Denver Bicycle Lobby

Covering Mobility: A Reporter's Guide to Traffic Violence Journalism

Prepared by the Denver Bicycle Lobby

Journalism is vitally important to citizens and it also plays a role in shaping the accepted narrative. Traffic crashes kill over forty thousand Americans every year.¹ Yet much of the journalism covering these deaths reads less like public health reporting and more like a police press release — passive, driver-centered, and subtly placing the burden on the person who was hurt or killed. This guide, grounded in peer-reviewed research and experts’ articles, offers concrete tools to do better.

1. Stop Parroting the Police Report

For many outlets, covering a crash means copying and pasting whatever the police department releases. This is a structural problem with real consequences.

Police reports contain a built-in flaw: survivor bias. When a pedestrian or cyclist is killed, that person cannot give their account to officers. The driver can. As Columbia Journalism Review noted in its 2018 analysis of crash reporting, “crash information usually comes from flawed police reports, which inform the news coverage. Those reports tend to reflect a survivor’s bias since, in crashes with fatal outcomes, the pedestrian or cyclist is not around to share their side of the story. Instead, the reports are usually based on a single eyewitness: the driver.”²

In practice, this means the report, and any story that simply transcribes it, reflects one perspective presented as neutral fact. A 2019 study published in the Transportation Research Record analyzed 200 local news articles about crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists and found that local coverage “tends to shift blame toward vulnerable road users and away from drivers.”³ A 2022 content analysis of Hawaii news coverage found that 69% of crash articles did not mention the driver or vehicle at all, and one quarter contained language that subtly assigned responsibility to the person walking or cycling.⁴

What to do instead:

Treat the police report as a starting point, not the story.
Contact city transportation departments, Vision Zero offices, and crash reconstruction experts for additional context.
Note explicitly when a driver’s account is the only one available.
Ask what the investigation found, not just what the officer initially concluded.

2. Understand Windshield Bias (Motonormativity)

We all have it. Growing up in a society with cars as the norm instills this in us. Understand then that so do most of your readers, your editors, and your sources. That doesn’t make you a bad journalist — it makes you a human being raised in a car-centric society.

Motonormativity is the term coined by Professor Ian Walker and colleagues (Walker, Tapp, and Davis, 2023) to describe the unconscious cognitive bias in which private car use and its societal costs are treated as natural and inevitable.⁵ It’s the traffic reporting equivalent of heteronormativity, not malice, but an invisible default that shapes perception.

Walker’s original UK research presented participants with paired statements. For example, one about smoking in crowded areas, one about driving in crowded areas with equivalent effects. They found participants consistently gave cars a pass they wouldn’t give cigarettes.⁵ A 2024 replication study, by Professor Goddard, with a U.S. sample found the same pattern: American respondents showed windshield bias across every measure tested.⁶

In journalism, motonormativity/windshield-bias shows up as:

Treating a pedestrian or cyclist death as a freak occurrence rather than a public health trend
Asking “why wasn’t she wearing a helmet?” but not “why was the driver doing 45 in a 25 zone?”
Framing infrastructure (wide lanes, few crossings) as neutral background rather than a cause
Writing about traffic deaths without ever quoting a transportation engineer, urban planner, or public health researcher

One diagnostic question: when was the last time your outlet ran a story about someone killed by a motorist and their car that focused primarily on what the pedestrian or cyclist was doing at the moment of impact?

3. Don’t Victim-Blame and Recognize When You Already Are

Victim-blaming in crash coverage often isn’t intentional. It’s structural, imported from police reports, amplified by editorial habits, and invisible to writers and editors who share the same cultural defaults as their sources.

Common victim-blaming patterns identified in research include: ² ⁷

Highlighting that the victim wasn’t wearing a helmet, reflective gear, or didn’t use a crosswalk
Including information about the victim’s prior behavior (“was jaywalking”) without equivalent scrutiny of the driver’s behavior
Noting that the driver “stayed at the scene”. Framing the absence of a crime as a detail in the driver’s favor
Publishing a victim’s criminal record when it has no bearing on the crash
Describing road conditions (dark, foggy, rain) as if they are the cause rather than factors a driver is legally obligated to account for

A 2017 study published in Earth Common Journal analyzing 71 media accounts of 10 pedestrian/cyclist fatalities concluded “media representation of road safety issues plays a key role in influencing the behaviour of road users and, ultimately, the prevention of road trauma. As such, the media has a responsibility to accurately and compassionately portray the news that shapes the public’s thoughts and behaviours.”⁸

A 2019 experiment put numbers to this: they randomly assigned 999 subjects to read one of three versions of the same crash story. Even small differences in word choice and framing significantly affected how readers assigned blame, what punishment they thought appropriate, and whether they supported structural safety fixes.⁹ Driver-focused language with contextual framing made readers substantially more likely to support infrastructure improvements and less likely to blame the pedestrian.

