Road safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars, and the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board offers proof that they’re right.
News stories overwhelmingly (but often subtly) shift blame onto pedestrians and cyclists, by treating crashes as isolated incidents, and by failing to include input from planners, engineers, and other road safety experts.
Sentence structure and word choice matter. “A pedestrian was hit by a car” centers the victim getting hit. Reports may describe a vehicle doing something rather than a driver (‘‘a car jumped the curb’’ versus ‘‘a driver drove over the curb’’). The use of object-based language was particularly jarring in the case of hit-and-run collisions where ‘the vehicle drove away.
Read the article at CityLab.