Death By Collision With People Driving Their Cars Illegally
To echo Dave Alpert’s concern I think it’s deplorable that this is the standard way of describing what happens when illegal driving kills people:
Four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when their car collided with a vehicle that was going the wrong way, Virginia State Police said.
Nobody would ever write “four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 were killed early yesterday in Culpepper County, Va., when their heads collided with bullets that were flying in the wrong direction.
Cars and trucks are, obviously, useful ways of getting around and I expect that people will continue to use them regularly for a long time to come. But equally obviously, fast-moving heavy metal objects are extremely dangerous. The people piloting them have a responsible to be careful with what they’re doing. And people who aren’t careful—especially those people whose carelessly leads to deaths and serious injuries—deserve to be subjected to strong implicit and explicit moral criticism. The common rhetoric of “accidents” the use of the passive voice serve to obscure what’s happening and where the responsibility lies.
70 Responses to “Death By Collision With People Driving Their Cars Illegally”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
And if the person driving the other vehicle was having a heart attack? This seems to be too broad a prescription. If the driver was drunk? By all means. If there isn’t enough information about the incident, passive voice is fine by me.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
if the person is having a heart attack you can call that out. it’s a rare case. duh.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Did you see the 2007 movie Hot Fuzz? From IMDB:
[Sergeant Angel has told Danny Butterman that Official Vocabulary no longer refers to car crashes as accidents: They are now called collisions]
Danny Butterman: Hey, why can’t we say “accident,” again?
Nicholas Angel: Because “accident” implies there’s nobody to blame.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
lol regarding the Duh. My point is that if the particulars of the accident aren’t yet fully known, go with the passive voice. Any reason not to?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
What if the guy going the wrong way was genuinely confused? It seems to me that unless the intent was to commit murder, its fine to write in a passive voice. For e.g. one could still say that so-and-so was hit by a police bullet not meant for him – or something to that effect.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I don’t understand why you think people responsible for accidental car crashes need to be subject to moral criticism. I doubt that shaming someone will stop them from crashing. They already have the fear of injury or death compelling them to drive safe. If that isn’t enough, I don’t think disapproval will do the trick. And I don’t think people who make mistakes, even mistakes with horrible consequences, really deserve to be publicly scorned. What purpose does it serve?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:11 pm
AHAHAHAHAHHAAH
AHHAHAHAHAHAHA
“Minorites are disproportionately affected by crime”
“HIV, a scourge in the gay community,…scholars have long noted that it disproportionately affects minorities, and the poor, those least likely…”
Besides, didn’t one of you guys argue that there’s no point of shame in changing behavior?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Matt, you’re smarter than me, but you don’t know very much about linguistics. I suggest you avoid using phrases like “passive voice” without knowing what they mean.
The phrase “were killed” is the only instance of the passive voice in the cited quote, and I don’t think it’s what you’re objecting to. In fact, it’s easy to construct direct, non-evasive uses of the exact same phrase in your alternate example: “Four people were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when reckless evildoers wantonly shot them in the head.” Or even with two uses of the passive voice: “Four people were killed early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va., when they were shot wantonly in the head by reckless evildoers.” Just as acceptable, direct, and non-evasive. Has nothing to do with the passive voice. (As an aside: throw away your copy of Strunk and White. It’s the CNBC of language advice.)
Your objection is to the use of evasive language– this is not a grammatical issue, or at least not strictly so. Evasiveness in language comes in many forms. Also, while it is possible to exploit the passive voice to for awkward and weaselly language, wholesale proscriptions of linguistic constructs are as ridiculous as they are impossible to obey.
When we outlaw the passive voice, only those by whom the passive voice is used will be outlaws.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Accidental shooting deaths are described as such in the press all the time.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Given that both parties to a crash are likely subject to harm, it kind of makes sense to assume the driver at fault was probably not intentionally trying to cause the accident. Sure, if it turns out the person was driving drunk or recklessly, shame/penalties should appliy, but often traffic accidents are the result of relatively innocent screw ups.
the analogy in the post fails because shooters don;t ride along in the bullets they fire.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Given that both parties to a crash are likely subject to harm, it kind of makes sense to assume the driver at fault was probably not intentionally trying to cause the accident. Sure, if it turns out the person was driving drunk or recklessly, shame/penalties should appliy, but often traffic accidents are the result of relatively innocent screw ups.
