@NOprophet_NØprofit is your desire not to use the word "accident" to describe an unintentional but careless car crash restricted to road accidents, or do you avoid the word "accident" more generally in your language. If a small child knocks over a glass of water because they're waving their arms around and not paying attention to where they are, would you describe that as an "accident", or would you note that the child could have been more careful, and so it wasn't an accident?
In standard British use, as @Enoch mentions, "accident" doesn't carry any kind of implication of "unavoidable".
Some local kids broke a wing mirror on my neighbour's car the other day. It was an accident - they didn't mean to break the mirror, and were absolutely horrified when it happened. It was also completely avoidable - they were playing with a baseball too close to parked cars.
This was an accident. The fact that it was an accident doesn't mean that the kids' parents aren't going to pay to replace the wing mirror. It doesn't mean that the kids weren't wrong to play with a baseball too close to parked cars, and it probably doesn't mean that the parents aren't going to impose some kind of consequence on the kids to help pay for the damage they caused. It just means that it wasn't a deliberate act. These kids weren't delinquents smashing car mirrors for the hell of it - they were generally well-behaved kids who made a mistake.
(If you write "a driver hit a pedestrian" and don't follow it with "with their car" then it sounds like road rage to me - the driver got out of his car and punched a pedestrian.)
I'm aware that the terms are not used everywhere like this, and that road crash insurance is organized differently in many places. This is actually a current change process. I am personally an enthusiast, but it this is mainstream in transportation. So it's not an exclusive group of enthusiasts, it's actually city planners, traffic engineers, people who work in active transportation. I do some of this work, and attended last month an European-hosted conference, so this understanding is used in Europe as well as America. I consult in public health, including the built environment and implications for physical and mental health and wellbeing, and behavioural health promotion.
I'll also note that there's a significant difference between avoiding the word "accident" to describe what happens when a car that is being driven by a human collides with some other object (another car, a pedestrian, a cyclist, a wall, ...) and @NOprophet_NØprofit's position that those things are not accidents.
For example, @NOprophet_NØprofit pointed out that we talk about "injuries at work" rather than accidents. That's because the thing that we're trying to avoid is the injury. Wearing protective clothing, for example, probably doesn't change the probability of an accident much, but it reduces the effect of that accident. But just because I don't routinely use the word "accident" to describe an injury at work doesn't mean that I don't think that most such injuries are accidents.
Words matter. Also consult in occupational health. I'm actually not an activist Dave. I'm a consultant: it's work. The words are not mine, the campaigns about not using the term "accident" for things under control of human beings originated elsewhere. Related concept given LC, is the "hierarchy of controls".
We found that subtle editorial choices influenced perceived blame...groups have been lobbying for neutral road-incident vocabulary for many years—“crash, not accident” is a common mantra—and now new research has demonstrated that thanks to the leading language used in media reporting, blame for road smashes is often placed on victims.
I don’t care where it originated. “Accident means that it was not preventable” is bullshit. That is not what people mean when they use the word accident.
and now new research has demonstrated that thanks to the leading language used in media reporting, blame for road smashes is often placed on victims.
OK, let me ask you a question. To me, there are two entirely different things at play in the discussion you quote here. One is attributing blame for the incident. If a car is driving on a road, and collides with a person, we can construct scenarios where the driver of the car is 100% at fault, where the pedestrian is 100% at fault, and where the blame is shared.
But blame is rarely a useful concept in preventing future collisions. Whose fault it was is rarely the most important thing. People make mistakes. Pedestrians don't look where they're going, drivers don't pay attention, drivers drive faster than is sensible - all those things are normal errors that humans will make all the time. If there's a modification in road design that can make collisions less likely, it's a good idea (other things being equal). It doesn't matter whose fault, if anyone's, the interaction was.
Blame is relevant when it comes to presenting criminal charges for behaviour that is significantly below expectations (or firing employees likewise), and in some jurisdictions that are not yours, blame is relevant for assigning the costs among the participants, but it's rarely useful in making things better in the future.
My uncle, a court reporter for many years, used to say: you don't go to the courts for justice, you go for the law. Never confuse the two.
