I subscribe to the school of thought that there is no such thing as a vehicular accident and believe it is time for us to stop using that word when describing car crashes and collisions.
If you are speeding at hit something, you didn’t have an accident but caused a collision. If someone disregards traffic rules and causes a crash, it is not an accident. It is definitely not that if your drunk friend insists on driving and then later on crashes into a tree.
It is not an accident if a teenaged driver slams into a cane truck parked on an unlit roadside because properly designed highways should have designated rest stops and the highway patrol shouldn’t allow parking on the highway. Such an avoidable crash would’ve been caused by multiple failures of government including poor road design, terrible enforcement, poorly maintained lighting, among many other factors.
If two cars collide because some idiot allowed another idiot to construct a road at the apex of a blind curve of a highway, that is not an accident but a result of sheer idiocy. The same thing applies to local governments that allow full-on intersections to be indiscriminately added to supposed “highways.”
If a truck loses its brakes and crashes into motorcyclists, killing a town’s police chief in the process, it is not an accident. It is simply the result of the owner’s failure to properly maintain the vehicle because properly maintained brakes don’t simply fail out of the blue.
If a burning meteor falls into your car while you are traveling at speed, making your vehicle to spin out of control and smash into a school bus full of toddlers and causing it to burst into flames… well maybe we can make an exception and call that an act of God and quite possibly an accident. But that requires the meteor or a lightning bolt to qualify.
The point here is that we should stop describing road crashes and collisions as “accidents” because if you come to really think of it, 99% of the time is what happened wasn’t an accident but the result of human failures. The incident occurred because either the driver, vehicle owner, pedestrian or government failed to do something they should’ve done.
Someone failed to drive properly and responsibly. Someone wasn’t paying attention while driving, probably sending a text or scrolling through FB. Someone didn’t maintain their vehicle properly. Tricycles and small cars are allowed to load 20-foot lengths of rebar or PVC pipe and travel on a highway.
The road wasn’t designed correctly and even after multiple incidents in the area attesting to that flaw, nothing is done to except to put up a sign. Loaded trucks are allowed to park on roadsides, anytime and anywhere. Broken down vehicles are not towed away ASAP and are even allowed to be left on the middle of the road.
Streets are not well lit and traffic signals strangely don’t have yellow lights. Police vehicles proudly sport amazingly blinding blinkers that make it difficult for drivers in their immediate area to see anything else. Hazard lights can be used for anything, signal lights give drivers the power to do anything without checking to see if it is safe to do so, high beams are kept on.
Pedestrian crossing and left turns are allowed at the foot of flyovers. There are no speed limits. Traffic enforcers turn a blind eye to counter flowing and cutting corners. Nobody knows what the hell a stop sign means.
Given all these things and habits that we see on our roads, it is no wonder the authorities love to describe crashes and collisions as “accidents.” The word is convenient because it means nobody is at fault and nothing has to be done. The best excuse in the world to do nothing is that shit simply happens.
We have to stop describing such incidents as accidents because that is the first step to becoming more accountable which leads to measures being taken to ensure those tragedies don’t happen again. The driver should always take responsibility for the car that is simply a dumb machine. If a road turns out to be badly designed, then it has to be redone. A government that loves to demolish and repair perfectly good roads every other election season shouldn’t balk at rerouting the potentially bad roads instead of simply resorting to lazy solution of putting up a sign saying “Danger: Accident Prone Area.” If rules and limits have to be enforced, then someone has to do that job.
It’s not much, but changing how we use one word could change our attitude. It could make more of us decide to take more responsibility every time we use the road, ending up with having less “accidents” to deal with.*
