Particularly because trucks do not carry passengers, all kinds of requirements for them
differ markedly from those for passenger vehicles – personal cars as well as buses. With safety of
such disinterest in this county, occasionally the simplest safety features that would cost little
more are overlooked.
As rare as one would think they are, as an expert witness I actually had two cases
involving tow trucks:
• In the first case, after her car was loaded onto the flatbed, the passenger needed to ride to
the repair shop. Unfortunately, weighing about 250 pounds, the driver opened the
shotgun door, helped her reach the running board with one foot, pushed on her buttocks
with both hands, and managed to shoehorn her into the shotgun seat. At the destination,
the driver walked into the shop and began a leisurely conversation with someone inside.
Whether he had forgotten all about this passenger, thought she could alight from the
vehicle all by herself, or intended to soon assist her out of the cab, the wait was
apparently too long for this passenger. With a high floor but no stepwell like a bus or
coach would have, the passenger opened the door, placed one foot on the running board
(about 20 inches above ground level), opened the door a bit further (but not to its
cantilevered position which would have made it stable) and as she tried to place her
second foot on the running board while the door effortless opened further, she tumbled
out of the cab, breaking far too many body parts for me to remember.
• More recently, I began a similar case. Only this time, the driver could not be bothered
helping his passenger into the cab. So his 253-lb., 73-year-old passenger tried to board
the vehicle by himself. But he was no match for the running board also about 20 inches
above the ground. So before he could fully enter the cab, he fell backwards out of the
truck, similarly breaking all sorts of things.
From an attorney’s perspective, neither of these stories are terribly interesting, the money
at the end of each episode did not seem like that much, and in the latter case, the attorney never
paid me anything beyond the retainer.
But this is still not the good part. The good part is that both these cases were worth far
more money than the damages alone would suggest. This is because the minute the passengers
began to enter the cabs of these vehicles, these tow trucks became what it known as “common
carriers” – as every public transportation vehicle of any size is. The most critical thing about a
common carrier is that the individual, agency or company that owns it, and its driver, are held to
the “highest standard and duty of care.”
Not helping a passenger in or out of a cab designed for a rugged helper – with no stepwell, no grab rails, only a single running board far above the ground level, and no “kneeling feature” like that of a transit bus or motorcoach with a pneumatic suspension system – could in no remote way resemble the highest standard and duty of care. Yet once someone entered its cab, it because a “common carrier,” and the string of parties from the vehicle’s owner to its driver effectively breached this duty.
This breach naturally expanded the value of these cases considerably, because now – beyond the driver simply being lazy, careless, negligent and, in my opinion, exercising “reckless disregard” – he committed a regulatory violation.
Such a seemingly minor feature of a truck cab coupled to a tow truck would not likely dawn on even a brilliant attorney, including one well-versed in slip-and-fall incidents. But to a genuine expert in vehicles, the slightest difference between a passenger vehicle and a freight vehicle come easily. Too bad, of course, that truck cab manufacturers fail to grasp these subtleties. Or perhaps they feel that only a small proportion of their cabs will be coupled with a tow truck bodies compared to, say, an 18-wheeler. But such oversights or disinterest are common, even while the cost of outfitting one side of a truck cab would likely cost little more than outfitting it with a running board. And God forbid that some rough-and-tumble driver’s helper (or shift driver) might slip on the running board during a light rain, or with a sliver of grease on the sole of his or her shoes. But these things happen. And the nature of civil law – with all its faults here, and likely in most other countries – can quickly become a boomerang and punish those entities and individuals who fail to respect and care about safety or look out or the well-being of others.
Quirky things occasionally happen in the transportation world that might not dawn on the most brilliant civil attorney. In the example overviewed here, a tow truck becomes a common carrier the moment a passenger steps into its cab, and the duty of care rises considerably.
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