When large vehicles carry large numbers of passengers and operate on city streets, there was considerable likelihood that injuries to people and damage to property would occur. Also, it appears that, then as now, many people believed that that large, wealthy or supposedly wealthy, organizations are fair game as targets of lawsuits, not always legitimate. Thus, by the early years of the 20th Century, after wages, power and maintenance, costs of legal liability was one of the greatest expenses of trolley operation.

The potential liability of trolley companies sometimes was exacerbated by behavior of the riders themselves. Of course there was the risk that a person might attempt to board or enter a car while it was in motion and then blame the company for the resulting injury. But the difficulty could become much worse when one rider endangered other riders. Intoxicated riders could pose a special problem.

Because of harm that might come to drunken persons when ejected from a car, either in the process of ejection or as a result of being left alone someplace where they might hurt themselves, employees usually were directed not to eject such a passenger form a car unless that passenger endangered other passengers. This was a very problematic “unless.” It could happen that a person did present such danger, and now there was risk that, in attempting to control the situation, the person, an employee or another passenger might suffer injury. There were times when there was nothing an employee could do that did not present danger of injury and a resulting lawsuit.

Pictures: We don’t have any pictures of questionable lawsuits, of drunks or of obstreperous persons being ejected from trolley cars, so we’ll just post some pictures of cars in our collection where such things might have happened back in the day. 1) LSE #149: 2) SHRT #12: 3) SHRT # 1225, later #12: and 4) SHRT PCC #92.