Very true - achieving justice is a subjective opinion, while applying the law is much more objective.
You mean the object of the law courts can never be justice? Quite. Probably why so many people are failed by the system and have no respect for it.
The object of the law courts is to apply the law. In the very nature of things, this means that some people have the courts vindicate their position, while others do not have that vindication. It's the latter group, almost entirely, who feel that they have been "failed by the system". A commonplace saying is that judgments are written not to explain why one party one, but why the other lost.
To put it another way, what a plaintiff sees as justice will probably be very different to how a defendant does.
Hopefully, the aim of the justice system is to achieve some kind of justice. I think anyone who has ever worked in the system knows that it does so very imperfectly, in part because it is trying to balance competing and operationally inconsistent goals. The criminal justice system tries to convict the guilty, but also tries to avoid convicting the innocent, and also tries to hold the apparatus of the state to some standards in the way it conducts criminal investigations. All three goals are part of doing justice, but in the imperfect world we live in they can and often do point in different directions when it comes to the results of particular cases.
and now new research has demonstrated that thanks to the leading language used in media reporting, blame for road smashes is often placed on victims.
OK, let me ask you a question. To me, there are two entirely different things at play in the discussion you quote here. One is attributing blame for the incident. If a car is driving on a road, and collides with a person, we can construct scenarios where the driver of the car is 100% at fault, where the pedestrian is 100% at fault, and where the blame is shared.
But blame is rarely a useful concept in preventing future collisions. Whose fault it was is rarely the most important thing. People make mistakes. Pedestrians don't look where they're going, drivers don't pay attention, drivers drive faster than is sensible - all those things are normal errors that humans will make all the time. If there's a modification in road design that can make collisions less likely, it's a good idea (other things being equal). It doesn't matter whose fault, if anyone's, the interaction was.
Blame is relevant when it comes to presenting criminal charges for behaviour that is significantly below expectations (or firing employees likewise), and in some jurisdictions that are not yours, blame is relevant for assigning the costs among the participants, but it's rarely useful in making things better in the future.
Disagree. Noting that "distracted walking" with cell phones, a recently introduced idea, has not been responsible for pedestrians been hit by car drivers. The concept has no factual basis. Or perhaps you can find one occurrence.
There's a well documented bias for not blaming drivers for collisions with vulnerable road users, with the understanding that shifting this bias changes the injury statistics. This is the difference between a "share the road" approach versus a vulnerable road users approach, with the extreme end of "cars as guests" and must yield to all always
If the zeitgeist (spirit or tenor of the times) is to attribute more blame to the pedestrian than driver, then we don't have motivation to change the roadways or the driver behaviour via expectations for conduct. This is what happened with alcohol consumption and driving, wearing of seatbelts.
and now new research has demonstrated that thanks to the leading language used in media reporting, blame for road smashes is often placed on victims.
OK, let me ask you a question. To me, there are two entirely different things at play in the discussion you quote here. One is attributing blame for the incident. If a car is driving on a road, and collides with a person, we can construct scenarios where the driver of the car is 100% at fault, where the pedestrian is 100% at fault, and where the blame is shared.
But blame is rarely a useful concept in preventing future collisions. Whose fault it was is rarely the most important thing. People make mistakes. Pedestrians don't look where they're going, drivers don't pay attention, drivers drive faster than is sensible - all those things are normal errors that humans will make all the time. If there's a modification in road design that can make collisions less likely, it's a good idea (other things being equal). It doesn't matter whose fault, if anyone's, the interaction was.
Blame is relevant when it comes to presenting criminal charges for behaviour that is significantly below expectations (or firing employees likewise), and in some jurisdictions that are not yours, blame is relevant for assigning the costs among the participants, but it's rarely useful in making things better in the future.