the analogy in the post fails because shooters don;t ride along in the bullets they fire.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Reporters try to avoid language that appears to draw conclusions about who is at fault, absent any legal finding of guilt.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
well, I guess a guy driving the wrong way on the freeway could be a heart attack victim. But it seems a lot more likely to me that it’s not a heart attack victim but someone who is reckless and is irresponsibly endangering lives, like a guy who shot a gun into a crowd would be. I don’t see any harm in having general approbation for driving on the wrong side of the freeway and calling out non-disapproval for the special cases -those who have extreme extenuating circumstances.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
That comment was made very funny by all the words in it.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:22 pm
What scritic says. Seriously, have you never made a mistake while driving?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Oh, this reminds me! In Austria, where I am, there are frequent radio bulletins for “Geisterfahrer,” which means people who drive the wrong direction on a highway (I guess?). Do we have a term for this? Does this happen often enough to warrant frequent radio bulletins? Does it ever happen for longer than about a minute? (That is, long enough for a radio bulletin to be of any use.)
What am I missing here?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:24 pm
oops, meant disapprobation – sorry about the error.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Except, bullets are created to kill people. Cars, on the other hand, are created for transport. Small distiction. I know.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I’m with Matt (or at least Dave) on this one. Matt seems to have maybe drawn the wrong message from Dave’s post. Dave’s complaint, it seemed to me, was that it would be fairly trivially easy to write that a driver going the wrong way struck another car, killing 4 people, than to write that the car going the correct direction “was struck” by a car moving the wrong direction. This changes nothing other than the voice, but the active voice personalizes it.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Gosh, Matt, you must be really hard up for things to whine about today.
The headline of the piece is “Wrong-Way SUV Hits Car, Kills 4.” The second paragraph states that “Police said a Chevy Tahoe sport-utility vehicle was driving on the wrong side of a two-lane stretch of Route 3 when it struck the Toyota Corolla about 2:50 a.m.” On the face of it, the SUV driver was responsible for the collision. But the story also notes that “The crash remained under investigation last night,” suggesting that it is too early to assign blame.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm
in Austria, where I am, there are frequent radio bulletins for “Geisterfahrer,” which means people who drive the wrong direction on a highway…
Because after colliding head-on with an oncoming car, they’re likely to become ghosts (Geist)? With that in mind, I offer Zeitgeisterfahrer, to describe a person who opposes the general spirit of the time in which he lives.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:35 pm
… and James Gary wins the thread. Zeitgeisterfahrer is my new favorite word.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:36 pm
полезные ссылки…
To echo Dave Alpert’s concern I think it’s deplorable that this is the standard way of describing what[...]…
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:41 pm
I think Matt should consider part timing at The Onion.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Matt’s criticism is spot on. It’s not that this is reported in the passive voice, it’s that too many people I know feel like “accidents just happen”. They think driving is like walking, nothing for which you need to study, or develop any skill.
Driving is probably the only thing you do every day that could easily kill you. Learn the rules, develop some skills, pay attention, and please, put the phone down (and I do not mean hands free, it’s your talking that may get me killed, not dialing).
Oh, and quit camping in the left lane.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
in a related transportation matter, as a bike rider/commuter i’ve nearly been killed by errant drivers more times than i’d like to think about. it seems when someone on a bike is hit the blame is often either placed on the cyclist or nobody is at fault.
if you’re interested, check it: http://velonews.com/article/13637 (disclaimer: it’s a bit depressing and might make you think twice about riding a bike in traffic)
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Matt,
I really respect the stuff you write about here but it seems like you do have something against automobiles in America. I understand we are too reliant on them in too many places and that they are dangerous, but to suggest that this is similar to a bullet is a bit much. If someone wildly drove there car in a random direction and happened to hit these kids, or drove their car directly at them with intent to injure them then the bullet comparison makes a lot of sense. If the driver was from out of town and went the wrong way on a ramp, then it is not the same at all. While the time of the accident (2:50 am) makes it sound like maybe the other driver was drunk, the article doesn’t specifically mention it (something that always gets mentioned if the driver is being charged with it) and your write up doesn’t even mention anything other than an accident occurring.
