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This is neat, but something bugs me about the framing of the intended goal versus how you propose to get there. If the intent is to raise public awareness and

by dymk 5y ago

This is neat, but something bugs me about the framing of the intended goal versus how you propose to get there. If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Many of the suggested fixes are just their own form of counterfactual - they're facts, sure, but they don't contribute to public understanding of _why_ the crash happened. The examples of removing counterfactual outright and including thematic framing (focusing on road conditions, frequency of crashes, and aggregate statistics that tell the story of how often crashes occur) seem to be the best set of suggestions for correcting public perception on road safety. Not making sure the public knows this _one specific driver_ hit a pedestrian, rather than their car.

tshaddox 5y ago
Couldn’t part of the larger “why?” be that individual drivers are not sufficiently subject to liability for causing accidents with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.? If it is the case that it’s almost impossible for a driver to get in any trouble for causing such an accident (except in the most egregious cases of reckless driving) then it doesn’t make sense to avoid talking about that.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  I can see value in not consistently talking about “btw killing someone with your car is basically a get out of jail card”. Most people probably don’t realize this. (Or am I misunderstanding your last sentence?)
advisedwang 5y ago
I agree, the best outcome would be if news stories said things like * "5 crashes have happened at this intersection so far this year" * "The speed limit at the crash site was 35, above the standard arterial speed limit of 25" * "The road at the bend had sharrow markings, which cycling advocates say are ineffective and inferior to marked or protected bike lines."
bluGill 5y ago
One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tailgating ticket even though it is rare to see someone maintain their proper following distance in traffic. Don't take the above as excusing bad road design.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Let's say all that is true. How does using a computer program to reword all traffic accident reports as being caused by drivers solve this problem? Doesn't it just make people trust accident reports less?
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    People reading the news aren't the only people who use traffic crash reports. They are also used (and can subtly influence) the people who make decisions about road planning. The culture we have of blaming pedestrians/cyclists and exonerating drivers (when, to be clear, the drivers are the ones creating the danger) leads directly to planning decisions that perpetuate road conditions that would be unconscionably dangerous in any other engineering field.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  > very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People bring this up often. As far as I can tell such people are not heavily represented in car crash statistics.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    That is because it is impossible to measure: people tend to drive less as their vision degrades, vision degrades at different rates for different people (we can't use old as a proxy), they tend to mitigate their vision problems by driving slower. Probably other factors to account for too, that I don't know how to account for. Not heavily represented is not the same as not dangerous.
chiefofgxbxl 5y ago
This is a great question and I agree with you entirely. Ultimately, Framing (thematic vs. episodic) is the most important consideration for these articles. It's important for articles to discuss road design, safety initiatives, etc. in order to equip readers with the knowledge necessary to get governments to act. However, Framing is also the most difficult pattern to detect simply because there are so many different thematic elements you can discuss, and many different ways to say each one. Here are a few examples: - This is the 3rd pedestrian fatality this year. - Residents have long complained about people racing down their street. - Washington St. has had a long lasting problem with weather-related crashes. - According to the NHTSA, there are X crashes per year related to prescription drug-induced drowsy driving. - Street width directly correlates with driving speed, which in turn increases the time needed to react and brake. I'm relying on manually annotated articles (700+ so far) and a custom-trained spaCy model to detect these elements, and the accuracy of that model depends on having enough training data. Since thematic elements are so rare in real-life articles, I'm having a difficult time providing enough training data. Hence why the tool emphasizes the other editorial anti-patterns, for now, but this will change once the Framing reporter gets better. Anyone have any suggestions for augmenting my training set for thematic elements?
Bermion 5y ago
We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space since they have historically been prioritized. It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.
- dymk 5y ago
  I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the unsafe conditions of the road. It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person because they think a news story will be more accusatory of them.
  - Zak 5y ago
    What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers. Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety. I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every high-risk road situation, but for those where it is, changing the speed limit alone is likely a poor solution.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      > reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers And having to navigate traffic that is not of a homogeneous speed creates cognitive load for all drivers. So then they don't notice things like cyclists and pedestrians.
      - calt 5y ago
        That makes no sense. Mixed use and mixed speed creates an environment where drivers have to notice diversity of traffic, including cyclists and pedestrians.
benatkin 5y ago
> If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? I think "almost all" would have to include the various use of the word accident when the fault hasn't been fully determined. I've been following Project Zero for years now and that is a big part of our shtick. And that certainly is not shifting the blame from the pedestrian to the driver. It is merely removing a harmful assumption.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
> why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Because the overwhelming majority of multi-party crashes involve one party violating the norms of how whatever traffic type they are is expected by the rest of the traffic to behave and shaming people is, for better or worse, an effective means of motivating specific behavior.
avianlyric 5y ago
In all of these scenarios the driver is the better protected and less vulnerable participant. Ideally we should be improving infrastructure to ensure that the risks created by high speed lumps of metal is reduced as far as practically possible. But until that happens, we have to acknowledge that in the majority incidents drivers are only ones capable of changing the outcome. Additionally drivers should take one a greater responsibility when operating vehicles in areas where they might encounter more vulnerable road users. Vulnerable road users will always end up paying a substantially greater price in any incident, so it’s reasonable to ask drivers to be more careful to avoid those incidents.
cranky908canuck 5y ago
Not sure if there's overshoot, but seems like it's trying to shift from: A car hit a cyclist/pedestrian to: A person driving a car struck (with the car) a person who was [on a bicycle]/walking. The issue is, "hit by a car" moves the focus away from what the person driving the car was/was not doing at the time.
ziml77 5y ago
I disagree. Framing it as anything other than the driver causing the crash makes it too easy for people to blame everything but themselves. Drivers need to understand the dangers of the road and drive in ways that make sense given all the conditions.

