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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

Just for the record, people who study the problem space concerning traffic safety have disavowed the word "accident" because it all too often dismisses the preventable root causes that can be learned from here.

context:

* https://laist.com/2020/01/03/car_crash_accident_traffic_viol...

* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/04/associated-press-caut...

* https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/04/05/laspatas-ordinance-wo...

It'd be nice if folks here would be mindful of the role language plays. Here's also a preemptive "intention doesn't matter" because the first post I share covers that in the section "The Semantics of Intention", where it argues that the decisions have already been made in both the designs of our streets and in the choices people make behind the wheel, and those have known and changeable outcomes.

last edit I swear, but a good catchphrase I've seen recently that I'll be pinching is "Accidents happen, crashes don’t have to."

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> Here's also a preemptive "intention doesn't matter" because the first post I share covers that in the section "The Semantics of Intention", where it argues that the decisions have already been made in both the designs of our streets and in the choices people make behind the wheel, and those have known and changeable outcomes.

The argument made here isn't very good. "Traffic violence" implies intention to do violence. Intention to speed is indeed intention to incur the risk of harm, but that risk is in general quite low, whereas 'traffic violence' strongly implies direct intention to cause harm. Intention to take risks that have harm as a potential consequence is not equivalent. It may be true that 'accident' cuts too strongly in the other direction, but the correct term is clearly closer to 'accident' than it is to 'violence'.

Putting others at risk is harm. The amount of harm was larger than expected, but that doesn’t excuse the intent to cause harm anymore than someone dying during a beating is excused because they didn’t mean it.

Reckless Endangerment for example is inherently a criminal offense even if no one was injured.

No, intent matters. Intending to kill someone with a car is punished far more severely than killing someone because you were speeding and lost control.

That’s irrelevant. While attempting to kill someone is considered a worse offense their both harm.

To be more clear, the amount of harm harm intended is the only difference. Manslaughter is still illegal even if the penalty for murder is higher. The difference is simply in the degree of harm intended not in the lack of intent to cause harm. If someone dies through because say you happened to have parked a normal car in a normal parking space then that’s perfectly fine, but kill someone because you where speeding and that’s your fault.

You can't have an accident without a risk of accident first.

Risk and harm aren't always inherently crimes. For example a cosmetic surgeon harms people and exposes them to unnecessary risks. In contact sports people willingly subject themselves to risks of serious injury. Same when people drive on public roads. The degree of risk is critical, hence the "reckless" requirement for the crime.

The critical difference is in sport and cosmetic surgery the other party willingly puts themselves at a specific level of risk. It’s not accepted for a cosmetic surgeon to increase risk by randomly preforming a second unrelated surgery while their under without telling the patient. Similarly, nobody agrees to have people do 200 MPH on a public road, in fact all speeding is breaking the law the only thing that changes is penalties getting more severe.

It seems you missed both my points.

1. People do indeed willingly put themselves at risk by driving on a public road, which was in the same list with the cosmetic surgeon. And doing so also puts others at risk.

2. The degree of risk is what matters. Ergo while both obeying the speed limit and driving 200 mph (assuming it was possible) puts others at risk, the latter risk is considered to high a degree.

It is not a fundamental choice between risk and no risk, but between unacceptably-high risk and acceptable risk.

Speeding is by definition both an unacceptable risk and illegal.

Even driving the speed limit is only acceptable in ideal conditions. Driving at those speeds is illegal in rain, fog, snow, etc as it puts others at what is considered an unacceptable risk.

You and many others may decide to ignore public safety and the law, but that doesn’t somehow make it safe. While you personally may feel homicide is a reasonable trade off for convince, don’t assume everyone that happens to be near a public street and who’s life your willing to sacrifice, agrees with you. The occasional person killed in their own homes might have considered it a reasonable trade off, but we can’t ask them. EX: https://www.wfft.com/content/news/Woman-in-Fort-Wayne-killed...

Another miss. Now you have it backwards. I am not defending speeding (good lord). I am pointing out that legal behavior is risky too. Therefore your point about risk equating to harm is useless.

