Bullets don't shoot people. So why do cars 'kill' cyclists?

Roadragers

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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.

See how language hides harm

Roadragers / system TRAFFIC HARM IS SYSTEMIC. Not just a string of mistakes. 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

01 / trends AT THIS SCALE, IT’S A HEALTH CRISIS. Language stops us from seeing it. 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 Progress stalled.

The spike went unreported as a crisis. 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.”

02 / factors STREET, SPEED, POLICY, ENFORCEMENT they all stack. 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 How contributing factors shape risk Factor Current pattern What reduces risk Impact Infrastructure & street design Many lanes, high traffic flow Traffic-calming, safety fences, rumble strips, silver zones High Speed Violations with no consequences Better illumination and law enforcement High Enforcement Reliant on high-volume police stops Evidence-based infrastructure and design interventions Medium Policy Fragmented responsibility, limited effectiveness Accountability and campaigns on traffic-related social costs Medium Sources: Yang & Han, 2025 · Abele & Müller, 2011 · Elvik et al.,

2004 · Yang & Kim, 2003

Risk reduction when measures are applied What changes when systems change 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

03 / language THE WORD “ACCIDENT” makes a preventable thing feel inevitable. 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 "Pedestrian involved in traffic accident" The driver disappears. The sentence sounds neutral. The event feels detached from policy and design. Clear framing "Driver hit pedestrian while turning across crossing" The action stays visible. The harm sounds concrete. The event reads as preventable.

From our focus group The headline is often written before the journalist sees it. 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: Victim: “a woman in her twenties on a bike” Perpetrator: “someone in a car” 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.

04 / rewrite NOW YOU TRY. Rewrite the headline so the driver is visible. 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.

04 / stats & trends THE DATA SHOWS WHAT THE HEADLINES HIDE. 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 They are not accidents… "Accident" 74% "Collision" 48% "Crash" 24% 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

05 / cases CASES MAKE THE SYSTEM FEEL REAL AGAIN. 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.