Practical check: Before publication, ask: does this story scrutinize the driver’s actions as rigorously as it scrutinizes the victim’s? If not, revise.

4. Design Matters

Because we live in such a car-centric world we often take for granted the design of the built environment around us, but design plays a central role in road users’ behavior.

A wide street promotes speeding. Large turn radiuses mean quick turns and drivers not looking for pedestrians. Pedestrian crossings onerously far apart mean people choose to cross mid-block instead of at the crosswalk. Protected bike lanes make it clear where cyclists are and prevent drivers from encroaching in their space.

The Director of Transportation for the city of Richmond, Virginia, Andy Boenau puts it this way: “drivers respond to the built environment much the same way water responds to a riverbed. The shape, width, and surface conditions of the riverbed determine the water’s speed, turbulence, and direction. Likewise, the width of a road, presence of visual cues, curvature, intersections, and surrounding land use dictate how fast, aggressively, or cautiously people drive.”¹⁰

Observations to make around a crash site:

What is the posted speed limit?
Is it an arterial, collector, or neighborhood street?
Is the street maintained by a city, state, or federal authority?
Are the lane widths large and highway-like?
Do the bike lanes have protection or are they simply paint on the street?
Is the street straight like a raceway with little visual friction for drivers?
Is the lighting appropriate for people outside of cars?
Are there adequate sight-lines for road users to see each other?
Are there visible crosswalks or appropriate crossing facilities?
Are there bike lanes or bump-outs that shorten crossing distances?

If you don’t feel equipped to answer these questions, this is your opportunity to reach out to an expert.

5. Don’t Center the Driver

Crash stories involving pedestrians and cyclists routinely make the driver the subject of sympathy and the victim a secondary character or no character at all.

Research on American crash coverage found that articles were “much more likely to focus on the pedestrian or cyclist who is struck, rather than the driver behind the wheel”.¹¹ A 2025 content analysis of German-language newspapers, echoing earlier findings from the U.S. and Netherlands, found that 52% of crash headlines completely omitted the driver as an agent.¹² In the Netherlands, a comparable study found “parties involved in a crash, and especially secondary parties are most often referred to as vehicles instead of persons and most often the headlines use a non-agentive grammar.”¹³

This happens through several specific mechanisms:

Passive voice that erases the driver. “A pedestrian was struck” tells us nothing about who struck them. “A cyclist was killed” omits the fact that a human being made decisions that led to that death. The 2017 Earth Common Journal study found only 3 out of 71 articles used active voice when describing crashes.⁸

The vehicle as agent. Phrases like “a car struck a cyclist” make an inanimate object the responsible party rather than the person operating the machine.

Driver sympathy details. Language like “the shaken driver remained at the scene” or “the driver is cooperating with investigators” subtly positions the driver as a protagonist under duress. These details are often included without equivalent humanizing detail about the victim.

What to do instead:

Use active voice when a driver’s actions caused a crash: “A driver struck and killed…”
Name the driver as agent, not the vehicle: “the driver” not “the car”
Provide equal biographical context for the victim: who they were, what they were doing, who they leave behind
Reserve driver sympathy details for stories where they’re genuinely relevant

6. Language: Use “Crash,” Not “Accident”

This is the most-cited, and most-ignored, recommendation in traffic safety journalism. The evidence is unambiguous.

“Accident” implies no one is at fault. The word’s plain meaning, an unforeseeable unpreventable event, is factually wrong in most traffic crashes. Drunk driving is a choice. Running a red light is a choice. Speeding through a school zone is a choice. Calling the result an “accident” is not neutral — it quietly exonerates.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recognized this and stopped using “accident” in official communications in 1997.¹⁴ New York City and San Francisco police departments followed. Nevada changed all statutory references from “accident” to “crash” in 2016.¹⁵ Professor Goddard’s paper in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives concluded that dropping the word “accident” from traffic coverage has “the potential to save human lives and prevent injury on a large scale, implementing more intentional editorial patterns may be nothing less than an ethical imperative.” ⁹

Beyond “accident vs. crash,” other language choices matter:

Instead of	Consider
pedestrian accident	driver struck a pedestrian
was hit by a car	was struck by a driver
the car involved	the driver
a car jumped the curb	a driver drove over the curb
road tragedy	traffic violence, traffic death
freak accident	preventable crash

See Table 1 in “Does news coverage of traffic crashes affect perceived blame and preferred solutions?” for more examples

A 2025 randomized controlled experiment with 1,537 participants in Germany found that shifting from passive, victim-focused language to active, driver-focused language reduced pedestrian blame attribution and increased driver responsibility attribution and that adding contextual information (road speed data, infrastructure conditions) enlarged those effects substantially.¹⁶

7. The Bigger Frame: Traffic Deaths Are a Public Health Crisis

The most important thing most outlets get wrong about traffic deaths isn’t a word choice, it’s the frame. The research is consistent: coverage tends to treat crashes as isolated events. They are not.