Plenty of things are acceptable harm. Exhaling CO2 in the same room with somebody is actually physically harmful but nobody generally worries that breathing becomes lightly more difficult when you’re around. The bounds for acceptable harm seem invisible, but they definitely exist.

Therefore some levels of risk being acceptable is in no way a counter argument.

I agree with everything you said except the last statement, which is an assertion, not logic.

Since you agree that one cannot avoid creating risk, what is the logical value of introducing the idea that risk is "harm"? You can just as well talk of unacceptable risks, rather than "unacceptable harms". Further, you apparently agree that all "accidents" result from parties taking a risk, whether small acceptable risks (more rarely, no doubt) or by larger unacceptable risks. So what point are you left making about the existence of "accidents"?

The last statement was countering your train of logic, it wasn’t support for the idea on it’s own.

I am not introducing the idea that risk is harm, I am acknowledging that society has agreed that risk is harm most clearly in the case of Endangerment laws. Therefore that must extend to all levels of risk not simply the most extreme cases. Therefore someone deciding to put others at risk must as generally agreed by society be seen as willingly doing harm to others.

As to “accidents” the outcome may have been undesirable by the person at fault by speeding, failing to maintain proper distance, failing to maintain your car, driving in unsafe conditions, driving when you’re incapable of maintaining control etc are hardly accidental. Their the result of deliberate risk taking with others lives. When you anti up the health and safety of pedestrians you can’t then say their death was anything but your fault.

That said, sure their might be a few hundred actual accidental deaths in the US from manufacturing defects, or undiagnosed medical conditions. But, calling a drunk driver hitting someone by going down the highway in the wrong direction an accident is a completely meaningless, at that point just call it a bad thing and move on.

You can't counter my train of logic by using the same points I used to support it, at least not without providing something more. Both "high risk" and "low risk" behaviors are qualitatively the same; they create a risk. They only differ quantitatively in the amount. And while you have been running for several posts with the idea that a high risk behavior is a sure cause of an accident, most are also generally very unlikely to cause an accident in absolute terms (that's usually why people take such risks, after all), making them very low risk compared to actual intentional violence (the point of the poster you responded to). Drawing a line for legal/illegal risks just allows us to punish people for taking risks we don't want them to take. It is still meaningful to call it an accident to identify these qualitative similarities.

That’s why I specifically said low levels of harm are acceptable.

Your argument boils down to saying it’s ok to play Russian Roulette with unwilling people if their is X chambers in the gun, but not ok if their is X-1 chambers in the gun. I am saying it’s never ok to do so but there is a polite agreement where people ignore low levels of harm based on a host of factors.

This is consistent with events that have already happened and events that have yet to happen. You can reasonably argue the risk was low for events that didn’t happen, as in the building was strong enough see it’s still standing. In that case speeding cameras should be legally different than a cop pulling someone over. The cop is stopping you from speeding, but the camera doesn’t.

On the other hand if risk is inherently a harm then past or future harm is irrelevant. Which is how things treated, you can’t argue the outcome when you have put others at risk.

Every crash that is not deliberate is an accident. Even if from negligence (drunks) the actual crash is accidental. Ascribing intention to every mistake, turning every tragic death into a homicide, ends in dark places. We may hate the person whose mistake causes a crash. We dont make them a murderer.

> Every crash that is not deliberate is an accident.

I don't agree, probably because we have different meanings and implications around the word "accident".

For me at least, there's some subtle semantics surrounding the word "accident" which are at the very least unhelpful in the context of traffic incidents.

There are lots of incidents which are not "accidents", they're the result of a driver choosing to do something, or choosing to not to do something.

A crash shouldn't be described as "They accidentally ran a red light", or "They accidentally went too fast into a curve", or "They accidentally failed to notice the pedestrian".

In those scenarios, "intention" doesn't matter, and the driver fucked up and cause the crash and should be held accountable/responsible. There's no wriggle room there for reducing the responsibility by saying "accidents happen, it wasn't my fault..." There was no "accident", there was a fuckup on someone's part.

