On Oct. 3, 2001, a mentally disturbed passenger from Croatia produced a box cutter and began slashing the driver of a Greyhound bus traveling between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tenn. In the ensuing crash six passengers including the attacker were killed. Now, in one of many lawsuits proceeding from the incident, a jury has decided that Greyhound should pay $8 million to Sharon Surles, a Saginaw, Mich. woman severely disabled by the crash. On what theory, you ask, was the large intercity bus company negligent for not preventing the crazed attack?
[Plaintiff’s attorney Andrew Berke of Chattanooga] said that in the four years before the crash, Greyhound had at least 43 incidents of a passenger attempting to assault a driver or grab the steering wheel of a moving bus.
“Despite the prevalence of attacks, Greyhound never did anything to protect its drivers,” Berke said.
He said a Greyhound executive in 1997 had asked the manufacturer if they could “put protective barriers” between drivers and passengers.
(“Bus crash after driver cut prompts $8M verdict”, AP/Nashville Tennesseean, Aug. 12; Ian Berry, “Woman wins $8 million in bus crash”, Chattanooga Times & Free Press/MSNBC, undated). Forty-three incidents of assault over four years amounts to a rate of ten per year, not necessarily an impressive crime wave given that Greyhound is the dominant player in intercity bus transport and carried more than 21 million people last year. Moreover, the quote from the lawyer includes no intimation that any of the earlier assaults in fact led to crashes or serious harm to passengers. The best detail, however, is the one portraying the company as culpable because one of its execs once asked about the practicability of driver partitions after which no one seriously pursued the idea. If you’d like an ultra-conservative, cover-your-behind culture to grow up in a big company, just plant the idea that the employee who goes around asking questions about possible different ways of doing things is setting you up for grief down the road after some adverse lawyer portrays the inquiry in question as a smoking gun.
Attorney Berke told the AP that the giant bus company is now moving toward the use of driver barriers, but it’s hardly surprising that such steps would have been rejected in the security climate that preceded the fall of 2001. Drivers of New York City taxis, who are exposed to a far greater risk of passenger crime than drivers of Greyhound buses, widely dislike their city-required partitions of yellowing Plexiglas and tend to leave them open during daytime rides at least, according to a recent article in the New York Times (Sewell Chan, “Taxi Partitions, Born of Danger, May Be Set for a Makeover”, Aug. 9). It’s not even intuitively clear that driver partitions will on net reduce crime on buses, since one of drivers’ key safety duties is to keep order among passengers. What will happen the first time one passenger on a Greyhound bus assaults another while the driver, immurred behind his partition, either doesn’t notice what’s going on or can’t make his authority felt? Do you think the company might get sued then too? (via Day on Torts, who predictably takes the other side of the question).
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