Accidents No Longer Happen On Britsh Roads
NO more accidents on British roads. Amazing isn’t it. Not one accident. Not a single one. Who said speed cameras and traffic police sat in cars would not one day make British roads a safe place to be? Now read on…
From the Times:
The word “accident” is to be banned from the new edition of the Highway Code in an attempt to persuade drivers and police that someone is almost always to blame for a death or injury on the roads.
The Driving Standards Agency has deleted the word throughout the code and replaced it with “collision”, “crash” or “incident”.
But some motoring groups have objected to the move, saying that it will foster a blame culture and encourage the prosecution of drivers for casualties that they had no intention of causing.
The agency acted after lobbying by Brake, a road-safety charity which claims that describing road deaths as accidents encourages people to view them as unavoidable. The Department for Transport (DfT) has also begun removing references to accidents in its road-safety reports and documents. The DfT’s annual report on road deaths and injuries, which used to be called Road Accidents Great Britain, has been renamed Road Casualties Great Britain.
Some police forces refer to “RTCs”, or road traffic collisions, rather than RTAs.
Cathy Keeler, head of campaigns at Brake, said: “We believe changing the word used will help produce a major shift in thinking away from the idea that crashes are nobody’s fault and that nothing can be done about them.”
Ms Keeler added that using the word accident encouraged police to believe there was no point in taking action against any driver.
Join the debate.
Posted: 12th, May 2007 | In: Twitterings Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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May 13th, 2007 at 12:01 am
I always objected to the word ‘accident.’ It suggests that something is unavoidable. My nephew was mown down by a speeding car that hadn’t a hope in hell of braking in time.
My nephew was lucky and lived, though he looks and walks differently since the ‘accident.’
Try telling him that the circumstamces that changed his life, was ‘accidental.’