Serious Crashes Happen to Real People

The specific crashes that we see, hear, or read about in the media are those judged newsworthy—those with the most tragic outcomes and those involving culpable, reprehensible behaviour, especially if they involve a group of teenagers. Newsworthy typically means crashes that conform with our stereotype of fault on the part of one or more of those involved, and we later explore in some detail how this stereotype evolved and the powerful influence it has had on traffic safety policy and practice, and how it helps explain why complacency rules. 

This stereotype is reinforced by the recent popularity of crash investigation shows on television. These usually take the form of a countdown, where we are asked to digest all the events in the minutes that tick by toward the moment of a crash. This leaves us with the impression that somehow the crash was inevitable those seconds until impact seem predetermined and unavoidable. 

Traffic safety progress at a macrolevel— beyond individual crashes— is typically reported in the form of brief summary statistics, limited to fatalities it is usually the running total of road deaths to date compared with the running total to the same point the year before. Even more misleadingly, focus is placed on holiday weekends and periods such as Easter and Christmas, despite research showing that these periods do not have unusually high incidences of serious crashes (see Box 2.1). If there appears to be a trend, particularly one for the worse, this will also attract attention. 

In reality, road trauma is something that cannot be predicted at the individual level we cannot know just who will be involved. For each of us personally, road trauma is unexpected, unpredictable, and life changing. As Mary Schmich famously pointed out in her Chicago Tribune colunm The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.  

In short, what the community typically has are simple counts of fatalities and simplistic indications of trends, along with a daily media diet of dramatic and unrepresentative individual events. It is not surprising that the net result is a misunderstanding of the true state of affairs. We are inoculated with apathy through the steady drip, drip of everyday frequency. 

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Another domain with serious concerns for validity is the use of simulators in research on driving behaviors. The need to validate measures obtained in a simulator against real world measures of driver behavior and crashes cannot be ignored, and as illustrated below is often addressed in simulation research. However, not all simulation measures can be validated. We can easily design situations that result in a crash in a simulator (for example by intoxicating people before they drive), but no one would consider replicating the same conditions in the true world to see if a crash will actually happen there. Thus, in interpreting the results of research reported in this book - or in any other venue, for that matter - a prudent reader should always ask whether or not the specific measure used warrants the conclusions drawn. 

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