McManamon v. Hanover Township

Citations

• 232 Pa. 439
• 81 A. 440
• 1911 Pa. LEXIS 740

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Contributory negligence — Municipalities—Streets and. highways — Pedestrian—Fall over embankment — Choice of two ways— Death — Circumstantial proof.</p> <p>1. A person who uses a street or highway that is thrown open for public travel, knowing at the time that there is a safer route which he may take to reach his destination, is not necessarily guilty of negligence because he does not take the safer route. It is only when the danger is so great and apparent that an ordinarily prudent person would regard it as dangerous, and therefore avoid it, that a trial court can say, as matter of law, that the person .using the more dangerous route is guilty of contributory negligence. If the alternative route has dangers of its own, and the dangers of the route actually taken are not so great and obvious as to deter the general public and ordinarily prudent and careful people from using it, the question of the contributory negligence of a person injured in using it is a question for the jury.</p> <p>2. In an action against a township to recover damages for the death of plaintiff’s husband, who was lulled by falling over an unguarded vertical cut on the main street of defendant township, the case is for the jury where there is evidence to show that there was a footpath on top of the cut about 200 feet in length and about six feet in width running up from and back to the level portions of the street; that this path had been open to the public and used as a way for travel or sidewalk by the residents of the community for a long period of years; that the decedent had lived with his family for about three years in a house on the top of the cut and had been in the habit of using the pathway to and from his home; that the path was the usual way for the people in the community to reach the houses on the embankment; and that the only other way to the home of the decedent was by a roundabout course of nearly twice the distance, used by wagons with heavy loads, much of it