Just because you don’t like cars and just because America’s infrastructure should have an alternative does not mean that people who drive cars are inherently evil or that they even will have immediate substitutes for riding in a car on a day to day basis as a means of transportation.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Apparently this really is a much more common problem in Austria than in other places.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I’ve seen a few places that could likely lead to people driving the wrong waythrough no fault of their own. When I-95 near Baltimore was being changed, there was a detour. They had a sign pretty close to Camdedn Yards, “95 South”, with a big arrow. If you followed the arrow, it sent you the wrong way. I always took it during the day, so I could see cars coming out of it as I approached, but someone who drove through in the middle of the night would zoom right onto I-95 against the flow.
I also had a commute a few years back where every intersection for about 3 miles had a “WRONG WAY” sign that was itself facing the wrong way. Someone who didn’t live around there might make a U-turn and have a head on collision.
That being said, most of the time it’s a matter of someone just not being capable of driving. It doesn’t seem to matter if you can’t see, have no judgement, no sanity… everyone gets a license.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
If I am not mistaken, Matt does not have a driver’s license and may not even know how to drive. As numerous others here have pointed out, culpability has yet to be determined.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
to suggest that this is similar to a bullet is a bit
much
It’s true. You’d have a pretty hard time killing four out of four teenagers with a gun, as countless spree killers could attest.
your write up doesn’t even mention anything other than an accident occurring
It mentions the deaths of four people. Does that rate?
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Instead of complaining about the language used to describe car collisions how about advocating for something useful – higher fines, more vehicular homicide charges, etc
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:15 pm
I completely agree with Matt. The way we report how vehicles killed or injured people, rather than reporting that a driver caused an accident or collision, is highly problematic because it trivializes the driver’s responsibility.
This morning, after I was doored on my bike and the driver fled the scene, I filed an accident report and the cops impounded his car.
I believe we must hold careless drivers responsible – even for accidents – only then will our roads become less threatening environments for cyclists and pedestrians.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:23 pm
The way we report how vehicles killed or injured people, rather than reporting that a driver caused an accident or collision, is highly problematic because it trivializes the driver’s responsibility.
Er, no. News reporters should simply be reporting the facts regarding a motor vehicle accident, not trying to assign responsibility.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
To quote Judge Judy:
It’s called an “accident” because it’s not an “on purpose”.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
well, I guess a guy driving the wrong way on the freeway could be a heart attack victim. But it seems a lot more likely to me that it’s not a heart attack victim but someone who is reckless and is irresponsibly endangering lives, like a guy who shot a gun into a crowd would be. I don’t see any harm in having general approbation for driving on the wrong side of the freeway and calling out non-disapproval for the special cases -those who have extreme extenuating circumstances.
Accepting the premise of your analogy, why does it seem more likely to you that someone is engaged in the equivalent of shooting a gun into a crowd than it is that someone is having a heart attack? Do people shoot guns into crowds often?
Making the same point, without the analogy: Someone driving on the wrong side of the road already is a “special case.” Driving squarely into oncoming traffic is not some casually reckless thing, like speeding or running a red light. So presumably something crazy was going on here, and there’s no more reason to believe that the craziness was a function of an immoral recklessness rather than a heart attack.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:52 pm
No, Matt’s right. When a baby dies because a forgetful parent locked it in a hot car by accident, the headline is still “parent kills child in automobile.”
If, instead, the baby dies because it was hit by a moving vehicle going the wrong way down the road, the headline is suddenly “baby killed in collision”, not “driver kills baby.”
The way the lede reads, here, it makes it out to be either a random act of coincidence 0 like being hit by a meteor – or even the fault of the teenagers, since it was their car that is described as doing the colliding.
A more honest headline would be “driver kills four while driving on wrong side of road.” Accident or not, the driver is a killer, his or her actions caused four deaths, and it’s not unreasonable to expect the news to make that point – instead of making their actions sound like an inevitable risk of travel. People have a reasonable expectation that others on the road will operate their cars in a legal manner, and people who cause injury or death as a result of not doing so should be shamed (in addition to being prosecuted.)
Just because you do like cars doesn’t mean we should be happy when language is misused to conceal the dangers of their operation.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Do people shoot guns into crowds often?
