Stop Saying “Car Accident.” It’s Car Violence.

Stop calling injuries and deaths caused by cars “car accidents.” Let’s start calling it what it is: car violence.

As a student of persuasion and propaganda, I often think about how our word choice shapes our perceptions and opinions.

Our use of the term “car accident” keeps us from addressing a violent and persistent problem that car dependency has created: Car violence is the leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1 to 54.

First, the use of the word accident downplays how awful deaths and injuries caused by cars are.

A toddler wetting the bed is an accident. Spilling your coffee is an accident. This is a very different definition than death and paralyzing injury in an automobile. A pickup truck colliding with a smaller vehicle and killing the person in the smaller vehicle is violence. It’s gruesome and horrible.

Second, the word accident implies a sense of randomness and inevitability, as if to say “accidents happen.” The problem is, we created these conditions.

As a society we’ve enabled and perpetuated car violence at alarming rates. These deaths and injuries are direct consequence of poor urban planning and policy choices. For example:

• We choose to build more stroads in cities, creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. (And therefore dissuading people from choosing cleaner, healthier transit options that are less dangerous to their fellow citizens.)
• We continue to make cars, especially pickup trucks, bigger and bigger. This makes them harder to drive, have more blind spots, and be more likely to kill and mane upon collision.
• We prioritize funding for highway expansions over public transit improvements, forcing more people into cars and onto dangerous roadways.
• We support policies that prioritize parking availability over safe street design, encouraging more car use and congestion, which leads to more crashes.

I could go on. This will not stop until we take accountability for the violence we’ve created, instead of shrugging them off as “accidents.”

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