There's a well documented bias for not blaming drivers for collisions with vulnerable road users, with the understanding that shifting this bias changes the injury statistics. This is the difference between a "share the road" approach versus a vulnerable road users approach, with the extreme end of "cars as guests" and must yield to all always
That may be a debate worth having, but I think it's a different debate. If the law is that the driver is responsible even if a pedestrian walks into an arterial road without looking, then practically speaking you're looking at effective speed limit of maybe 40 km/h (25 mph) or less for any road that isn't a controlled access freeway (unless you want to make cars guests on those roads as well...). That effectively eliminates the concept of arterial roads.
Disagree. Noting that "distracted walking" with cell phones, a recently introduced idea, has not been responsible for pedestrians been hit by car drivers. The concept has no factual basis. Or perhaps you can find one occurrence.
I am such an occurrence. I was cycling home, in the middle of the road, one evening, and a pedestrian on a cellphone suddenly stepped backwards into me. I almost avoided her, but ended up in the gutter with a broken collarbone.
I still maintain that it's reasonable to expect people not to suddenly walk backwards into roadways.
(In retrospect, I believe that the pedestrian in question was trying to meet up with friends at a local pub, was lost, was on the phone to her friends asking for directions, and stepped backwards into the road to try and read the street sign that was attached to the wall quite some distance above head height. )
Yes, my bike had lights, and I was wearing a bright yellow fluorescent vest, which was irrelevant, because she didn't have eyes in the back of her head. Yes, my bike carried the statutory bell, but I didn't have time to ring it. I had time to shout "Hey" while I was attempting to swerve.
So I blame the pedestrian for the accident. The police took no action, and I wasn't interested in pursuing anything (the UK has the NHS, so my medical treatment was free; I was out the cost of a taxi ride home from the hospital later than night, plus the cost of a replacement front wheel and helmet for my bike. It wasn't worth my while spending the time to chase that up - it was maybe 100 quid in total.)
Now, you can ask what you could change to make the accident less likely. "Have the pedestrian not be an idiot" isn't an option - there will always be people who do stupid things. Fences between the footpath and roadway would have helped - such things are often installed in crowded areas where there are a lot of people to keep off the road, but probably aren't proportional on a minor side street such as this one. Making the road into a shared use car / bike / pedestrian space rather than a road with a footpath would have helped - I'd have been cycling slower in a shared-use space than on a road, and so might have succeeded in avoiding her. I'd probably have also given her a wider berth to start with, rather than making the fairly natural assumption that a pedestrian standing still, facing away from the road, was not about to reverse into the road.
For the road in question, I don't think there would be any significant downside in making the whole thing a shared-use space, and making it a shared-use space would change the assumptions that I would make whilst cycling down it, and would have likely prevented that particular collision. (The road is a quiet dead-end for cars that terminates in a cycle path. Its only use for motor vehicles is for access to the surrounding buildings.) This doesn't alter the fact that I allot 100% of the blame for the accident to the pedestrian.
(The cost to me of making it a shared-use space would be to perhaps halve the speed at which I'd cycle down it, which would have increased the duration of my commute by about 30 seconds or so. Doing it on one smallish stretch of road clearly doesn't cost much. Co-mingling pedestrians with bikes and vehicles along my entire route, on the other hand, would convert a 20-25 minute commute to a 50 minute commute, which would look like a bad choice.)
Re 'accident' - is there possibly a compromise position that the word 'accident' encompasses a wide range of situations, including but not limited to 'not preventable'?
And therefore, human nature being what it is, if a situation is described as 'an accident', some people will instinctively rationalise it as 'not preventable, and therefore not my fault'?
And therefore it might be better to use a word that doesn't open the door to that particular rationalisation?
Hopefully, the aim of the justice system is to achieve some kind of justice. I think anyone who has ever worked in the system knows that it does so very imperfectly, in part because it is trying to balance competing and operationally inconsistent goals. The criminal justice system tries to convict the guilty, but also tries to avoid convicting the innocent, and also tries to hold the apparatus of the state to some standards in the way it conducts criminal investigations. All three goals are part of doing justice, but in the imperfect world we live in they can and often do point in different directions when it comes to the results of particular cases.