With guns or with cars?
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I used to live in that area, and Route 3 there is a divided highway, with enough trees and brush in the median that you may not realize you’re on a divided highway, and think you’re heading down your standard two-lane country road.
I haven’t made that mistake myself, but once saw a car coming my way on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately, I was in the right lane, and the other driver was staying on “her” side of the road, so nothing much happened.
For all the theoretical talk about the way newspaper stories are written and the responsibilities and motives of drivers, everybody seems to have forgotten that some roads are safer than other. Route 3 is riskier than most.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
A more honest headline would be “driver kills four while driving on wrong side of road.” Accident or not, the driver is a killer, his or her actions caused four deaths
Nonsense. From the information in the story, you simply don’t know enough to claim that the SUV driver “caused” the deaths, let alone to assign moral or legal responsibility to him. All you know is that his vehicle was going in the wrong direction on a stretch of road and that it collided with the other vehicle. Everything else is just speculation at this point.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Well, I guess y’all kinda made Matt’s point for him. A good three-quarters of these comments reached for some incredibly rare occurrence as something “that could have happened”.
The fact is, if you read each and every one of these ‘wrong-way’ stories (which you can easily spot because so many people die) you find that most occur around bar closing time. It’s pretty rare to find one happening at 11 AM on Sunday, and even about a half of those involve alcohol.
Why do I know this? Well, I noticed that bad things seem to happen in clumps, and started reading the paper more carefully to notice where and when these ‘clumps’ occur. Part of my live-longer-graciously plan.
Congratulations! You’ve been brainwashed to search for any possible exculpation for the clumsy or criminal driver!
I don’t even want to think about the psychology behind that one.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Wow! what a paradigm shift! I’m going to chew on this for awhile… continue to spell this idea out, please.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Oh c’mon, Al, that wasn’t a straight news story, it was a think piece about the phenomenon, specifically written to argue the provocative viewpoint that it wasn’t the parents’ fault. If you go and find some reporting about one of the actual incidents I’m sure you’d find something more like what she said.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
shorter serial catowner: Statistically, the SUV driver is probably to blame for the accident, so rather than just reporting the facts of the incident the reporter should have written the story as if he already knows who’s to blame.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 pm
If you go and find some reporting about one of the actual incidents I’m sure you’d find something more like what she said.
Really? News reports about children dying after being left by accident in a car are typically titled something like “Parent kills child in car” rather than something like “Child dies after being left in car” are they? I find that highly implausible.
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Perhaps the headline could read:
Person drives wrong way on road for unknow reasons, though probably because s/he was drunk since that happens a lot more than other reasons we can think of, and killed four people ranging in age from 19 to 21 early yesterday in Culpeper County, Va.
Does that carry the appropriate amount of shaming and still communicate the salient facts? It seems important to get that shaming in quick.
Matt’s post feels more reactive than thought out. Why not just find out the particulars and then report them?
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:57 pm
I agree with Matt that “accident” is a poor choice of word to describe most vehicle collisions. Unfortunately, the Washington Post article he linked doesn’t illustrate his point… is that what he intended? The idiot *was* in fact going the wrong way.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
So how do you suppose the SUV got on the wrong side of the road, genius? It was driven there by the driver. On purpose, by accident, as a result of impairment by alcohol or fatigue – doesn’t matter. The driver of that car killed 4 people. There’s no explanation that makes that ok. If they were drunk they shouldn’t have been driving. If they were tired, they shouldn’t have been driving. If they were simply careless or forgetful or unfamiliar with the area – well, for one thing they should have noticed that all the road signs were backwards. Anyway I’d hate to be the person whose carelessness killed four people. There’s never a legitimate reason to drive down the freeway on the wrong side of the road, and that’s what this weasel language obscures.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Actually, the article doesn’t give the details of this case, but I think you are painting too broad a brush by suggesting that all car accidents involve negligence (even if the driver is breaking the law). To use your gun analogy, gun accidents happen every day. Sometimes people are being careless, but sometimes they happen despite every precaution.
In law and in culture, we assign blame when someone drives recklessly and causes a death or injury. Maybe the person driving was being careless – or maybe they missed a sign. To drive is to sometimes break the law, no matter how careful you are.