Motorcyclists here in Australia have a term "SMIDSY" - which stands for "Sorry mate, I didn't see you", which is pretty much guaranteed to be the first thing out of a driver's mouth after they've just driven straight into you. It's not that they didn't "see you", it's that they didn't bother looking, or that they looked and didn't take any notice. Those are not "accidents". They are fuckups.

>> In those scenarios, "intention" doesn't matter, and the driver fucked up and cause the crash and should be held accountable/responsible. There's no wriggle room there for reducing the responsibility by saying "accidents happen, it wasn't my fault..." There was no "accident", there was a fuckup on someone's part.

Intention absolutely always matters. People often do drive through lights unintentionally. If that is a proximate cause of an accident they are punished for negligence, not murder. Even intentionally driving through a light is a form of negligence. The only intentional crashes happen where people use the vehicle as a weapon[1]. If you deliberately run someone down you are a murderer, whether you broke any traffic laws while doing so is irrelevant. If you kill your wife by deliberately crashing into her, the cops aren't going to write you a speeding ticket while they read you your rights.

[1] There are also rare cases where crashes are deliberately caused by non-drivers. A crash resulting from someone icing a road, throwing a brick at a car from an overpass, or tampering with a vehicle are deliberate crashes even though the driver(s) involved are not at fault. But if the road is icy because of something like a broken water line, it is very possible for nobody to be responsible: a truly blameless accident.

> People often do drive through lights unintentionally. If that is a proximate cause of an accident they are punished for negligence, not murder.

Oh sure. I'm not proposing people who fuck up be treated as murderers. It's just that in my head, saying it's "an accident" is minimising the blame. If you drive through a light unintentionally, that's totally your fault. You should have and could have avoided doing that by paying attention. You're right that it's negligence. I'm less sure than you are that it deserves to be called "an accident". It seems to me way to close to the schoolyard bully claiming "I was just waving my arm around, he put his face in front of my fist."

> But if the road is icy because of something like a broken water line, it is very possible for nobody to be responsible: a truly blameless accident.

I don't live in a place where it freezes, so I'm kinda not the right person to have an opinion here - but I would have thought that if you live/drive somewhere that ice or black ice happens, then there's at least some "driving to the conditions" argument to be made that the driver was negligent in that case?

I guess bottom line there is that to me, negligence is not covered under the term "accident". If the incident should have been avoided by a driver not being negligent, then it wasn't an accident.

(But I'm not a linguist, and am questioning whether that's a widely held opinion. Thinking about it, it's likely because I'm a long-term motorcycle rider. I cannot afford to have "accidents", because they hurt _way_ more than people driving cars having "accidents". I consider myself at fault for any situation _I_ could have avoided by "being less negligent", and perhaps unfairly impose that burden on other drivers as well. But I will none the less get angry when they say "Sorry. It was just an accident" while I'm the one lying bleeding on the road because they were negligent...)

Fellow biker here, and I think you're just stating an arbitrary line.

The first negligent action could be climbing on the bike.

I think I'm safer slowing and rolling through a stop sign in my truck than I am getting on the bike in the first place.

I realize it's different-- causing a threat for others and all. But I think the point stands-- you're just debating where negligence starts.

I tend to agree with the GP. It's an accident anytime it wasn't intentional, even if it's a preventable accident.

> People often do drive through lights unintentionally. If that is a proximate cause of an accident they are punished for negligence, not murder.

No, traffic violations are generally strict liability, intent, or mental state more generally, does not matter.

Sure, if you intend to kill and do, then you will also be guilty of murder, but that is a separate and additional issue.

Liability is not criminality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

> People often do drive through lights unintentionally

Generally this is in the context of driving too fast.

Speeding is a choice. You are either intentionally disregarding your speedometer, or the designers of the street have made it too easy to get to higher rates of speed rather than apply calming designs to slow traffic down (another intentional choice).

The intention is baked in.

