Liability for Railway and Road Accidents
This Case Study examines the way in which private law was able to cope with traffic accidents caused by railways and cars. Of course, there were also many accidents in the era of horse-drawn carriages which preceded the steam, internal combustion and electricity of today. Roads in towns were congested even in the eighteenth century, and this led to collisions between carriages and also injury to pedestrians. On major roads, stagecoaches could travel faster and they sometimes overturned. The novelty of railways accidents in the nineteenth century and then car accidents in the twentieth was the speed of the vehicles and the complexity of their mechanisms. This gave rise to three problems:
- The scale of the accidents – more people might be injured, especially in a railway accident.
- The speed of the events might make it difficult for witnesses to see reliably what happened and to provide sufficient evidence.
- The complexity of the mechanisms would make it harder for the conscientious railway company or car owner to ensure that the vehicle was safe before it was used. Was the person really to blame if an injury occurred?
The Case Study looks at how these problems were tackled by private law first in relation to railways and then in relation to cars.