Challenging the assumption that road deaths are the price of mobility
Words matter. The language we use to describe traffic crashes shapes how the public understands road safety, who is held accountable, and what solutions are considered possible.
Our friends at Vision Zero Vancouver have developed a Media Style Guide and it is powerful. It encourages reporting that treats traffic deaths and serious injuries as preventable public health and transportation issues rather than unavoidable tragedies.
The guide is about more than journalistic style. It challenges a deeper cultural bias that has become so normalised that most people rarely notice it - motonormativity.
Motonormativity describes society's tendency to view the harms, risks, and inconveniences associated with motor vehicles as normal, acceptable, or unavoidable. Behaviours and outcomes that would provoke outrage in other contexts are often dismissed when they involve driving.
Imagine a toy that caused hundreds of serious injuries a year. Regulators would demand recalls and redesigns or remove the product from the market. Imagine a factory that seriously injures workers every week. Investigations and corrective actions would follow and we would not accept this as the cost of doing business. Yet when similar harms occur on our roads, they are often dismissed as accidents rather than preventable failures of system design. This double standard is classic motonormativity.
A motonormative mindset influences not only transportation policy but also the way crashes are reported. The result is language that minimises the role of drivers, vehicles, and street design while portraying traffic violence as a natural feature of modern life.
One of the guide's most well-known recommendations is to avoid the word “accident” and replace it with “crash”. At first glance, this may appear to be a minor editorial change. In reality, it challenges motonormative thinking.
The term “accident” suggests that a crash was random and unavoidable. It discourages further questions. A "crash", by contrast, invites questions about speed, road design, vehicle characteristics, safety measures, and whether similar incidents have occurred before. The distinction matters because Vision Zero is founded on evidence that road deaths and serious injuries are preventable. Research from the Safe System approach shows that transportation systems can be designed to anticipate human error and reduce the risk of death or serious injury when crashes occur. Calling them accidents undermines that message.
Traditional crash reporting often obscures agency. Consider the difference two headlines: 1) "Pedestrian dies after being struck by vehicle in Halifax's south end" and 2) "Woman killed on marked crosswalk by Halifax driver." In the first example, the pedestrian and the vehicle are the focus while the driver disappears from view. In the second, the driver remains visible as the person operating the vehicle and causing the crash with context also provided. The facts are largely the same, but the framing changes how readers understand responsibility, agency, and the preventable nature of road violence.
Vision Zero Vancouver's Media Style Guide specifically encourages journalists to describe agency and causality rather than relying on passive language that makes harmful events appear to happen on their own. This is not about assigning legal guilt before an investigation is complete, but about accurately describing what occurred. The fact that such direct language can feel uncomfortable to readers is itself evidence of motonormativity. We are accustomed to sanitising and depersonalising traffic violence in ways that would seem strange in almost any other context.
The guide also emphasises systemic causes. Serious crashes rarely occur in isolation. Dangerous road design, excessive speeds, poor visibility, and recurring risk patterns often contribute. By including crash histories and local context, reporting can help the public understand that these events are part of larger safety challenges rather than isolated tragedies.
Vision Zero rejects the idea that road deaths are an inevitable cost of mobility. Its goal is simple: zero deaths and serious injuries. Achieving that goal requires us to focus on infrastructure, vehicle design, speed management, and policy rather than accepting harm as unavoidable. The Vision Zero Vancouver Media Style Guide helps advance that shift by changing how we talk, think, and ultimately act on road safety.
