I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction that vision zero finds more appealing. E.g. in the first article we should view the woman as a vulnerable road user, bearing no responsibility for being struck by a vehicle even though video evidence shows that she fell into the street.
Respectfully, I think you're demonstrating the sort of thinking the corpus of research surrounding this seeks to shine a spotlight on: blaming the victim, rather than focusing on safe and forgiving design.
Should our built environment be such that falling down in public should end your life? Do people deserve to die simply because they want to cross the street? Why do we design residential neighborhoods where parents are afraid of letting their kids play outside due to traffic? Do drivers of 4,000+ lbs of steel and glass bear greater responsibility than pedestrians and bicyclists.
In the article you mention with the woman falling into the street, the article makes no mention of street design. Further, emphasis is placed on the victim, but nothing is said of the driver.
- What is the speed limit on that road? Fast-moving vehicles will require faster reaction time and longer stopping distances. Maybe areas that mix traffic with VRUs need to be reworked.
- Did the driver appear to make any effort to stop? If so, why doesn't the article mention it if they already have video evidence? If not, did the driver not see the woman? Was the driver distracted?
- Did poor illumination contribute to this collision? (If so, that's a design element: street lighting).
> I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction that vision zero finds more appealing.
I'm posting this to demonstrate my work and seek honest and meaningful criticism to improve the tool and help improve public discourse around a public safety matter that is killing 30k-40k people per year in the U.S., and injuring millions. You can avoid the underhanded and snarky quip.
Calling them "editorial anti-patterns" because they don't frame the discussion how you would like it to be framed is... well, an antipattern in itself.
Let me be clear: Your goal of improving road safety is laudable, and the aspects your tool highlights are conceivably a way to achieve that. But priming visitors to expect "editorial anti-patterns" and then instead presenting "insufficiently biased-to-the-pedestrian" snippets is dishonest.
While there are recommendations in there I fully support (e.g. "highlight systematic problems"), I am particularly put off by repeated suggestions like "the driver hit the cyclist": Unless the driver itself physically made contact with the cyclist, this is between inaccurate and confusing. It sounds like a fist fight broke out when the fundamental happening was someone being injured by sudden contact with a vehicle.
You can still involve the driver in the sentence if needed, but please don't advocate for confusing reporting in the name of unconditionally blaming individuals.
Also, suggestion for an addition: If you want to improve road safety, you could also recommend report on the maintenance status of the vehicle (e.g. were the brakes well-serviced?).
I certainly have a lot more work to do over the next few weeks to improve the tool, and I think much of your comment will be addressed once I place a lot more weight on Framing (see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842314).
For your "driver hit the cyclist" example, I would like to avoid confusion that there was a physical altercation like a fist fight between the driver and cyclist. However, I stand by the sentence structure, because I don't want to personify or give agency to vehicles (e.g. "vehicle hit the cyclist") when it's the driver who is in control, and focusing on driver calls into question more thematic elements like distracted driving, speeding, visibility and lighting conditions, etc.
Is there a way you'd recommend rephrasing "driver hit the cyclist" to satisfy both our suggestions?
> Calling them "editorial anti-patterns" because they don't frame the discussion how you would like it to be framed is
To be clear, I'm not trying to force my desired framing on authors or inject bias into articles. I am simply working off of the research I've seen, such as Editorial Patterns in Bicyclist and Pedestrian Crash Reporting [1] and all the other citations in that paper, that there is a very real and measurable effect on the language used in these articles and the readers' perception on blame and preventative measures.
However, I am certainly thinking about the feedback I've received from everyone in this thread.
> If you want to improve road safety, you could also recommend report on the maintenance status of the vehicle (e.g. were the brakes well-serviced?).
That sounds like an interesting idea. I know that vehicle status can contribute to crashes, and legislation has been enacted to improve this. For example, all vehicles now require tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) because improper tire pressure was leading to lots of crashes. Back-up cameras are required because people, particularly small children, were being run over when in reverse. States have different requirements for periodic vehicle safety inspections (in New York State where I live it's once per year).
If a crash is being reported involving older vehicles, maybe journalists could mention if those vehicle predate certain safety mandates. For example, vehicles before 2007 in the U.S. may not have TPMS [2]
You're right that the intent is not to make the reporting more neutral, but you are missing the point -- the reporting is not neutral to begin with.
Take an example from the tool:
- The SUV crashed into the woman.
vs
- The driver crashed into the woman.
It is not that one of these statements is "neutral" while the other one is biased. In both cases, the author is making a choice of emphasis.
What Vision Zero advocates is that the former's emphasis is the wrong one, and that ascribing more agency (not necessarily blame, but agency) to drivers is the right emphasis to take. But no one is saying that that the choice of words is not subjective either way.
Yeah, this is a little odd to me. The app frames itself as a way to improve reporting, but the way it intends to improve it is by imposing an inherently less neutral position on the language used. There's no fact-checking going on here that would lead the program to decide the original report was incorrect and needed updating, except that it doesn't frame the story in the designer's point of view. An extremely postmodern app.
It's possible (and not unlikely) that this is how more news will be processed in the future.
To be fair: The model does not appear to automate remediation. It just highlights problems.
Also: If all of this is done toward the goal of reducing vehicle-related pedestrian deaths, maybe the dictionary says that's technically a bias, but I have a hard time seeing the argument that its a reprehensible one. Pedestrians may bear some responsibility; the driver is not always at fault; at the end of the day, a pedestrian has never killed a driver. The point here isn't/shouldn't be about fault; its about underscoring a power imbalance.