And it is your last sentence which is getting close to the answer - save that I'd exclude the qualification "imperfect ". In addition, it does not deal with the point I made that the perception of achieving justice depends on the person's role in the particular case. To move to a particular example: a few days ago here, a court handed down a decision in a case which had taken a dozen or so days court time for the actual hearing on top of numerous disputes at the pre-hearing stages. It was a fight between siblings as to parental intentions in organising property. The costs would be very, very substantial, including of course the costs to the community in providing a judge, courtroom and associated registry staff.
You can bet that one set of siblings feels that justice was done, their assertions and evidence having been accepted; at the same time, those on the other side will feel that there has been no justice at all. How do you approach that sort of case, and all the others like it, in your goal of "achieving justice"?
Hopefully, the aim of the justice system is to achieve some kind of justice. I think anyone who has ever worked in the system knows that it does so very imperfectly, in part because it is trying to balance competing and operationally inconsistent goals. The criminal justice system tries to convict the guilty, but also tries to avoid convicting the innocent, and also tries to hold the apparatus of the state to some standards in the way it conducts criminal investigations. All three goals are part of doing justice, but in the imperfect world we live in they can and often do point in different directions when it comes to the results of particular cases.
And it is your last sentence which is getting close to the answer - save that I'd exclude the qualification "imperfect ". In addition, it does not deal with the point I made that the perception of achieving justice depends on the person's role in the particular case. To move to a particular example: a few days ago here, a court handed down a decision in a case which had taken a dozen or so days court time for the actual hearing on top of numerous disputes at the pre-hearing stages. It was a fight between siblings as to parental intentions in organising property. The costs would be very, very substantial, including of course the costs to the community in providing a judge, courtroom and associated registry staff.
You can bet that one set of siblings feels that justice was done, their assertions and evidence having been accepted; at the same time, those on the other side will feel that there has been no justice at all. How do you approach that sort of case, and all the others like it, in your goal of "achieving justice"?
Perception isn't everything, though as you mentioned one purpose of reasons for judgement is to improve the perception of justice being done.
Walking through a few examples:
We now know that honestly mistaken but absolutely confident eyewitnesses were a significant cause of wrongful convictions, before the frailties of eyewitness evidence were fully appreciated.
Let's say somebody testifies they were viciously attacked and the accused was their assailant. In fact, they fingered the wrong person, while honestly being completely convinced they were right. The accused is acquitted. The complainant may well perceive this as a miscarriage of justice, but on any standard the complainant would be wrong.
Change the facts and say that the accused is actually the person who committed the attack, but the court still finds the eyewitness evidence insufficient to convict after a trial where the complainant was the only witness. If the Court has only the complainant's evidence to go on, and only God and the accused know that the accused is actually guilty of the offence, it's hard to accuse the court of committing an injustice if the Court correctly applied a standard that is designed to prevent innocent people from being wrongfully convicted and decided the evidence just wasn't strong enough. On the other hand, if someone came up better tools for reliably assessing eyewitness evidence, such that we could be more confident in basing convictions on some kinds of eyewitness evidence, we would want to use those tools because doing so would make the justice system better at doing what it's supposed to do. That's what I mean when I say we live in an imperfect world - a world that contains honestly mistaken witnesses, and lacks omniscient judges, and where we have to make do with rules that we believe serve the ends of justice but that we are know are fallible (and, in criminal law, have been designed have acquittal as their failure mode).
Perhaps. Accident means that it was not preventable.
And therefore doesn't exist. You have defined the word "accident" out of existence. Is that a standard Canadian use, or your own idiosyncrasy?
Read the links. No it is general.
It originated in the USA.
“Accident means that it was not preventable” is not standard usage in the US, though it may be popular among some traffic safety activists.
"Accident" in the U.S. means simply that it was not intended by anybody. You can talk about a drunk-driving accident or even an accident caused as the result of a high-speed chase. The only thing that would rule out the use of the word would be if someone deliberately set out to cause a crash--at which point it would be called murder, attempted murder, vehicular homicide, and the like. Nobody would refer to the incidents where assholes deliberately drive into crowds as "accidents." Those were intended.