If we are going down this route of the semantic of road incidents, then lets commit fully and using the law as it is where I live. Any traffic incident here always involve two people who failed to comply with traffic laws.

A pedestrian crossing a street is required to look for cars and avoid the road if there is a risk for a collision. It is in the law, even if the crossing sign is green. No person has a right to cross a road or driving a car over a crossing. Both individuals is only allowed to do their thing if it can be done without causing an accident.

The same is true for traffic lights. Green does not mean you have a right to drive through, but rather means that drivers are allowed to drive through if such thing is possible without causing a traffic incident. Basically ever single action on the road under any circumstance is qualified under the condition that it won't cause an accident.

Naturally no pedestrian is going to be charged for being hit by a car unless there is some truly extraordinary circumstances, but the intent of the law is to make people understand that traffic is about mutual communication and responsibility.

> Any traffic incident here always involve two people who failed to comply with traffic laws.

Are you sure about that? It would mean that it's technically illegal to cross a road unless you're absolutely certain that there can't be a speeding driver around the next corner who's gonna get to you faster than you can react. Or that you aren't allowed to cross the street at a green light even when all the cars are waiting because you can't actually be certain that a car isn't gonna start driving suddenly and run you over. Or that someone tailgating you is somehow caused in part by you.

It's pretty ridiculous to claim that both sides failed to comply with the laws in every incident.

Yes, 100%, it is illegal to cross the road unless you can be reasonable certain that doing so won't cause an accident.

Look at the perspective of the law maker. The goal is zero traffic accidents, the vision zero as it is called (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero). If pedestrian think that they have a given right to cross the road then there is a risk that people won't apply common sense but rather just step out on the road without looking or thinking.

Similarly, the driver of the car is always guilty of negligence, regardless if the pedestrian is at fault. This include if the pedestrian walk against red. Just because the other party is also at fault does not diminish the obligations of the driver to not hit a pedestrian. Regardless of traffic light, the driver is not allowed to drive over the crossing unless they are reasonable certain to not cause a traffic incident.

In the extreme, if both driver and pedestrian wanted to be 100% guarantied to not cause an accident then both would simply stand still. In practice both hopefully act with common sense and work together to avoid an accident, which happens to align with the goal of those who wrote the law.

>> Any traffic incident here always involve two people who failed to comply with traffic laws.

> Are you sure about that?

There are at least single vehicle incidents which do not involve two people. Over cooking a corner and spearing off into the scenery is just one person fucking up.

But I agree with the thrust of the GPs argument, in any two (or more) vehicle incident, there was probably one party who “caused” it, and another party who should have avoided it. Not _every_ incident, but I’d argue that it applies to the vast majority of multiple vehicle incidents.

Just so you're aware, there is a crime known as negligent homicide (although it's usually treated as manslaughter instead of murder).

When you drive at speed (above ~25-30 mph for someone not protected by a giant steel cocoon, I think ~50 mph for someone who is), you are now in control of a loaded weapon that will kill or seriously injure anyone against whom it goes off. If you are unable, or unwilling, to handle a loaded weapon with the requisite amount of care to avoid negligence, then perhaps you are not deserving of the privilege of handling that weapon.

I am aware. It was on the test.

>> negligent homicide (although it's usually treated as manslaughter instead of murder)

Not usually. It can never be treated as murder. If it was negligent then the killing lacked indent per se.

>> If you are unable, or unwilling, to handle a loaded weapon with the requisite amount of care to avoid negligence

Good luck selling that to the AARP. People have medical incidents behind the wheel every day. A heart attack/stroke/seizure can easily result in a crash, including deaths. We don't lock people up for that unless they were negligent, unless they had some reason to know it would happen. Everyone one of us may suffer an aortic dissection or brain aneurysm at any moment. That's why large commercial aircraft have two pilots. Driving while human is not negligence.

Criminal negligence applies when you could and should have taken steps to prevent the incident but failed to do so. Having a heart attack while driving is not negligence, unless you are somebody who has a medical condition that makes a random heart attack while driving a likely foreseeable outcome (say, angina).