by dymk 5y ago

tshaddox 5y ago

Couldn’t part of the larger “why?” be that individual drivers are not sufficiently subject to liability for causing accidents with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.? If it is the case that it’s almost impossible for a driver to get in any trouble for causing such an accident (except in the most egregious cases of reckless driving) then it doesn’t make sense to avoid talking about that.

ryantgtg 5y ago
I can see value in not consistently talking about “btw killing someone with your car is basically a get out of jail card”. Most people probably don’t realize this. (Or am I misunderstanding your last sentence?)

advisedwang 5y ago

I agree, the best outcome would be if news stories said things like * "5 crashes have happened at this intersection so far this year" * "The speed limit at the crash site was 35, above the standard arterial speed limit of 25" * "The road at the bend had sharrow markings, which cycling advocates say are ineffective and inferior to marked or protected bike lines."

bluGill 5y ago

One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tailgating ticket even though it is rare to see someone maintain their proper following distance in traffic. Don't take the above as excusing bad road design.

karaterobot 5y ago
Let's say all that is true. How does using a computer program to reword all traffic accident reports as being caused by drivers solve this problem? Doesn't it just make people trust accident reports less?
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  People reading the news aren't the only people who use traffic crash reports. They are also used (and can subtly influence) the people who make decisions about road planning. The culture we have of blaming pedestrians/cyclists and exonerating drivers (when, to be clear, the drivers are the ones creating the danger) leads directly to planning decisions that perpetuate road conditions that would be unconscionably dangerous in any other engineering field.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People bring this up often. As far as I can tell such people are not heavily represented in car crash statistics.
- bluGill 5y ago
  That is because it is impossible to measure: people tend to drive less as their vision degrades, vision degrades at different rates for different people (we can't use old as a proxy), they tend to mitigate their vision problems by driving slower. Probably other factors to account for too, that I don't know how to account for. Not heavily represented is not the same as not dangerous.

chiefofgxbxl 5y ago

This is a great question and I agree with you entirely. Ultimately, Framing (thematic vs. episodic) is the most important consideration for these articles. It's important for articles to discuss road design, safety initiatives, etc. in order to equip readers with the knowledge necessary to get governments to act. However, Framing is also the most difficult pattern to detect simply because there are so many different thematic elements you can discuss, and many different ways to say each one. Here are a few examples: - This is the 3rd pedestrian fatality this year. - Residents have long complained about people racing down their street. - Washington St. has had a long lasting problem with weather-related crashes. - According to the NHTSA, there are X crashes per year related to prescription drug-induced drowsy driving. - Street width directly correlates with driving speed, which in turn increases the time needed to react and brake. I'm relying on manually annotated articles (700+ so far) and a custom-trained spaCy model to detect these elements, and the accuracy of that model depends on having enough training data. Since thematic elements are so rare in real-life articles, I'm having a difficult time providing enough training data. Hence why the tool emphasizes the other editorial anti-patterns, for now, but this will change once the Framing reporter gets better. Anyone have any suggestions for augmenting my training set for thematic elements?

Bermion 5y ago

We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space since they have historically been prioritized. It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.

dymk 5y ago
I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the unsafe conditions of the road. It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person because they think a news story will be more accusatory of them.
- Zak 5y ago
  What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers. Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety. I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every high-risk road situation, but for those where it is, changing the speed limit alone is likely a poor solution.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    > reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers And having to navigate traffic that is not of a homogeneous speed creates cognitive load for all drivers. So then they don't notice things like cyclists and pedestrians.
    - calt 5y ago
      That makes no sense. Mixed use and mixed speed creates an environment where drivers have to notice diversity of traffic, including cyclists and pedestrians.

benatkin 5y ago

> If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? I think "almost all" would have to include the various use of the word accident when the fault hasn't been fully determined. I've been following Project Zero for years now and that is a big part of our shtick. And that certainly is not shifting the blame from the pedestrian to the driver. It is merely removing a harmful assumption.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

> why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Because the overwhelming majority of multi-party crashes involve one party violating the norms of how whatever traffic type they are is expected by the rest of the traffic to behave and shaming people is, for better or worse, an effective means of motivating specific behavior.

avianlyric 5y ago

In all of these scenarios the driver is the better protected and less vulnerable participant. Ideally we should be improving infrastructure to ensure that the risks created by high speed lumps of metal is reduced as far as practically possible. But until that happens, we have to acknowledge that in the majority incidents drivers are only ones capable of changing the outcome. Additionally drivers should take one a greater responsibility when operating vehicles in areas where they might encounter more vulnerable road users. Vulnerable road users will always end up paying a substantially greater price in any incident, so it’s reasonable to ask drivers to be more careful to avoid those incidents.

cranky908canuck 5y ago

Not sure if there's overshoot, but seems like it's trying to shift from: A car hit a cyclist/pedestrian to: A person driving a car struck (with the car) a person who was [on a bicycle]/walking. The issue is, "hit by a car" moves the focus away from what the person driving the car was/was not doing at the time.

ziml77 5y ago

I disagree. Framing it as anything other than the driver causing the crash makes it too easy for people to blame everything but themselves. Drivers need to understand the dangers of the road and drive in ways that make sense given all the conditions.