"Accident" in the U.S. means simply that it was not intended by anybody. You can talk about a drunk-driving accident or even an accident caused as the result of a high-speed chase. The only thing that would rule out the use of the word would be if someone deliberately set out to cause a crash--at which point it would be called murder, attempted murder, vehicular homicide, and the like. Nobody would refer to the incidents where assholes deliberately drive into crowds as "accidents." Those were intended.
Here, and in the UK, "accident" is commonly used as a synonym for collision, or some other event causing injury or loss, as well as the stricter sense you set out. I could say that I had an accident the other day when I slipped on a lettuce leaf on the greengrocery floor.
Marsupial - thanks for that last post. I can now see where you're coming from. Perhaps in the example you give, the complainant is cross-examined as to the time of day, general visibility and so forth. She agrees that it was late on a winter afternoon, with a bit of fog around etc. and it was not easy to see. All that evidence accords with earlier evidence from a bystander who did not see the attack. Before I could ask the judge to find that her identification evidence should not be accepted, I'd be ethically bound to put to her that visibility was so poor that her evidence of identification of my client was mistaken because of the matters she has agreed to.
Would there be an injustice if the judge found that her evidence could well have been both given honestly but mistaken?
I think reliability (as opposed to honesty) is really what’s at stake here, so an acquittal based purely on concerns about reliability can be a just outcome.
I think reliability (as opposed to honesty) is really what’s at stake here, so an acquittal based purely on concerns about reliability can be a just outcome.
Perhaps. Accident means that it was not preventable.
And therefore doesn't exist. You have defined the word "accident" out of existence. Is that a standard Canadian use, or your own idiosyncrasy?
Read the links. No it is general.
It originated in the USA.
“Accident means that it was not preventable” is not standard usage in the US, though it may be popular among some traffic safety activists.
"Accident" in the U.S. means simply that it was not intended by anybody. You can talk about a drunk-driving accident or even an accident caused as the result of a high-speed chase. The only thing that would rule out the use of the word would be if someone deliberately set out to cause a crash--at which point it would be called murder, attempted murder, vehicular homicide, and the like. Nobody would refer to the incidents where assholes deliberately drive into crowds as "accidents." Those were intended.
It's a good read. Falling off your bike is an accident. A driver hitting you while on your bike isn't. It's about a pro basket ball player who is now paralysed. Because an accident?
Perhaps. Accident means that it was not preventable.
And therefore doesn't exist. You have defined the word "accident" out of existence. Is that a standard Canadian use, or your own idiosyncrasy?
Read the links. No it is general.
It originated in the USA.
“Accident means that it was not preventable” is not standard usage in the US, though it may be popular among some traffic safety activists.
"Accident" in the U.S. means simply that it was not intended by anybody. You can talk about a drunk-driving accident or even an accident caused as the result of a high-speed chase. The only thing that would rule out the use of the word would be if someone deliberately set out to cause a crash--at which point it would be called murder, attempted murder, vehicular homicide, and the like. Nobody would refer to the incidents where assholes deliberately drive into crowds as "accidents." Those were intended.
It's a good read. Falling off your bike is an accident. A driver hitting you while on your bike isn't. It's about a pro basket ball player who is now paralysed. Because an accident?
Yes, because of an accident, by a common definition of the word:
an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
Yes, in the U.S. that would be referred to as an accident. The only way of disqualifying it would be to show that there was good reason to believe the driver did it on purpose.
You seem to be confused about the kind of word this is, at least in U.S. usage. "Accident" is a euphemism. We tend to avoid "crash" and the like except in completely de-humanized contexts such as radio announcers saying "there were five crashes on the I-5 this morning," where no names are mentioned and there's no victims or grieving families about. "Crash" is painfully evocative when there is such a human context, and the presumption is that nobody needs that extra pain. Rather like saying "homicide" instead of "murder" or "stabbing." We know what's meant (not talking legal contexts here, just ordinary speech), but the pain is backed off just a bit.
Now I can see how activists might think that forcing the pain is the way to go, but I doubt it myself. I think that those wanting to have safer roads could do a great many things that would have a larger effect than campaigning against the use of a well-understood euphemism.