That said, many car crashes are probably caused by negligent actions anyways. Someone who is speeding through a stop sign without stopping is negligent in doing so, especially because the kind of people who do that once tend to do it all the time.

To further your position and to loop it back to the original point about crash vs accident: even in the case of an AARP member who had a heart attack that leads to a collision, accident is not the right word. There is nothing accidental about it. We know that building infrastructure that requires driving into old age will result in deadly collisions, yet we continue to choose to invest to grow this infrastructure. The resulting incident is a crash or collision, not an accident. A good book on the subject is Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow.

> Every crash that is not deliberate is an accident.

If you were to define the word "accident" as "everything not deliberate", then, sure ok. But that's not how the word is typically used.

There are vanishingly few real accidents in traffic. Nearly all crashes are also not intentional.

The vast middle is crashes due to driver incompetence or negligence. Not intentional, but totally avoidable if the driver had done their job (pay attention, be lucid, have suitable skills).

People like to call things "accidents" because it shifts blame to destiny. But reality is that nearly all crashes could have been avoided by the driver.

> risk is in general quite low

Let's phrase it differently. Suppose you have a button. If you press it you can save a total of just under 5 days over your lifetime of driving, but there's a ~1.5% chance somebody instantly dies. Do you press the button?

I think most people make that choice because they don't understand how dangerous their actions are, not because they think that's an acceptable return on investment (and in that sense, you're probably right that "violence" isn't quite the right word), but the fact remains that we have a system where pedestrians can't feel safe crossing the road at a crosswalk at a stop sign in front of a stopped car, and almost all pedestrian deaths would be prevented by just not breaking traffic laws or otherwise driving recklessly. I definitely think "accident" cuts too strongly in the other direction.

A brief reminder just in case anyone reading doesn't know yet and will change their driving behavior positively in response:

- Blowing through stop signs kills people (if you don't have enough visibility, stop first and _then_ pull forward)

- Speeding drastically increases the chance of killing pedestrians you hit; please at least slow down in residential areas?

- Tailgating kills people

- Texting while driving kills people

> The word "accident" suggests nothing could have been done to predict or prevent the collision.

I mean, that's clearly rubbish, isn't? When I accidentally shut my thumb in the door, I use the word accident to indicate I didn't do it intentionally. It doesn't minimise the fact that I was a blithering idiot and could have avoided a broken thumb with the minimum of attention.

I happen to agree (I've had this exact debate before), but to a lot of people it's a loaded term.

The language is definitely a bit tricky: think about how many accidents are caused by driving aggressively or choosing to use a phone while driving. Nobody chose the accident but it was a direct, easily predicted consequence of a deliberate choice and wouldn’t have happened if they had followed the law. That seems to be rather different from you hitting your finger with a hammer, unless perhaps you were trying to check Facebook at the same time like the average commuter.

To me it's just a matter of stakes. No one will die if you close your door without taking care. On a road that's a realistic threat so people should account for it in how they act. For me that moves it from accident to negligence (in an everyday language sense, not legalese).

The traffic people avoid the word, the people that study commute patterns and write policy papers about how reducing the number of vehicles reduces accidents (have a phd for that one). The people who design crumple zones, who decide traffic light brightness, who build the brakes that prevent crashes and the seatbelts that make them survivable ... the people who represent 99% of your safety still call them accidents.

Wow, how unhelpful. I don't know the acceptable way to call this out, but how about focusing on substance instead of just bringing pedantic language stuff into the mix. I see this happening a lot, when people can't find a real way to contribute, they start debating the position of commas or whether it should be called inquiry or enquiry or whatever. It distracts from real debate, and maybe gets you some attention (lots of bureaucratic leader types love this sort of thing) but it's really wasting everybody's time.

(Edit, the irony isn't lost on me of providing a low value comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion in response to one I accuse of something similar. But I've seen so much time wasted and so many people getting ahead and in some cases basically build a career on engaging with these kind of language things instead of doing any actual work, I wanted to bring it up)

His comment added a lot more to the conversation that your comment (or mine.)