I think you make a valid point that a lot of people act as if breaking traffic laws doesn’t matter (e.g. by breaking speed limits, running stop signs, etc.) but an accident is not prima facie evidence of negligence.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
“Parent kills child in car” is probably not an example of what you would see, in retrospect. A better example would be something like “Mom left 7-month-old girl in car”. Of course, when a man does it, we do get a headline like “Heat kills child left in car.” Similarly, the driver of this SUV was a man.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:58 pm
The trend in government is to move away from using the word “accident” in looking at all kinds of fatal incidents, motor vehicle or otherwise. Calling something an “accident” seems to also convey the notion that it was something that “just happened”–wasn’t the result of human choices and couldn’t really have been prevented. Fate. Destiny. In the cards.
Just two examples: the CDC speaks of “unintentional” rather than “accidental” injuries, and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration renamed their venerable Fatal Accident Reporting System to Fatality Analysis and Reporting System (you have to keep the same acronym; acronyms are everything in government).
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:18 pm
The real crime is the grammar in this post. Am I right, people? Am I right?
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
So how do you suppose the SUV got on the wrong side of the road, genius? It was driven there by the driver. On purpose, by accident, as a result of impairment by alcohol or fatigue – doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters. The responsibility of the SUV driver depends on the circumstances of the accident, and you simply don’t know what those circumstances were. Maybe he was on the wrong side of the road through no fault of his own because a sign was missing or obscured or confusing. Maybe he had suffered some kind of attack that had impaired his vision or judgment. Maybe he had veered into the oncoming lane to avoid crashing into an obstacle. Maybe the other driver had contributed to the accident. You simply don’t know. You’re jumping to conclusions.
“Parent kills child in car” is probably not an example of what you would see, in retrospect. A better example would be something like “Mom left 7-month-old girl in car”.
Actually, the headline is “Mom Left 7-Month-Old Girl in Hot Car.” The implication of wrongdoing is slight. It doesn’t even say that the mom endangered the child. And if the child had died, I find it highly unlikely that the headline would have read “Mom kills child by leaving her in car” rather than “Child dies after mom leaves her in car.”
March 24th, 2009 at 3:30 am
I’m just amazed that anyone thinks there’s this big media conspiracy to cover up that automobiles may be dangerous when used improperly. Or that there is no explicit moral criticism of careless or otherwise crappy drivers.
“But equally obviously, fast-moving heavy metal objects are extremely dangerous.”
Like automobiles. And snowmobiles. And airplanes. And trains. And ships. And bicycles.
It’s called ‘operational risk management’.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:18 am
The description of this accident as someone driving on the wrong way on the “freeway” makes people think of divided, limited access highways. It was a two lane road. The driver drifted across the yellow line and hit the other car head on.
The accident occurred at 3 am, so alcohol or fatigue are likely factors in the cause of the crash.
And it’s an accident because the driver didn’t intend to cross the center line. It may be extreme negligence, but I don’t see how it could be intentional — it far different from firing a gun into a crowd. It’s more like carrying a loaded gun into a nightclub in your sweatpants, and once you’re drunk, instead of accidentally shooting yourself, you shoot the person next to you.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:58 am
The way the article is written, it’s about the 4 victims.
The way Matt wants it written, it would be about the driver of the wrong-way SUV.
There’s a place for the article Matt wants written, but I don’t see why the article focused on the victims is objectionable.
It’s probably written that way because of the information available to the reporter–he knew more about the people killed than about the culpability of the SUV driver. From the way the article is written, looks like he didn’t even have the name of the SUV driver until a subsequent rewrite.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Trains run on tracks where pedestrians aren’t supposed to be, onto which a fall is a terrible accident in itself, and on which the third rail is another deadly danger. Ships are unlikely to run into pedestrians, or even swimmers. Airplanes are a danger to birds, other airplanes, and iconic buildings targeted by terrorists. But danger from bicycles is somewhat like danger from cars, especially if someone is recklessly cycling on the sidewalk. That’s why I shed no tears when the Segway failed to catch on.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Frequently shootings are reported in the passive voice so I am not sure why you thing car crashes are getting special bad treatment. I suppose that the active voice is more clear, but skilled journalists don’t spend very much of their career writing reports on car accidents and shootings. You just can’t expect much out of stories like these.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Scampdog, I grew up in Culpeper and still on occasion drive back home on 3. I am pretty sure that much of Route 3 is two-lane highway, no median. That’s the way I interpreted the article as well.