Yes, in the U.S. that would be referred to as an accident. The only way of disqualifying it would be to show that there was good reason to believe the driver did it on purpose.
You seem to be confused about the kind of word this is, at least in U.S. usage. "Accident" is a euphemism. We tend to avoid "crash" and the like except in completely de-humanized contexts such as radio announcers saying "there were five crashes on the I-5 this morning," where no names are mentioned and there's no victims or grieving families about. "Crash" is painfully evocative when there is such a human context, and the presumption is that nobody needs that extra pain. Rather like saying "homicide" instead of "murder" or "stabbing." We know what's meant (not talking legal contexts here, just ordinary speech), but the pain is backed off just a bit.
Now I can see how activists might think that forcing the pain is the way to go, but I doubt it myself. I think that those wanting to have safer roads could do a great many things that would have a larger effect than campaigning against the use of a well-understood euphemism.
Totally agree with all of that, and also Dave W's post in relation to the use of "accident" here. But NP_Np may be setting out a distinct Canadian usage.
Comments
In standard British use, as @Enoch mentions, "accident" doesn't carry any kind of implication of "unavoidable".
Some local kids broke a wing mirror on my neighbour's car the other day. It was an accident - they didn't mean to break the mirror, and were absolutely horrified when it happened. It was also completely avoidable - they were playing with a baseball too close to parked cars.
This was an accident. The fact that it was an accident doesn't mean that the kids' parents aren't going to pay to replace the wing mirror. It doesn't mean that the kids weren't wrong to play with a baseball too close to parked cars, and it probably doesn't mean that the parents aren't going to impose some kind of consequence on the kids to help pay for the damage they caused. It just means that it wasn't a deliberate act. These kids weren't delinquents smashing car mirrors for the hell of it - they were generally well-behaved kids who made a mistake.
(If you write "a driver hit a pedestrian" and don't follow it with "with their car" then it sounds like road rage to me - the driver got out of his car and punched a pedestrian.)
For example, @NOprophet_NØprofit pointed out that we talk about "injuries at work" rather than accidents. That's because the thing that we're trying to avoid is the injury. Wearing protective clothing, for example, probably doesn't change the probability of an accident much, but it reduces the effect of that accident. But just because I don't routinely use the word "accident" to describe an injury at work doesn't mean that I don't think that most such injuries are accidents.
here's an accessible read re "crash not accident": https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/11/17/crash-not-accident-better-road-safety-reporting-could-save-lives-show-researchers/?sh=1d5795f641ba .
Why it matters:
OK, let me ask you a question. To me, there are two entirely different things at play in the discussion you quote here. One is attributing blame for the incident. If a car is driving on a road, and collides with a person, we can construct scenarios where the driver of the car is 100% at fault, where the pedestrian is 100% at fault, and where the blame is shared.
But blame is rarely a useful concept in preventing future collisions. Whose fault it was is rarely the most important thing. People make mistakes. Pedestrians don't look where they're going, drivers don't pay attention, drivers drive faster than is sensible - all those things are normal errors that humans will make all the time. If there's a modification in road design that can make collisions less likely, it's a good idea (other things being equal). It doesn't matter whose fault, if anyone's, the interaction was.
Blame is relevant when it comes to presenting criminal charges for behaviour that is significantly below expectations (or firing employees likewise), and in some jurisdictions that are not yours, blame is relevant for assigning the costs among the participants, but it's rarely useful in making things better in the future.
The object of the law courts is to apply the law. In the very nature of things, this means that some people have the courts vindicate their position, while others do not have that vindication. It's the latter group, almost entirely, who feel that they have been "failed by the system". A commonplace saying is that judgments are written not to explain why one party one, but why the other lost.
To put it another way, what a plaintiff sees as justice will probably be very different to how a defendant does.
Disagree. Noting that "distracted walking" with cell phones, a recently introduced idea, has not been responsible for pedestrians been hit by car drivers. The concept has no factual basis. Or perhaps you can find one occurrence.
