Crash in California (not the one in the article). Photo by Bisayan lady.

This morning’s Washington Post car crash story, the latest in a sadly regular chain, avoids the “man killed from striking fast-moving bullet” fallacy, the excessive passive voice, and the misleading use of the word “accident” that mar much traffic crash reporting. The story still doesn’t assign any criminal responsibility, since that’s the police’s job. But neither does the reporter, Matt Zapatosky, contort his words as though vehicles magically behaved of their own accord. The lede:

A man slammed his sport-utility vehicle into a wall on the Capital Beltway early yesterday, killing a teenage passenger and injuring himself and four others, police said. The man … was driving on the inner loop near Route 1 in Prince George’s County when he lost control of his vehicle and struck the center median, police said.

Zapatosky also calls the incident a “crash”, not an “accident”. The latter term presupposes that nobody is at fault, while the former is neutral, encompassing all incidents, whether police charges ought to file charges or not. In this case, according to the article, Prince George’s County police are investigating that possibility.

Police did file charges in California, against a woman who smashed into a line of cars while texting, killing another driver. The driver, Deborah Matis-Engle, “used her cell phone to conduct three separate bill-paying transactions in the final four minutes and was in the middle of one of those transactions” when she passed through a construction zone at 66 mph, hitting a stationary vehicle and killing the driver, Petra Monika Winn.

Judge Cara Beatty, despite hearing from friends of Matis-Engle that she was a gentle, caring and loving person, made it clear that she was not the same person as a motorist. “She drove without any concept that people might be in her path,” she said.

Matis-Engle even kept texting while driving after the crash. Beatty sentenced her to six years in jail for vehicular manslaughter. Many liken driving while texting to driving drunk, as studies have shown drivers to act in a similarly impaired way, dubbed “intexticated”.

Tom Vanderbilt writes,

These sentences convey an important truth; that most people involved in negligent driving of this sort aren’t “bad people” or homicidal maniacs, and to demonize them in that regard is counter-productive, as it may reinforce the notion among the rest of us that it’s the “other person” we all need to be concerned with, that our own driving is “above average,” etc. What does need to demonized, rather than blithely accepted and tacitly encouraged, is the culture of multi-tasking while driving. …

A last point to make is that had the driver been intoxicated, the sentence would surely be higher still. As the science comes in on distracted driving, is the distinction between alcohol and texting going to hold?

This crash and the death of a teenager is a tragedy. So was the death in California. But criminal or not, drivers’ behavior can significantly increase or decrease the chance of such tragedies occurring. When reporters properly place the driver rather than the vehicle as the subject of their sentences, and police file charges when drivers act in negligently dangerous ways, we might make a dent in the carnage on the streets.