More than 40,000 people die on American roads each year. Pedestrian fatalities increased between 2009 and 2022. These deaths are not randomly distributed, they fall disproportionately on low-income communities, communities of color, older adults, and people who rely on walking and cycling.¹⁷

Stories that provide this context by citing local crash trends, speed data, infrastructure conditions, and Vision Zero goals produce measurably different public responses. In the Goddard et al. experiment, readers who saw “thematic” crash coverage (with context about speeds, crosswalk conditions, and local crash patterns) were significantly more likely to support infrastructure solutions and less likely to attribute blame to the victim, compared to readers who saw the standard isolated account.⁹ A 2021 UNC study of TV news crash coverage on social media found that posts emphasizing traffic disruption dominated, while victim-narrative and thematic framing — which performed better on engagement — remained rare, leading researchers to conclude that “news media, and professionals in transportation and public health can and must coordinate their actions” to reshape how crashes are portrayed.¹⁸

Sources worth cultivating:

Your city’s Vision Zero team and Department of Transportation
NHTSA’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for crash data
Smart Growth America’s Dangerous by Design reports
Local transportation engineers and urban planners
Academic researchers focused on safe system design and engineering
Public health researchers studying traffic violence
Pedestrian and cyclist advocacy organizations

A Quick Reference Checklist

Before you publish a story about a traffic crash:

Key Research and Guidance

Goddard, T., Ralph, K., Thigpen, C.G., & Iacobucci, E. (2019). “Does news coverage of traffic crashes affect perceived blame and preferred solutions? Evidence from an experiment.” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vol. 3.
Walker, I., Tapp, A., & Davis, A. (2023). “Motornormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard.” International Journal of Environment and Health, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 21–33.
Magusin, H. (2017). “If You Want to Get Away with Murder, Use Your Car: A Discursive Content Analysis of Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities in News Headlines.” Earth Common Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1.
Smart Growth America. (2022). “Dangerous by Design”.
LaJeunesse, S. & Austin, L. (2021). “Factors and frames that shape public discourse around road user safety.” UNC Road Safety Research Center.
Road Collision Reporting Guidelines Handbook for Professionals

U.S. Department of Transportation, “The Traffic Safety Problem”. ↩
Dalton, M., “When covering car crashes, be careful not to blame the victim”, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018. ↩ ↩²
Ralph, K., et al., “Editorial Patterns in Bicyclist and Pedestrian Crash Reporting”, Transportation Research Record, 2019. ↩
Keliikoa, B., et al., “Public health framing in local media coverage of crashes involving pedestrians or bicyclists in Hawai’i, 2019: A content analysis”, Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2022. ↩
Walker, I., Tapp, A. & Davis, A., “Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard”, International Journal of Environment and Health, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2023. ↩ ↩²
Goddard, T., “Windshield Bias, Car Brain, Motornormativity: Different Names, Same Obscured Public Health Hazard”, Findings, August 2024. ↩
Schmitt, A., “Six Ways the Media is Still Blaming the Victim”, Streetsblog USA, January 14, 2019. ↩
Magusin, H., “If You Want to Get Away with Murder, Use Your Car”, Earth Common Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2017. ↩ ↩²
Goddard, T., Ralph, K., Thigpen, C.G. & Iacobucci, E., “Does news coverage of traffic crashes affect perceived blame and preferred solutions?”, Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2019. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Boenau, A., “It’s easy to design safer streets. City planners just need to care”, Fast Company, 2025. ↩
Zipper, D., “Crash Course: News organizations need to relearn how to cover car collisions—especially when the victims are on foot”, Slate, 2022. ↩
Schindler, F. & Wirz, M., “How linguistic patterns obscure responsibility in newspaper coverage of traffic crashes in German-speaking countries”, Mobilities, 2025. ↩
te Brömmelstroet, M., “Framing systemic traffic violence: Media coverage of Dutch traffic crashes”, Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vol. 5, 2020. ↩
NHTSA, “Crashes Aren’t Accidents”, August 1997. ↩
Nevada Traffic Records Coordinating Committee, “Nevada Traffic Records Data Dictionary”, page 3, 2021 ↩
von Schneidemesser, D. & Caviola, H., “Language matters: an experimental study of language patterns’ effects on traffic safety perceptions in Germany”, Traffic Safety Research, Vol. 9, 2025. ↩
Smart Growth America, Dangerous by Design, 2022. ↩
LaJeunesse, S. & Austin, L., “Factors and frames that shape public discourse around road user safety”, UNC Road Safety Research Center, 2021. ↩