There's a well documented bias for not blaming drivers for collisions with vulnerable road users, with the understanding that shifting this bias changes the injury statistics. This is the difference between a "share the road" approach versus a vulnerable road users approach, with the extreme end of "cars as guests" and must yield to all always
If the zeitgeist (spirit or tenor of the times) is to attribute more blame to the pedestrian than driver, then we don't have motivation to change the roadways or the driver behaviour via expectations for conduct. This is what happened with alcohol consumption and driving, wearing of seatbelts.
That may be a debate worth having, but I think it's a different debate. If the law is that the driver is responsible even if a pedestrian walks into an arterial road without looking, then practically speaking you're looking at effective speed limit of maybe 40 km/h (25 mph) or less for any road that isn't a controlled access freeway (unless you want to make cars guests on those roads as well...). That effectively eliminates the concept of arterial roads.
I am such an occurrence. I was cycling home, in the middle of the road, one evening, and a pedestrian on a cellphone suddenly stepped backwards into me. I almost avoided her, but ended up in the gutter with a broken collarbone.
I still maintain that it's reasonable to expect people not to suddenly walk backwards into roadways.
(In retrospect, I believe that the pedestrian in question was trying to meet up with friends at a local pub, was lost, was on the phone to her friends asking for directions, and stepped backwards into the road to try and read the street sign that was attached to the wall quite some distance above head height. )
Yes, my bike had lights, and I was wearing a bright yellow fluorescent vest, which was irrelevant, because she didn't have eyes in the back of her head. Yes, my bike carried the statutory bell, but I didn't have time to ring it. I had time to shout "Hey" while I was attempting to swerve.
So I blame the pedestrian for the accident. The police took no action, and I wasn't interested in pursuing anything (the UK has the NHS, so my medical treatment was free; I was out the cost of a taxi ride home from the hospital later than night, plus the cost of a replacement front wheel and helmet for my bike. It wasn't worth my while spending the time to chase that up - it was maybe 100 quid in total.)
Now, you can ask what you could change to make the accident less likely. "Have the pedestrian not be an idiot" isn't an option - there will always be people who do stupid things. Fences between the footpath and roadway would have helped - such things are often installed in crowded areas where there are a lot of people to keep off the road, but probably aren't proportional on a minor side street such as this one. Making the road into a shared use car / bike / pedestrian space rather than a road with a footpath would have helped - I'd have been cycling slower in a shared-use space than on a road, and so might have succeeded in avoiding her. I'd probably have also given her a wider berth to start with, rather than making the fairly natural assumption that a pedestrian standing still, facing away from the road, was not about to reverse into the road.
For the road in question, I don't think there would be any significant downside in making the whole thing a shared-use space, and making it a shared-use space would change the assumptions that I would make whilst cycling down it, and would have likely prevented that particular collision. (The road is a quiet dead-end for cars that terminates in a cycle path. Its only use for motor vehicles is for access to the surrounding buildings.) This doesn't alter the fact that I allot 100% of the blame for the accident to the pedestrian.
(The cost to me of making it a shared-use space would be to perhaps halve the speed at which I'd cycle down it, which would have increased the duration of my commute by about 30 seconds or so. Doing it on one smallish stretch of road clearly doesn't cost much. Co-mingling pedestrians with bikes and vehicles along my entire route, on the other hand, would convert a 20-25 minute commute to a 50 minute commute, which would look like a bad choice.)
And therefore, human nature being what it is, if a situation is described as 'an accident', some people will instinctively rationalise it as 'not preventable, and therefore not my fault'?
And therefore it might be better to use a word that doesn't open the door to that particular rationalisation?
And it is your last sentence which is getting close to the answer - save that I'd exclude the qualification "imperfect ". In addition, it does not deal with the point I made that the perception of achieving justice depends on the person's role in the particular case. To move to a particular example: a few days ago here, a court handed down a decision in a case which had taken a dozen or so days court time for the actual hearing on top of numerous disputes at the pre-hearing stages. It was a fight between siblings as to parental intentions in organising property. The costs would be very, very substantial, including of course the costs to the community in providing a judge, courtroom and associated registry staff.
