For every bad or unfortunate incident, we call for blame and jail time and sometimes even public shaming.
And then we turn around and wonder why so many behaviors are criminalized and why so many people are in jail.
Yes, reckless driving shouldn't be ignored, but the article is arguing that accidents almost never happen, and that almost all accidents should lead to some sort of charges.
Beyond that, a lifetime driving ban is nearly impossible to impose in this country even though it would be an appropriate punishment for repeat dangerous drivers. Driving, despite being a privilege, is often treated as a right. A man who ran down and killed a little girl holding hands with her grandma in the crosswalk with the light (the police initially blamed the child on the word of the driver, and the DA dismissed the crash as an 'accident') only ended up with a driving ban due to a civil suit: http://www.streetsblog.org/2015/10/29/civil-suit-compels-man...
We clearly shouldn't blame, and especially shouldn't jail, people for every crash— but the current driving and policing culture in this country is profoundly far from that standard. Redesigning roadways so safe behavior is the default is a far better first step, but an abusive driver can figure out ways to make the best-designed piece of infrastructure dangerous.
Is it "blame culture" when someone hits-and-runs a cyclist, posts on Facebook that he hit some dumb-ass guy on a bicycle, that cyclist winds up dead, but hey, he wasn't actually( trying to kill him, and gets off the hook with a $350 traffic fine?
This shit happens EVERY WEEK in New York City. Our cops would rather pretend like they're on The Wire or 24 hunting down drug lords and terrarists than doing basic traffic enforcement. They use terminology like "accidents" because a cabbie paralyzing or murdering a child is difficult to prosecute.
Semantics count. When we say "call it a crash, not an accident," all we're saying is, "figure out whether the person driving the car is culpable before you let him off the hook."
I am not opposed to blame culture per se, I think problems should be solved at the most logical level. Sometimes a systematic solution is the easiest, and sometimes removing jerks is the easiest.
In the meantime, we can at least get rid of the laws and customs that make it legal to kill people when your weapon is a car rather than a knife or gun.
> murder (n) : the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another
Apparently, you are also into redefining words in a way that suits you. What next, they're having a war on pedestrians ? We're letting drivers commit genocide ?
For (much) more, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_(United_States_law)#Deg...
But we're just hopping on a particular word choice. The larger point is that a fine is not the right punishment.
Right there.
The article is citing a specific statistic claiming that 94% of crashes are the result of some sort of risky behavior. If that's the case then those people fail to appreciate the gravity of their behavior and maybe our society, for everyone's sake, should make more of an effort to impress that upon them.
Choosing to use an accurate and neutral term like "crash" as opposed to an implicitly exonerating term like "accident" seems like a pretty modest step in that direction.
If you can find a source that talks directly about risky behavior, it would be appreciated.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I think, beside the Sunday church drivers, very few people would be classified "safe" driver or rider.
The penalties involved for driving recklessly and killing someone with a car seem very light to me, even as many other kinds of criminal sentences seem disproportionately harsh.
Ending someone's life with carelessness should not forgive the result.
But I am no legislator.
Why Sweden has so few road deaths http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/02/ec...
OTOH, I think we play the blame game is because people refuse to take responsibility.
And one other contributing bit is the entitlement(/victimized) game.
Honestly though, both the blame and the entitlement games are poisonous because they provde an easy vehicle for anger and offloading responsibility.
FWIW I support the shift in semantics (from accident to crash), because of two things : 1) driving brings a calculated risk, and 2) safety when driving suffers from the tradegy of the commons (I think that's the term) - it's easy to relatively ok (safe for yourself) to drive like a maniac when everyone else is driving ok.
I think using the term accidents hides those dynamics more.
Edit: I'd like to note that I think that this a useful mental model to have, not necessarily the correct model. And there's definitely more nuance than I expressed. Also, I'm not sold on the criminalization part - I do think that a terminology shift might help.
Where I live, it is generally true that many drivers are occasionally reckless, endangering lives in obvious ways, and this recklessness is winked at by our present driving culture. It's an error.
Not to mention, all other users of that device, as in "bloody cyclists, always going through red lights and riding on the pavement" etc. Even more weirdly, blaming cyclists for motor traffic congestion and pollution, as if cars don't do those things all on their own. (Both these memes rely on "bicycles hold up the traffic," with the second adding "which causes the cars to be less efficient and produce more pollution.")
I got forced off the road once, learned my lesson, and now I take the lane in similar situations. You are far safer with an angry driver behind you who knows you are there, and wants to kill you figuratively but not literally.
Cars incentivize drivers to take risks with other people's lives, but drivers will almost never kill deliberately if you make the choice black and white for them.
This training was changed a while ago, and is now called "EVIP" - Emergency Vehicle _Incident_ Prevention.
Anyone who spends some time observing the news in New York - a city with a fairly low (relative) car ownership rate - would immediately notice how even the most shocking, violent, absurd automobile collisions are not just referred to as "accidents" but referred to as distinct forces of nature apart from their drivers. It's always the machine that did the colliding, the maiming and the killing... there is never any agency or responsibility given to the driver. (It's as if these cars just decided themselves to jump the curb, or race into oncoming traffic!) Flip it to a bicyclist or motorcyclist who caused a collision, and you'll see the language very precisely target the user, not the device.
Sometimes a collision IS just an accident. But not all collisions are accidents.
It's really important that policy and public perception change to dismiss the exceptions in behavior and risk-taking that we assign to most drivers who aren't drunk. If a driver is caught clearly speeding, turning through occupied crosswalks, or coming out of an assigned lane in an uncontrolled fashion, and if the result is (almost predictably) a collision, it must be stated that the driver chose to violate traffic laws & take harmful risks, which is no accident at all. The converse of this is that a driver who doesn't take these risks may get into accidental collisions, but they won't be of the sort where the car ends upside down very far from the roadway in a 25mph speed limit area.