It’s no accident when people crash cars into people
Vocabulary might not sound like the most important issue when discussing road safety. But as Citizen reporter Elizabeth Payne’s recent news stories from Stockholm illustrate, knowing how to describe a problem has an impact on how we address it.
In her first piece from the Swedish capital, Payne opened up with an image of a mountain of shoes, 3,700 pairs to be exact, representing the people killed in traffic worldwide every day. Statistics, we forget. But that image sticks with us. It helps prompt us to demand changes — in infrastructure, legal framework, or enforcement — that we know will save lives.
One such change is “geo-fencing,” a technology introduced to prevent terrorists from using a motor vehicle to kill pedestrians, but which is now used in a few pilot projects around Sweden and neighbouring Norway to limit the speed of vehicles. It creates electronic fences around certain areas that automatically prevent cars from going faster than a certain speed. Imagine what this could do around your local school.
Here’s another small but significant detail you may not have noticed reading Payne’s series: She used the word “crash” throughout (never “accident”) to describe how people suffer and die on the road. When I asked her about it, she told me she never uses “accident,” because “that suggests it is not preventable.”
Bingo. But she’s a bit of an outlier in the media. Usually when someone dies in a crash, news reports use the word “collision.” It happened earlier this month after Jeannette Runciman’s death in Brockville and also after 91-year-old actor Orson Bean died on a California road a few days earlier. Bean was first clipped by a motorist who didn’t see him, and fell on the pavement. Then, as a police officer explained, “A second vehicle was coming up, was distracted by people trying to slow him
Knowing how to describe a problem has an impact on how we address it.
down and then looked up and then a second traffic collision occurred and that one was fatal.”
A vehicle was distracted and a collision occurred?
And no, I’m not unduly obsessed with semantics. Serious people have studied these things and are just as picky as I am with their words: An academic paper published last December in the United States (itself referencing an earlier, smaller Canadian study) explained that by using terms such as “accident” or “collision,” and by using a passive voice, media outlets perpetuate a sense of generalized apathy in society instead of spurring us into demanding changes necessary to avoid those deaths.
When a news story informs you that a pedestrian was hit by a car, instead of telling you a driver killed a pedestrian with her vehicle, it masks the reality that: 1) most crashes are preventable; and 2) people are the ones responsible for their occurrence, not cars.
In some cranky anti-car corners of the internet, more than a few voices are demanding we talk about “traffic violence” rather than “traffic accidents,” much like we talk about “gun violence” and not “gun accidents.” It’s tempting.
Drivers don’t intend to hurt anyone. But a lot of them do anyway, and it’s not enough to say, well, nobody meant to hit your grandpa, sorry about that. I can’t tell you how many times I have yelled at drivers backing out of parking spaces without looking while I was shepherding three kids to my vehicle. It shouldn’t be up to pedestrians to make sure every driver sees them before making a move.
We need to make serious changes to our infrastructure, and parking lots are an obvious place to start. We’re so used to them, we don’t notice how stupid they are: drivers and pedestrians moving every which way without clear directions as to who has priority where.
Protected walkways seem like such a no-brainer. But unless and until we strongly demand such changes, nothing is going to happen. That’s why the language we use to discuss these things matters so much.
If we want to keep pedestrians alive, we must start by picking the right words to describe what happens when they get hit. Starting with us in the media.