You can bet that one set of siblings feels that justice was done, their assertions and evidence having been accepted; at the same time, those on the other side will feel that there has been no justice at all. How do you approach that sort of case, and all the others like it, in your goal of "achieving justice"?
Yes they do. God made me drive my car into that walker when I was speeding.
Perception isn't everything, though as you mentioned one purpose of reasons for judgement is to improve the perception of justice being done.
Walking through a few examples:
We now know that honestly mistaken but absolutely confident eyewitnesses were a significant cause of wrongful convictions, before the frailties of eyewitness evidence were fully appreciated.
Let's say somebody testifies they were viciously attacked and the accused was their assailant. In fact, they fingered the wrong person, while honestly being completely convinced they were right. The accused is acquitted. The complainant may well perceive this as a miscarriage of justice, but on any standard the complainant would be wrong.
Change the facts and say that the accused is actually the person who committed the attack, but the court still finds the eyewitness evidence insufficient to convict after a trial where the complainant was the only witness. If the Court has only the complainant's evidence to go on, and only God and the accused know that the accused is actually guilty of the offence, it's hard to accuse the court of committing an injustice if the Court correctly applied a standard that is designed to prevent innocent people from being wrongfully convicted and decided the evidence just wasn't strong enough. On the other hand, if someone came up better tools for reliably assessing eyewitness evidence, such that we could be more confident in basing convictions on some kinds of eyewitness evidence, we would want to use those tools because doing so would make the justice system better at doing what it's supposed to do. That's what I mean when I say we live in an imperfect world - a world that contains honestly mistaken witnesses, and lacks omniscient judges, and where we have to make do with rules that we believe serve the ends of justice but that we are know are fallible (and, in criminal law, have been designed have acquittal as their failure mode).
"Accident" in the U.S. means simply that it was not intended by anybody. You can talk about a drunk-driving accident or even an accident caused as the result of a high-speed chase. The only thing that would rule out the use of the word would be if someone deliberately set out to cause a crash--at which point it would be called murder, attempted murder, vehicular homicide, and the like. Nobody would refer to the incidents where assholes deliberately drive into crowds as "accidents." Those were intended.
Here, and in the UK, "accident" is commonly used as a synonym for collision, or some other event causing injury or loss, as well as the stricter sense you set out. I could say that I had an accident the other day when I slipped on a lettuce leaf on the greengrocery floor.
Marsupial - thanks for that last post. I can now see where you're coming from. Perhaps in the example you give, the complainant is cross-examined as to the time of day, general visibility and so forth. She agrees that it was late on a winter afternoon, with a bit of fog around etc. and it was not easy to see. All that evidence accords with earlier evidence from a bystander who did not see the attack. Before I could ask the judge to find that her identification evidence should not be accepted, I'd be ethically bound to put to her that visibility was so poor that her evidence of identification of my client was mistaken because of the matters she has agreed to.
Would there be an injustice if the judge found that her evidence could well have been both given honestly but mistaken?
Indeed.
How about this one? https://www.bicycling.com/news/a35880731/shawn-bradley-paralyzed-hit-by-car-during-bike-ride/
It's a good read. Falling off your bike is an accident. A driver hitting you while on your bike isn't. It's about a pro basket ball player who is now paralysed. Because an accident?
You seem to be confused about the kind of word this is, at least in U.S. usage. "Accident" is a euphemism. We tend to avoid "crash" and the like except in completely de-humanized contexts such as radio announcers saying "there were five crashes on the I-5 this morning," where no names are mentioned and there's no victims or grieving families about. "Crash" is painfully evocative when there is such a human context, and the presumption is that nobody needs that extra pain. Rather like saying "homicide" instead of "murder" or "stabbing." We know what's meant (not talking legal contexts here, just ordinary speech), but the pain is backed off just a bit.
Now I can see how activists might think that forcing the pain is the way to go, but I doubt it myself. I think that those wanting to have safer roads could do a great many things that would have a larger effect than campaigning against the use of a well-understood euphemism.
Totally agree with all of that, and also Dave W's post in relation to the use of "accident" here. But NP_Np may be setting out a distinct Canadian usage.