Hello. They're crashes. Don’t call them accidents anymore. Thank you.

Janette Sadik-Khan, author of Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, tweeted a link to this article.

It's no "accident" that we've excused crashes for decades. Our word choices matter – let's adopt the language of life.

"Roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers."

Words indeed matter, as when my council representative imagines he belongs to a "progressive" political party.

It’s No Accident: Advocates Want to Speak of Car ‘Crashes’ Instead, by Matt Richtel (New York Times)

Roadway fatalities are soaring at a rate not seen in 50 years, resulting from crashes, collisions and other incidents caused by drivers.

Just don’t call them accidents anymore.

That is the position of a growing number of safety advocates, including grass-roots groups, federal officials and state and local leaders across the country. They are campaigning to change a 100-year-old mentality that they say trivializes the single most common cause of traffic incidents: human error.

“When you use the word ‘accident,’ it’s like, ‘God made it happen,’ ” Mark Rosekind, the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said at a driver safety conference this month at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“In our society,” he added, “language can be everything.”

Almost all crashes stem from driver behavior like drinking, distracted driving and other risky activity. About 6 percent are caused by vehicle malfunctions, weather and other factors.

Before the snow, there was a wreck on our perfectly safe one-way street.

As posted by Greg Roberts on the Two Way Streets Now page at Fb.

"Another traffic accident on Spring Street! Car trying to cross Spring Street at 10th and oncoming speeding vehicle slams into the side of the other vehicle and one of them ending up nearly in the building. If someone had been standing or walking on the sidewalk at this point they would have been killed! So, maybe Irv Stumler can cherry pick the metal off the street. Also, our police officers doing everything they can, but can't be everywhere at once!"

Coincidentally, while walking yesterday a few hours after the accident, I saw a school bus and a police car driving westbound together on Spring at precisely the same intersection. The bus was in the north lane, and the police car in the south lane.

Q. What did these two vehicles have in common apart from excessive speed (which we take as a given)?

A. Each occupied half its own traffic lane, and most of the bicycle lane immediately to its side, and this is the norm, not an aberration.

But hey; whatever. We only see the problem every single day. