The traffic crash: a system breakdown
Date: 1998-09-09
The word "accident" is in widespread use to describe crashes and collisions in traffic. But over the past 20 years or so the traffic safety community have been lobbying to eliminate it from their vocabulary. At one driver safety conference a few years ago, speakers were encouraged to contribute a dollar "fine" every time they slipped up and (accidentally) used the word.
The problem with using the word "accident," writes General Motors' senior researcher Leonard Evans in his book Traffic Safety and the Driver , is that it "conveys a sense that the losses incurred are due to fate and devoid of predictability." The term "crash," on the other hand, opens the way for analytical examination of all the factors involved in roadway collisions, and a search for means to prevent them.
However, any shift in terminology or thinking shouldn't go too far in placing blame on the driver. The task of driving is, after all, highly complex, and there are so many factors that can conspire to create the conditions for a crash that it would be unfair to expect drivers to always be on top of them. Adding considerable weight to this point of view is the fact that drivers generally receive little or no formal training for their increasingly difficult task. And the training that is available is, for the most part, decades out of date.
Meanwhile, researchers continue to gather reams of statistics about crashes. Sociologists, psychologists, crash reconstructionists, enforcement agencies and safety advocates of all kinds continue to probe all aspects of crashes in search of new knowledge about how, why, when and where they happen. The search for solutions goes on. But, as researchers Lawrence Lonero and Kathryn Clinton point out in their report on the effectiveness of various efforts to change driver behavior, there is not likely to be any one "silver bullet" solution. It is the orchestration of an ensemble of efforts that it likely to yield the best results.
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