Language matters in transport safety—not just in what is reported, but how.
Language is never neutral. It reflects our values, our assumptions, and our priorities.
As transport safety professionals, we hold influence in how collisions are understood and how change is pursued. Deaths and serious injuries in the transport system don’t have to be inevitable. Choosing our words with the same care we give in our daily work of designing, building, managing, or delivering can make all the difference to long term outcomes.
Laura Laker is a freelance transport and environment journalist, with bylines in The Guardian, Sunday Times, Cyclist, Cycling Plus, and road.cc, where she was previously the weekend editor. She hosts the Streets Ahead podcast and regularly appears on Sky News, BBC, LBC and Yahoo to discuss active travel and road safety. Laura also chairs and contributes to panel discussions and public debates on cycling and transport and has recently published a book about the UK’s national cycle network. She was a guest speaker at PACTS’ Council of Members meeting in March 2024.
In this guest article, journalist Laura Laker reflects on the way language shapes public understanding of road crashes, and how small shifts in the words we use an drive meaningful cultural change.
What’s in a word? Well, science tells us a lot, actually. Words shape our understanding of the world, and how we interact with it. That’s why from childhood we learn to say things like, ‘the milk spilled’ rather than ‘I spilled the milk’, to obscure our own responsibility in the matter. While road collisions are far more serious than spilled milk, we risk employing the same slippery semantics when talking about them. Calling them ‘accidents’ assumes no-one is at fault and nothing could have been done before we know any of the facts. Saying ‘a car mounted the kerb’, or ‘a car was speeding’, without mentioning any driver obscures the role of people in crashes. People are license holders. More accurately ‘a driver was speeding’ or ‘a vehicle being driven on “A-road” hit a pedestrian’ – language we already use when the striking ‘vehicle’ is a cyclist. This small change shifts the audience focus away from vulnerable road users by up to 30%. That’s huge.
In 2022 I authored the UK’s first Road Collision Reporting Guidelines to try and improve media accuracy around road crashes. However, the media listens to, and often copies verbatim, language from professionals; ‘common usage’ in journalist parlance. That’s why I spent part of a year working with blue light services, among others, to improve language ‘upstream’, while producing a handbook for press offices. The results were positive: police services, backed by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, and the fire service, backed by the National Fire Chiefs Council, have almost phased out the word ‘accident’ entirely, and committed to further improvements. National Highways is phasing out ‘accident’, backed by new government legislation. ‘Accident’ slips into our vocabulary, mine included, out of habit. As professionals though, we can lead a conscious change for better and, with a few small tweaks to our language, play our part in cutting road danger. That’s the power of words.
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