of a reasonable man was a question for the jury, and, as we said in Brown v. Beaver Val. M. C., supra, “we are bound by its determination of it.”
The plaintiff was struck when he was three-fourths of the way across the street, which means that he travelled 12 feet while the car travelled 170 feet. That does not to me sound like conduct which should deny a citizen of the right to have a jury pass upon the question as to whether he did what the average reasonable person could well have done.
This Court has said almost to the point of satiety: “Judgment can be entered for the defendant only if the evidence, viewed in the light most advantageous to the plaintiff, resolving all conflicts therein in his favor, and giving him the benefit of every fact and inference pertaining to the issues involved which may be *481reasonably deduced therefrom, would not justify a verdict and judgment in his favor.” (Mellott v. Tuckey, 350 Pa. 74.)
With this kind of a compass to guide deliberations in this case it is incomprehensible to me how the logic of the Majority leads to an affirmance of the lower court which granted a compulsory nonsuit in favor of the Railways Company and judgment on the record in favor of the defendant Attilo DeFelice, the operator of the automobile which struck the plaintiff.
This Court has also said to the point of saturation that in reviewing cases where the plaintiff has been nonsuited or judgment has been entered on the record that the evidence must be read in the light most advantageous to the plaintiff. (Jones v. Carney, 375 Pa. 32). However, in the instant case that rule has been honored more in the breach than in the observance. A street car passenger is discharged in a danger zone and, by force of necessity he proceeds to a point of safety when he is struck by a car whose driver must have seen him 170 feet away. Even if this testimony were regarded with cold, impassive neutrality uncolored by the advantageous inferences which, under our law, the plaintiff is entitled to, it still could not be said that what the plaintiff did was so devoid of reflection and innate care that he can summarily be ordered out of court on the grounds of contributory negligence.
The facts in the case of O’Malley v. Laurel Line Bus Co., 311 Pa. 251, 255 were somewhat like those in the litigation before us. There, the plaintiff was discharged by the driver of a motor bus at a non-regular bus stop. As the plaintiff alighted and started toward the sidewalk he was struck by an automobile. In the ensuing lawsuit the jury was unable to agree on a verdict, and the Court entered a judgment in *482favor of the defendant. Upon appeal this Court reversed, saying: “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.”
This Court also applied there the rule which it has ignored here, namely, “If two or more negligences are existing at the time of an injury and concur in producing it, the fact that one preceded the other slightly in point of time is a matter of no moment, and the rule as to concurrent negligence, under which both the parties are held jointly and severally liable, and not that of proximate and remote cause, will be applied.”
Even if the action of the motorman in this case, standing alone, would not have precipitated an accident yet it concurred with another event to produce the plaintiff’s injury, the plaintiff still has the right to recover. In Burrell Twp. v. Uncapher, 117 Pa. 353, 363, this Court said: “If the defendant’s negligence concurred with some other event (other than the plaintiff’s fault) to produce the plaintiff’s injury, so that it clearly appears that but for such negligence the injury would not have happened, and both circumstances are closely connected with the injury in the order of events, the defendant is responsible, even though his negligent act was not the nearest cause in the order of time.” There can be no doubt that both circumstances here were closely connected with the plaintiff’s injury. Whether the plaintiff himself was at fault, as already stated, was a question for the jury.
I dissent.

 It will be recalled that Simon Stylites, from whose name derives “stylitic”, lived atop a pillar for 37 years to do public penance and make vicarious atonement for others’ sins. No such assumed duty rested on the plaintiff here!