Sufficiency of evidence as to whether defendants breached their duty of care owed; Failure to wait to insert a ticket & find a seat before moving the streetcar forward; Special & apparent reason; Ottinger v Detroit United Ry; Getz v Detroit; Acceleration of the streetcar in a particularly violent & sudden manner; Distinguishing Adelsperger v Detroit

The court concluded that the trial court did not err by holding that plaintiff failed to submit evidence of a special reason why the streetcar driver should have delayed moving forward. Also, it did not err by holding that “plaintiff failed to establish as a matter of law that the acceleration of the streetcar was unnecessarily violent or sudden.” Thus, the court affirmed summary disposition for defendants. The case arose when plaintiff was injured while riding the streetcar. Plaintiff argued that she submitted evidence sufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether defendants breached their duty of care owed to her. She contended that the “driver breached the duty of care by (1) failing to wait for her to insert her ticket and find a seat before moving the streetcar forward and/or (2) accelerating the streetcar in a particularly violent and sudden manner.” Under Getz and Ottinger, the question here was “whether there was some special and apparent reason why we should not apply the general rule that streetcar drivers are not required to wait until all passengers are seated before operating the streetcar in a forward motion.” Plaintiff argued that “because passengers are required to place their tickets in a receptacle before finding a seat, the law should recognize an obligation or duty by the driver to wait to move forward until a passenger goes through the process of submitting his or her ticket and finds a seat.” The court held that her “argument does not constitute a ‘special’ reason for not applying the general rule. Although Getz did not place any focus on the fact that the plaintiff was waiting for a transfer ticket when she fell, ticket-related transactions on boarding a bus or streetcar are certainly commonplace and recognizing an exception to the general rule as proffered by plaintiff would swallow up the rule.” To the extent she contended that “the driver should have waited because it was an unusually busy day, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ottinger reflects the reasoning that overcrowded streetcars is one of the primary reasons that the general rule of nonliability exists.” Also, the only evidence “in support of the acceleration being unnecessarily violent or sudden was plaintiff’s testimony that her friend also fell.” Plaintiff relied on “the statement in Ottinger that no one else had fallen during the sudden stop.” But as the trial court recognized, “this fact was mentioned only briefly in Ottinger, while the Court mostly focused on the plaintiff’s fall being a product of natural and expected forces.” The court could “not conclude that evidence that two people fell when the streetcar pulled forward created a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the streetcar’s acceleration was unnecessarily violent or sudden.”