Sometimes pedantism is important and useful. In this case I have no problems imagining that we could reframe our understanding of how to design traffic systems by reframing the language we use to talk about how those systems fail.

Not that I necessarily agree, but I don't think you can dismiss the argument by waving your hands and saying "pedantism is bad".

Emergency vehicle driver training (which is acceptable in some states in place of a CDL, and also covers other rules) used to be called "EVAP" (Emergency Vehicle Accident Prevention).

It's now called EVIP (Emergency Vehicle Incident Prevention).

A friend of mine has a saying

"There are no accidents, there are only fuckups. Maybe getting hit by an asteroid would be an accident - but hitting or getting hit by another vehicle, or driving into the scenery, is _always_ a fuckup on somebody's part, not an accident."

(Though I'll bet "people who study the problem space concerning traffic safety" have a more socially/professionally acceptable word for "fuckup")

That's a stupid phrase. I can think of many cases where there was not a fuckup yet vehicles collide. Example: someone has some kind of acute medical issue happen (maybe a seizure) and crashes. Or maybe there is black ice that you cant see. Maybe a truck flings a tiny rock it couldnt see in time into the windshield of a car behind it. It is really easy to come up with examples like this.

> Or maybe there is black ice that you cant see

This deserves expanding upon. You’d rightly assume people who live in cold places know to look for ice on the road.

The only traffic accident my ex was involved in was also the only time I ever saw ice on the road in Lisbon, in 30 years of living there. We saw a pileup, she barely touched the breaks, and we entered a skid. Ended up bumping against a car in the pileup (at pretty low speed so it was harmless). Still — freak accidents do happen.

> I can think of many cases where there was not a fuckup yet vehicles collide.

And yet the examples are extreme cases, which while do happen, are very rarely the cause of crashes.

The vast majority of crashes is not because someone had a seizure, it's because they weren't paying attention or were incompetent.

Right, but if you actually read the parent comment you will notice that "_always_" was used and even emphasized, along with "there are no accidents", and the only example provided of a non-accident is a non-car crash example of a meteorite. My examples are much more plausible, and the list goes on. I came up with those examples in like 5 seconds. The point is that there are lots of cases where it truly was an accident.

> "There are no accidents, there are only fuckups. Maybe getting hit by an asteroid would be an accident - but hitting or getting hit by another vehicle, or driving into the scenery, is _always_ a fuckup on somebody's part, not an accident."

The NTSB openly defines transportation investigations as accidents. The entire purpose of the agency existing is to issue recommendations based on the root cause for transportation accidents to prevent the same thing from happening in the future. Any foreign transportation safety agency counterpart in the world has the exact same definition. Whoever the “people who study the problem space” are it sounds like they are trying to twist language for their own personal beliefs and not really studying the problem at all.

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/ntsb-accident-investigat...

Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puK5CwThaq4

That line in the movie has always stuck with me. It was almost too good, since it was so correct and insightful that there was no real comedy and it took me out out the movie.

Interesting - I never thought about this aspect! This crash was of course 100% preventable by... driving.

> crash was of course 100% preventable by... driving.

By following the guidance indicated to you in the manufacturer's owner's manual that every new car is supplied, yes.

The word "accident," as it pertains to traffic collisions, is actually just translated to "collision" in my head. In no way does my brain understand it to mean that "this was done unintentionally," it instead basically acts as a homonym to the word which has anything to do with intention.

> Just for the record, people who study the problem space concerning traffic safety have disavowed the word "accident" because it all too often dismisses the preventable root causes that can be learned from here

Nah, it's just a line from law enforcement and prosecutors who want to feed more people to the justice system. More convictions means more revenue and career advancement.

People who study safety are not synonymous with law enforcement and prosecutors.

Edit: having previously worked with safety officers in aerospace who take this exact stance on definitions, I can say they aren’t neither law enforcement or very much concerned with putting people into the criminal justice system. Their concern is mainly to understand the systemic root causes that f accidents in order to prevent them from recurring.

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