Maryland Trucking Accident Lawyer Blog
As a personal injury attorney here in Maryland, I know how much the odds are stacked against pedestrians and bicyclists in cases of traffic-related accidents. Pitting oneself, as a virtually unprotected human being, against a two ton passenger car — not to mention being hit by a large commercial vehicle, such as a large box truck, semi tractor-trailer or even a metropolitan transit bus — is a situation few would want to experience.
Pedestrian roadway accidents involving cars and trucks can result in some pretty serious bodily injuries on the part of the hapless person on foot or riding a bike. Simply being knocked over by a motor vehicle that passes too close can cause an individual to fall to the tarmac, potentially causing broken bones or even a concussion; closed-head injuries are not uncommon in such collisions between people and vehicular traffic.
As Baltimore car, truck and motorcycle accident lawyers, I and my legal staff have met numerous individuals hurt or severely injure in a random car or trucking-related wreck. In pedestrian-related collisions, the people traveling on foot are rarely the winners; many people do, in fact, suffer extensive injuries that may require days or weeks in a hospital bed. Expensive medical treatment is sometimes followed by a fair amount of physical therapy in order to get the victim back to some semblance of normalcy once back at home.
Like many victims of road accidents, a student from the University of Baltimore received serious injuries following a run-in with a city bus not long ago. According to news articles, a 20-year-old college junior was one of three people hurt as a result of an in-town traffic accident on a Tuesday in February.
According to reports, Hillary Walsh was hit at 5:50 p.m. by an MTA bus as she was crossing St. Paul Street. News articles indicate that the woman was struck by the bus as she was crossing the roadway diagonally in order to catch a downtown shuttle. The accident, which happened a little after 5pm, caused the victim to be pushed about 15 feet through the intersection of St. Paul and 33rd streets.
According to reports, the force of the collision cause the bus’s windshield to be cracked, which may or may not indicate the force of the collision. While any decision on who was to blame would have to rest in large part with the results of the police accident investigation, one observer who was riding in the bus at the time of the crash said that Walsh was reckless in her actions.
According to that individual, the victim started running in front of the bus, causing the driver to slam on the brakes, but not in time to avoid hitting the pedestrian. Whatever the root cause of the accident, news reports show that the woman sustained broken ribs, several fractures of the skull, a broken left fibula and a punctured spleen.
The head injury was obviously the most serious of all the injuries received by the woman as a result of the crash, yet none of them were life-threatening according to reports.
In a second crash on that same day, two Johns Hopkins University students were hurt in that same area. Based on police reports, a vehicle that was headed south on St. Paul struck the two students as the vehicle’s driver attempted to make a right turn onto 33rd. According to police, the sophomores were in the crosswalk just west of St. Paul at the time of the collision.
Three pedestrians hit at 33rd and St. Paul, JHUNewsletter.com, February 8, 2012