Personal injuries while riding on city buses.

 

Injuries incurred while riding on city buses are common. This may be due to the nature of a public bus. They can have many passengers on them, and the passengers are unsecured – for example, not wearing a seatbelt – or often standing. Therefore, when a bus has to stop suddenly or hits an obstruction in the road, passengers can be sent flying in all directions.

The law as it relates to injuries on buses is slightly different than the law relating to regular motor vehicle accidents, which typically involve privately owned vehicles and their occupants. In a typical motor vehicle collision, it is up to the injured party to prove the person they are suing has been negligent. The law for public  buses has been modified to put the onus on the bus driver to prove they did not act negligently. Once an injury has occurred an initial case for negligence has been made, the bus driver must now prove that they were not negligent. This is a substantial difference, and was recently illustrated in a Supreme Court of British Columbia case:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/15/10/2015BCSC1039.htm

Here, a bus driver rode over a dip in a rode resulting in injury to one of the occupants of his bus. He was not able to prove to the court that he had acted with proper care. The standard of care that bus drivers are expected to follow involves a “very high degree” of care. This degree of owed care is further elevated when dealing in certain circumstances, for example when dealing with elderly or disabled passengers. In a typical motor vehicle accident case, it would have been up to the injured party to prove that the driver they were suing had acted negligently. For example, if the passenger of a vehicle was suing the private driver of a sedan they were seated in, it would have been up to them to provide the evidence to show that the driver was negligent. Here, it was up to the bus driver to provide evidence that he had not been negligent.

This case illustrates that although suing a city bus may seem like a more difficult task, in some ways it can be a simpler.

 

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