The Road Collision Reporting Guidelines should take their own advice
A few months ago, former Green Party leader, Jenny Jones tweeted about the use of the word “accident”. In her view, accidents are adverse events that are unavoidable.
I thought that was odd. That had never been my understanding of the word.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow, and was promptly bombarded with approximately a zillion replies drawing my attention to the Road Collision Reporting Guidelines. The guidelines are a [presumably] well-meaning resource — put together, unasked-for, by “freelance journalist”, Laura Laker, working in conjunction with the Active Travel Academy — to help her colleagues “improve” the way they report on road collisions.
Most of its recommendations are so unremarkable as to be banal:
“At all times be accurate, say what you know and, importantly, what you don’t know.”
But there are a couple that are worthy of comment. The first echoes Jones’s view about the word “accident”:
It could… mean avoiding use of the term ‘accident’, which risks making crashes seem inevitable and unavoidable.
Could it, I thought? So I tested the water by running a couple polls on Twitter.
These polls were far from scientific. Certainly if I were reading for a Doctorate in lexicology I think my supervisor would want better — small sample, self-selecting, and so on. But this is what the polls showed.
Literally nobody who responded thought the word “accident” means “unavoidable”. Nobody.
So, I tried again. Perhaps I had inadvertently loaded the question or something. But again, nobody thought the word “accident” meant “couldn’t have been prevented”. And, more importantly, only a quarter of people thought that it means “where nobody is to blame” [we’ll come to this shortly].
On the face of it, Laker’s concerns about the word “accident” seem unfounded. It seems odd to me to go to the bother of writing some guidelines to fix a problem without bothering to do anything to find out whether it was a real — rather than imagined — problem. But that just me.
No matter — substituting the word “accident” with “collision” might sound a bit clunky, but it’s not exactly a hardship, is it?
But what the “accident vs collision” debate does do is give you a window into the soul of what comes next.
Collisions [if you must] don’t just happen. Even a mechanical failure or a medical incident has a cause. A blow-out has a cause: excessive speed; a badly worn tyre; a nail in the road; and so on. This is obviously true. It’s also obviously true that the most common cause of collisions are human factors.
This brings us neatly to the second recommendation of the Road Collision Reporting Guidelines that is worthy of note:
This could mean describing all human actors in collisions neutrally, such as “driver and pedestrian in collision”, rather than, say, “pedestrian hit by car”, which research shows unintentionally shifts focus to the only named human actor, and implicitly attaches a degree of blame.
The guidelines were not intended to be a scholarly work so I’m not going to quibble generally about lack of references. But this is a huge claim:
“research shows [referring to the vehicle instead of the driver] unintentionally shifts focus to the only named human actor, and implicitly attaches a degree of blame.”
What?!
If we’re to believe Laker, saying “pedestrian hit by car” implies that the pedestrian is at fault. Well, Laura, not to me it doesn’t. It means only that a pedestrian was hit by a car.
A stated aim for the guidelines is “improving accuracy and clarity”. So, what happens if adopt Laura’s recommendation and say instead that the pedestrian was hit by a driver?
Somewhat predictably we have introduced ambiguity. Some people assumed that the driver had got out of their vehicle and bopped the pedestrian on the nose. Others didn’t know what to think at all. Nobody at all thought that the pedestrian had been hit by a lorry — which is interesting in itself, as we didn’t mention what the driver was a driver of.
So I tried again. Let’s make it clear that the vehicle was a lorry, I thought:
I’m genuinely not quite sure what happened here, but more than four in ten respondents thought the pedestrian had been punched. It’s possible that “driver of a lorry” was interpreted as an occupational description — though I’d have thought that more likely if I had used the phrase “lorry driver”. Whatever the cause, objectively-speaking, this formulation has even less clarity — even though it includes more information (the type of vehicle).
For completeness, I ran the poll one more time. And, guess what, the clearest way to say that a pedestrian was hit by a lorry is to say that a pedestrian was hit by a lorry. Who’d have thunk?
So if the guidelines fail in their own terms (additional clarity) then what are they for?
The foreword by David G Davies, Executive Director of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, illuminates:
Journalists also have a responsibility… If we are to achieve a fairer, healthier, more environmentally friendly society… we need roads where everyone is and feels safe.
Whether or not journalists should be activists is a topic for someone else. For our purposes it’s enough to acknowledge that these guidelines are just that — activism. Laker isn’t interested in “describing all human actors in collisions neutrally” — she thinks that drivers are getting off the hook.
One respondent to my surveys was kind enough to share some of his thoughts, so I took the opportunity to quiz him about this worldview. I played back to him what I had understood him to be saying:
So, in your view, the act of even using a car is an aggravating factor — even if the collision was caused by a mechanical failure or medical incident?
“Yes”, he said:
If you choose the most lethal mode for your journey, that choice makes you responsible for any harm you cause. Mechanicals, medical incidents & children running out are made fatal by your choice. Walk, cycle or take the bus and you will not hurt anybody.
I cannot fault the logic of the argument. But I do wonder if it’s a particularly useful way of thinking given that so much of what we do as humans is harmful (or potentially harmful) to each other or to the environment.
I pushed a little harder:
In your view, making the driver (as opposed to the vehicle) the subject of the sentence is a justified and proper way of ascribing liability? It’s not an attempt at neutrality?
“Yes! I am not neutral on this subject!” came the reply. And, of course, neither is Laura.
Here’s one of the suggested examples from the guidelines:
Instead of:
After hitting one person, the BMW then crossed the road before mounting the kerb, and forced members of the public to take evasive action after it drove along the pavement
Consider:
After hitting one person, the BMW driver then crossed the road before mounting the kerb, and forced members of the public to take evasive action after they/he/ she drove along the pavement
The problem here isn’t just that the proposed wording makes it unclear what actually happened [Was the BMW driver in the car when he crossed the road?] — it’s that it over-steps the mark in terms of the agency it gives to the driver.
Assuming the incident was not a repeat of the Westminster Bridge terror attack, it makes absolutely no sense to talk about the driver driving along the pavement. The events leading up to the incident might have been a choice — speeding, checking their SMS messages, even choosing to drive and not to take the bus — but when you’ve already lost control of the vehicle you have no agency.
Collisions on our roads are typically only newsworthy at two points: immediately after they have happened; and, once an investigation has been concluded. Immediately after a collision, as the guidelines acknowledge, there isn’t going be a lot of information:
Often emergency services will release scant information and key details won’t emerge until an inquest or court case.
So, Laura, please take you own advice and just “say what you know” — which is that a pedestrian was hit by a car — and leave ascribing liability or blame until after the investigation.
