Crash intelligence
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2009-07-17
Ever wondered why two people killed in a plane crash get more attention than 100 killed in road crashes? Safety psychologists might say that there's a "dread factor" connected with plane crashes that we don't feel about driving. We're not used to flying, but driving is an everyday kind of thing we're very familiar with, so we don't fear road crashes so much - this despite the fact that risk on the roads is far higher than risk on an airline.
Whatever the reasons, plane crashes get a lot more attention than automobile crashes. Just about every crash involving American aircraft gets intense scrutiny from organizations such as the National Transportation Safety Board.
When a plane crashes, experts examine every detail until the cause and all related factors are determined. This information then loops back into the system and is generated into changes designed to ensure that such crashes never happen again.
Road crashes, on the other hand, are typically investigated by police, usually with the goal of fixing the blame and possibly laying charges.
However, all that could change in England if the government implements suggestions in a recent report from the Royal Automobile Club Foundation, a research branch of the Royal Auto Club. The Foundation is calling on the government to establish road crash investigation teams similar to those now being widely used for aircraft and rail crashes.
The report's author, Dr. Chris Elliot, maintains that the police role often neglects in-depth investigation of crashes in order to expedite the legal resolution of crash cases. "Speed was a factor," police will say, or maybe alcohol. Often the blame for a crash is pinned on easy to identify driver errors such as "failed to yield right of way," "excessive speed," or "disobeyed sign." The RAC wants to change that and have specialist accident investigation teams probe deeper for actual causes.
"We have to challenge the global trend towards criminalising accidents and their investigation," Dr. Elliott said.
The RAC Foundation says lessons are not being learned from the deaths on Britain's roads. A road accident investigation body, it maintains, would not seek to blame but to find deeper causes that could lead to improvements in policy, traffic management, or even changes in road or vehicle design.
The report gives the example of a driver who was sentenced to three years in jail after his truck hit a stationary car on the M6 motorway in October, 2008. Six family members were killed in that collision.
Police blamed the crash on a lapse on concentration on the part of the driver. A crash investigation team could have looked at many other factors and possibly suggested remedies. Dr Elliot has questioned whether the driver's lapse was the root cause of the accident. "Motorways are very safe when traffic is flowing smoothly," he said, but a disruption in flow can cause serious problems.
Specialist investigators, he implied, might have come up with changes that could prevent those problems.
Editor's note: A 1994 article published on Drivers.com addresses just this issue in relation to a driver charged with ploughing into a group of 13 brightly dressed cyclists in broad daylight on a flat, open road in Ontario, Canada.
Comments to this article have been disabled.
