But on a more intelligent level, who actually is to blame for car crashes?
Well throughout our lives we're told constantly that somebody else is to blame for them - it's never us, and the people responsible are usually made out to be stupid!
The police come into the schools for example to talk about the dangers of drink driving. They never tell us stories about somebody who met the rest of the extended family for a meal one Sunday afternoon and had two pints of beer with his food before getting pulled over by police for having a brake light out and being found to be over the limit. That's likely to be your "average" drink driving story. What they tell us instead is the story of a young, foolish lad who met some mates for a deliberate drink after the football, perhaps he intended to leave his car at the pub, but it was raining and he drove home after 20 pints, crashing at 80mph in a 30 zone and killing people close to him. Is it any wonder that the audience here finds it very easy to dismiss examples such as the one given as being something that they simply wouldn't do? A crash after that amount of alcohol seems almost inevitable - normal people wouldn't do that, the driver there was plain stupid!
And then you have those cliches that come out when people are learning to drive...
"You only learn to drive after passing your test"
"Nobody drives after their test in the same way that they do when they pass it"
"It's not your driving you need to watch, it's everyone else's"
"The roads are full of idiots these days"
That doesn't help either - it seems as though most drivers openly admit that they deliberately let their driving standards drop immediately after passing their tests (which is a test of their ability to follow rules and to drive safely) and then wonder why everyone seems to have differing opinions as to how things should be done and labels everyone else stupid!
To find a more constructive answer to the question of who is to blame for car crashes, we need to spend some time thinking about one.
Take for example, a fairly standard crash where a car has apparently emerged from a junction into the path of another vehicle. If we assume that that basic fact is all that we know about the situation and brainstorm possible reasons for it happening and list them, it varies a lot...
- Bad weather could have caused skidding
- Bad weather could have caused poor visibility
- Speed of either vehicle could have been an issue
- An emergency vehicle may have been involved
- Either driver may not have known what road markings meant
- Somebody may have been in a hurry - if so... why?
After a few hours of brainstorming, the exhaustive list of potential causes for any particular crash is massive and any single one of the things listed may be the ultimate cause of a crash of this description in a real life situation.
Now each of these potential causes can be placed into one of four different boxes - just four. Those four are:
- PERSONALITY TRAITS
- REASON FOR THE JOURNEY
- KNOWLEDGE OF RULES AND PROCEDURE
- PHYSICAL CONTROL OF THE VEHICLE
As you sort the reasons into the boxes (and some go in two or more boxes, it's okay to do that and to list them twice) then a very clear, stark pattern emerges. As we go through this exercise, we find that two boxes contain 80 or 90% of the potential causes we came up with - these boxes are the personality and reason for the journey boxes.
It's a fact that people don't crash because of a lack of knowledge of the rules or because they lost physical control of their vehicle (these are the two things that form the basis of the driving test) - they crash because of their personal character attributes and the reason for their journey.
Now you may have crashed yourself because you lost control of your vehicle and be thinking that this is a load of rubbish, but give it a bit of thought - why were you driving in that manner? Do you just enjoy a fast drive (personality)? Or were you late for work or something (reason for the journey)? Perhaps your kids distracted you as you drove somewhere on holiday (reason for the journey)?
We end up with examples like this coming to mind...
A young lad taking his girlfriend out on a date promised her dad that he'd have her home for 11pm and is keen to leave a good impression. They've been to the cinema and the film over-ran so they're late. There isn't a lot of traffic around and the lad is feeling pressure to get home before that 11pm deadline. Is he an idiot for respecting the girl's father like that?
An elderly lady wants to go shopping. Her eyesight is failing and she knows it but without her car she is isolated and reliant on neighbours who are also elderly. She has no family. Is she an idiot for needing a few things from the shops? How easy would you find it to trouble the neighbours if you were in her situation? Very easy? Really?
Those are just two examples that come up in these kinds of studies and they illustrate clearly who is to blame for car crashes and that is all of us that are involved in them! Idiots don't cause car crashes generally, normal people doing normal things are to blame.
If we're going to bring down the number of crashes and KSI (Killed or Seriously Injured) figures, then what we need to do is drop this attitude that everyone else is the cause of the problem and adopt one of tolerance, co-operation and personal responsibility for our own actions and safety. When you do that, you notice that there aren't actually that many problems on the roads at all and that most drivers, far from being stupid, hostile towards you and the cause of danger, are simply trying to do their best to get from A to B with the minimum of fuss and drama.