And having grown up in Culpeper, 2:00 a.m. accidents like this are much more often than not alcohol-related.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
It’s about the four victims and their car, which was described as “colliding”. But it’s obvious from the situation that their car was the one collided with; that’s the weasel language. Saying that the car on the right side of the road, not being driven illegally, was the one that “collided”, obscures the fact that the cause of the collision was an SUV being driven down the wrong side of the road, illegally.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“What scritic says. Seriously, have you never made a mistake while driving that resulted in the death of numerous people? but less than a dozen?”
There, fixed your typo….
March 24th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
It’s about the four victims and their car, which was described as “colliding”. But it’s obvious from the situation that their car was the one collided with; that’s the weasel language. Saying that the car on the right side of the road, not being driven illegally, was the one that “collided”, obscures the fact that the cause of the collision was an SUV being driven down the wrong side of the road, illegally.
I think this illustrates the inanity of the complaint. What reader needs the formulation “X collided with Y” instead of “Y collided with X” to understand that the cause of the collision was that X was heading down the wrong side of the road? And who doesn’t know that driving on the wrong side of the road is illegal?
March 24th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
The fact is, if you read each and every one of these ‘wrong-way’ stories (which you can easily spot because so many people die) you find that most occur around bar closing time. It’s pretty rare to find one happening at 11 AM on Sunday, and even about a half of those involve alcohol. . . . Congratulations! You’ve been brainwashed to search for any possible exculpation for the clumsy or criminal driver! . . . I don’t even want to think about the psychology behind that one.
Good point. The headline should have just been “drunk driver kills 4,” lest we allow the unlikely to saddle our certainty.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
It looks like a simple 2 lane road with no divider in the region cited in the story. There is, however, another road which merges with it. Eastbound traffic from York Rd changing into eastbound traffic on Rt 3 might present an increased chance of head on collision.
That’s just from the satellite photo. There might be good precautions on the ground to prevent it, and the accident might not have happened there.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Not that anyone’s still reading this, but I looked into the local press. The stretch of road has had 2 other fatal head on crashes in lthe last 19 months. One involved a drunk driver and one, at 5:50 in the afternoon, did not. If alcohol was not involved in this accident, I believe VDOT should look into the possibility of some inherently dangerous situation.
March 25th, 2009 at 4:38 am
Buy Propecia…
http://www.folkd.com/user/buypropeciaonline Buy Propecia…
March 25th, 2009 at 7:58 am
Njorl, I’m reading because I grew up in Culpeper.
3 is in fact mostly a two-lane road. But there are no exceptionally dangerous parts of it that I can think of. The problem might have to do with the fact that both Culpeper and Fredericksburg (on the other end of 3) have grown a lot over the last 20 years but Route 3 hasn’t. And there are a lot of farms along that route so you get some very slow traffic combined with impatient commuters on a two-lane road, which probably leads to some dangerous attempts at passing.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
So anything less than the immediate, deliberate intention to ram another vehicle must be an “accident”?
I don’t buy that. Every driver makes choices all the time that inherently put others’ lives at risk. Turning on the radio, buying a huge SUV, speeding, taking a cell phone call, and wearing a seatbelt all provide benefits to the driver at the cost of increased probability of the untimely, grisly death of a stranger.
I don’t go as far as Matt in claiming that we need moral approbation here. But we do need to hold drivers fully accountable for the risks they pose to others. If we don’t, then that’s a subsidy for risky driving. The externality must be internalized, or else more than the optimal number of people will die from careless driving.
It’s an incentive problem. These drivers aren’t immediately intending to kill, it’s just that killing is an acceptable side cost to them. Therein lies the choice, and that’s why it’s not an “accident”.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Buy Propecia…
http://url.edna.edu.au/eVAJ Buy Propecia…
April 16th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!.
I am from Rwanda and learning to read in English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Are you tired of opening multiple browsers and entering your itinerary over and over again? To – departing – returning – tickets – class not all providers.”
Waiting for a reply
, Adelaide.