"We’ll know we’re making progress when we stop blaming children and their parents for winding up underneath pickup trucks."

Our increasingly cloistered and clueless "local" newspaper's answers to questions about the way it misrepresents driver-inflicted collisions with non-automotive street users betray an indifference to the value of real-world thinking.

The city compounds the issue by blithely painting sharrow symbols on pavement and declaring victory, or as Orwell might note, merely masking their abject concession of defeat with meaningless words and symbols.

If we wish to make streets safe for all users, then drivers must be slowed, inconvenienced and in many instances awakened. Full stop.

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Guilty Until Proven Helmeted, by Eben Weiss (Outside)

When a driver hits a cyclist—even a child on a bike—the victim is almost always the one who gets blamed, unless they're wearing a helmet

When it comes to automotive violence and mayhem, we’ve become more desensitized than a perineum after a Gran Fondo on a maladjusted saddle, as is apparent from the way we report on incidents in which someone in a car drives into someone on a bike.

News stories about drivers who hit cyclists often implicitly absolve the driver and blame the victim. First, there’s almost always a lack of agency coupled with the passive voice: it’s never “a driver hit a cyclist.” Instead, it’s usually something like “a cyclist was hit by a car.” (Yet you never read about how a shooting victim “collided with a bullet.” Go figure.) Then there’s generally some insinuation that it must have been the victim’s fault, often along the lines of “It’s unclear whether the victim was wearing a helmet.” And despite a big push to change this, it’s also fairly typical to refer to the collision as an “accident,” even before anybody knows what really happened; in journalism, the oxymoronic “police are still investigating the accident” is reserved almost exclusively to incidents involving cars.

It’s not just reporters who write this way, either. When it comes to drivers hurting or killing people on bikes, this kind of unconscious victim-blaming permeates every aspect of our discourse ...

The conclusion.

Yet it’s essential to hack away at the gigantic blind spot that allows us to see the actual problem, which is people driving into other people with their cars. We’ve got a long way to go in that regard. But we’ll know we’re making progress when we stop blaming children and their parents for winding up underneath pickup trucks.

Blaming the victim in car crashes: "Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists."

Hello ... THUMP THUMP ... is this thing on?

Bill, Susan, Jason, Chris, et al ... this is the Columbia Journalism Review speaking, not some foaming-at-the-mouth Baylorite radical anarchist trying to take your cars away from you.

When covering car crashes, be careful not to blame the victim, by Meg Dalton

Please feel free to click through and peruse the entire piece ... and then can you explain what you're doing to cure this bias at the News and Tribune?

PEDESTRIAN (AND CYCLIST) BLAME is the predominant framework in a lot of news coverage, according to Angie Schmitt, an editor of Streetsblog, a news site about transportation reform. Journalists will report that the victim “darted” into traffic, a verb you see almost exclusively in stories about traffic deaths. Or they’ll emphasize that the victim was jaywalking, texting while crossing the street, or not wearing a helmet.

“The helmet fixation redirects attention away from the overarching problem of vehicular violence, assisting in its denial,” according to a report released last month by the University of Heidelberg. Even in cases when a helmet would not have prevented death, the absence of one is usually noted, as in The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s 2009 coverage of the death of a young cyclist, Sylvia Bingham. Wearing a helmet would not have made a difference in the outcome of the crash, according to Bingham’s doctor. But the reporter, in the paragraph immediately following that statement, noted Bingham wasn’t wearing a helmet and included two additional incidents in which cyclists lacked them.

Journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists.

Whether it’s speeding, running a red light, texting, or just a general lack of attentiveness, journalists need to scrutinize driver’s actions as much, if not more, than the behavior of pedestrians or cyclists in these situations. These oversights can be startling. For instance, local television station KTSM solely focused on the victim following a fatal 2016 crash in El Paso, Texas. Eduardo Dill attempted to cross a street in his neighborhood in his electric wheelchair when a driver struck him. The police cited Dill’s “failure to yield the right of way” as the contributing factor in the crash, and so did the station’s story.

In reporters’ defense, Schmitt says, 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.

Dear Jeff: "When Drivers Hit Pedestrians, Where Do We Lay the Moral Blame?"

So why do so many people blame the pedestrian?

Earlier today, I was walking on Spring Street, the world’s longest interstate entrance ramp, as recently certified by the Guinness Book of World Records.

City officials giddy as New Albany finally makes Guinness Book of World Records (REPOST).

At one point, three of four vehicles coming past -- probably all of them traveling between 35 and 40 mph -- shared a single feature in common.

Their drivers, two men and a woman, were staring at mobile phones.

When Drivers Hit Pedestrians, Where Do We Lay the Moral Blame?, by Peter Simek (Front Burner blog at Dallas Magazine)

... When your city is constructed in such way that it values efficiency and speed for vehicular traffic above all else, taking every opportunity to create a thoughtless, unobstructed environment for drivers, that design teaches the people who live in the city that the public realm values the car over the pedestrian. When a pedestrian interrupts the vehicular environment, he or she demonized for stepping out of line. They are judged to be thoughtless, reckless, or irresponsible because they have invaded a space that the city has instructed us belongs to cars.

Another walker in Louisville killed, this time by a tow truck -- but of course, it was her fault.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if we cared enough to analyze patterns of speeding among commercial vehicles traveling the city of New Albany's streets, tow trucks and wreckers would easily be identified as the fastest moving.

Dump trucks and box trucks would come second. The former might be more dangerous owing to the loads they carry.

This city tolerates anti-social traffic safety standards. Why is that?

Police Tow Truck Driver strikes and kills a person walking on Southside Drive, by Branden Klayko (Broken Sidewalk)

On Monday evening, a Louisville woman was walking along Southside Drive. At about 6:30p.m., she was crossing the street at or near the intersection Tenny Avenue when a motorist driving a Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) tow truck struck and killed her. The woman’s identity has not been released.

The usual reports came from WDRB, WAVE3, WLKY, and WHAS11, with LMPD spokesperson Dwight Mitchell making the usual victim-blaming statements about the person not glowing in the dark.