Have you ever heard the old saying: If the team succeeds, its everyone's success; if the team fails, its the manager's failure? Same thing. In situations of power imbalance, it is Good to bias fault toward power. As they say: with great power, comes great responsibility. Most drivers on American roads have zero sense of responsibility.
If someone collapses into the street, the driver should be able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast. Who I can think to blame here:
* The auto manufacturer for not having sensors to detect this.
* The city for making car dependent areas
* The city for making roads that have cars drive so fast by pedestrians, that the pedestrian can die if hit
* The driver for not driving more reasonably
* The city for not having a barrier between the sidewalk and the road, China has these in a lot of areas, a curb with a hedge between the side walks and roads, or a fence.
The pedestrian who collapses is the last to blame in my view.
The duration between when the pedestrian collapses and when the driver runs over the pedestrian is not as relevant as you seem to be implying. If someone is standing in a crosswalk in broad daylight and falls over, even if the pedestrian collapses 0.1 seconds before someone runs them over that doesn't leave the driver blameless. Why, in broad daylight, in the middle of a crosswalk, was a driver 0.1 seconds away from running over a pedestrian? That sounds like poor road design, poor driving, or another factor. The same logic applies even as we worsen the conditions: if it was dark, where was the lighting? If the pedestrian "suddenly appeared" from behind an obstacle, why is there an obstacle that close to a road and why can a pedestrian get so close that they can "appear" from behind that obstacle?
Roads should be designed so that pedestrians cannot accidentally end up 0.1 seconds (or pick your duration) from being crushed by a driver. And drivers, state-licensed machine operators, should face an incredibly high bar of scrutiny when it comes to damaging pedestrians. Yes this probably means very different road designs than the ones we have now, that is one of the end goals of this kind of effort.
This is the key point of the research and the tool I built, and clearly I still have some work to do on making this clear on my site:
The objective is not to shift blame from one party to the other, even if its shifting from VRUs to drivers. The important thing is that we emphasize that all car crashes have a cause and known solutions! Nearly all news articles miss this point, and tend to place blame (even inadvertently) on the parties involved rather than discuss how to prevent future incidents from happening.
FWIW, one way in which you lost me early on was framing it as VRU vs driver. I don't see it in such simple terms. There are road users. It is not always the pedestrian that is killed. Sometimes it is another driver. And pedestrians can absolutely be the cause of a wreck where the driver dies. Not to mention, someone can be a VRU now, and a driver in a few minutes, then a VRU again.
There are lots of good reasons to make roads safer, lots of methods for doing so, and none of them require making drivers the villains.
Exactly this. The human-factors-engineering take is that these should be mutually exclusive:
- a driver should be able to brake if a person falls suddenly (streets)
- a person is isolated from/ is incapable of falling suddenly into oncoming traffic (roads)
It's the same reason highways are fenced off, extended to streets and roads. A big part of the problem is America's reliance on stroads: too fast to be hospitable for non-drivers, insufficiently isolated to protect non-drivers.
Perhaps if she is struck then the drivers were going too fast? Maybe the speed limit should be lowered. Perhaps the street could be designed in a safer way to make this less likely to happen. Calling everything an accident is ignoring the actual causes.
If I see a cyclist one of the things I do is slow down and give them space specifically because bicyclists do occasionally fall. A good chunk of my awareness is also assigned to evaluating how they're riding in order to anticipate any kind of problem. The fact that most motorists don't believe there's any kind of responsibility for everyone to behave similarly is a problem.
Changing your behavior gives the cyclists and the road users around you (other cars, pedestrians looking for a spot to cross, etc, etc) the impression that you're a skittish or novice driver and are uncomfortable with the situation. This puts them on alert that you might do something unexpected (you are presumably a novice after all). This takes attention away from all the other things that demand their attention and reduces overall situational awareness.
The best favor you can do all other traffic is to be as predictable and unremarkable in your actions as possible so that they may reliably plan their actions around yours.
I don't know why this other person is claiming that altering your driving based on what's happening on the road is a bad thing. Not adapting to the conditions is how many crashes happen in the first place.
All that other stuff in this thread about safer road design is really about removing the need to think about how to drive. So instead of making it so drivers need to give cyclists room, safe road design would just give them that room. But in the absence of those safer designs, people just need to drive more safely.
My point is you look like a novice in the eyes of the other drivers because the only information they have is that you're having a harder time than everyone else passing the cyclist(s).
>You can absolutely react to hazards without appearing skittish, which also alerts other traffic to the hazard if they're paying close attention.
> My point is you look like a novice in the eyes of the other drivers because the only information they have is that you're having a harder time than everyone else passing the cyclist(s).
In my experience, this is because the other drivers are just rolling the dice and passing on blind curves or passing in the same lane with barely any clearance. It's not an example of good driving ... but it is predictable.
Imagine this were a workplace: some kind of suspended catwalk where accidentally falling off it is fatal. It would be an OSHA violation not to have guard rails to prevent this from occurring. Likewise, if this is a road where cars are moving too quickly to stop in time to avoid fatally hitting someone who falls onto the road, there ought to be a barrier between the pavement and the road except at designated crossing points.
Who's being obtuse? It looks like neither you nor the parent comment assign blame to the woman that the driver struck. From here, it looks like you are in agreement.
The parent comment didn't even say one way or another if the driver who struck the woman should get any blame...
