When language removes the driver, all responsibility is removed as well.
Every year, 1.19 million people are killed in traffic. Yet news reports describe crashes as if cars move on their own, roads are at fault, and victims simply “get involved.” We tracked the language and compared it to how we talk about other violence.
When the same kinds of crashes keep happening in the same kinds of places, it stops being bad luck. Infrastructure, speed, enforcement, and policy stack up. The language we use decides whether anyone is ever held responsible.
Infrastructure Road design shapes who survives
Speed Higher speed = less time to react
Language Words decide who gets blamed
Road traffic is the leading cause of death for people aged 5 to 29 worldwide. If a disease killed 1.19 million people every year, we would call it an epidemic. But because every crash gets reported as a separate, isolated “accident”, the public never sees the pattern. The language breaks the crisis into individual misfortunes. The system stays invisible.
Netherlands road fatalities over time
2000 2005 2010 2015 2019 2022 2023
Each of those 745 deaths in 2022 was reported individually: as an accident, an incident, a collision. Never together. Never as a crisis.
Source: SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research, Netherlands, 2024 →
The framing problem
“An epidemic is invisible when every death gets its own headline and none of them are connected.”
The point is not to remove individual responsibility. The point is that infrastructure, urban design, enforcement, and policy create the conditions in which harm becomes more likely and more normalised.
Research overview
Sources: Yang & Han, 2025 · Abele & Müller, 2011 · Elvik et al., 2004 · Yang & Kim, 2003
Risk reduction when measures are applied
Fewer fatalities with speed limit compliance
−38%
Fewer pedestrian injuries with traffic-calming
−60%
Fewer crashes with monitoring cameras
−28%
Fewer fatalities with monitoring cameras
−60%
Sources: Elvik et al., 2004 · Sharma & Dehalwar, 2025 · Yang & Kim, 2003
Language does not just describe events. It distributes agency. It decides whether a broken system appears visible or whether harm seems to happen by itself.
Passive framing
Clear framing
Reporters mostly rely on what the police choose to share, and police share little, to protect the victim and avoid prejudicing a trial.
What the journalist receives:
Resulting headline: “Car hits pedestrian, woman sent to hospital”
So journalists are not always the ones to blame. The framing is already baked in by the time it reaches the newsroom. That is why we target readers: when we recognise an incomplete headline, we stop accepting it as the whole story.
The framing problem
A victim became a number. A driver became grammar.
Read the original headline. Type your own version that keeps the driver in the sentence and uses active voice. We’ll tell you whether it works, and why.
Research into traffic collision reporting reveals a consistent pattern: language erases driver responsibility, normalises harm, and makes the preventable sound inevitable.
96%
of articles are hiding who did it by using a passive voice
based on 71 news articles covering 10 traffic fatalities
Source: Magusin, 2017 →
Word frequency in traffic news
Source: Magusin, 2017 →
Agent framing in collision articles
53% Car as agent
~13% Driver named
53% of articles mention cars as agents. That is 4× more common than explicitly stating "the driver did it".
Sources: Reymond & Rérat, 2026 · Keliikoa et al., 2022
Individual stories are not the whole story, but they stop people from treating structural harm like an abstract issue with no faces, routes, or routines attached to it.
Case 01 / Netherlands
One person was killed in a chain-reaction crash involving seven vehicles on the A12 near the German border near Babberich. […] The same stretch of road has seen multiple incidents. Early last month, a heavy chain-reaction crash involving five vehicles left three people injured, including a child.
What this proves
No driver appears in this headline. Seven vehicles crashed on a stretch of road that has seen this pattern before, but the report blames the geometry, not the people driving through it. A repeat-incident location is reported as if the road simply causes crashes by itself.
Case 02 / California, USA
Two people were killed and two others injured when two vehicles collided head-on Friday evening along a dusty, deserted stretch of road in the Antelope Valley. […] The Highway Patrol cited “limited sight distances, narrow lanes, and winding terrain” as factors on Mount Emma Road.
What this proves
Two cars collided head-on: grammatically impossible without drivers, yet no driver is named. The Highway Patrol blames sight distances, lane width, and terrain. The infrastructure becomes the agent. The drivers vanish.
“Transport systems should be responsive to the needs of users and forgiving of human error.”
You have seen the scale, the language, and the pattern. The next step is not more awareness, it is using what you know to change what gets said, written, and built.
For friends Share a section that creates discussion instead of only outrage.
For newsrooms Use wording that keeps agency visible.
For cities Design streets around survival and visibility, not just movement speed.