The District Court at Brisbane has dismissed a CTP personal injury claim by a pedestrian who was run down by a bus in Adelaide Street, between Officeworks and the Brisbane Arcade.
At the time of the accident, the injured Plaintiff was 21 years old. It was about 5:55 pm and she was walking to her work at a retail store in the Queen Street Mall. It was a Friday and the CBD night shopping in the lead up to Christmas meant there were a lot of pedestrians and vehicles.
The injured Plaintiff had come out of the King George Square bus station onto Adelaide Street and turned to her left and was walking past Office Works and needed to get to the other side of the road, where the Brisbane Arcade is located. There is a pedestrian crossing with lights to her right but she had turned to her left after coming out of the bus station.
The pedestrian lights to her right were red and so there were no vehicles in the two lanes on the Office Works side of Adelaide Street where she was looking to cross to the Brisbane Arcade side. However, the other side of Adelaide Street was full of banked us cars and buses. She though she saw a point where it would be safe to cross and decided to go for it. As she got to the middle of the road, the lights to her right at the pedestrian crossing changed from red to green for the traffic and so she quickened her pace to get to the other side because everything had just started to move.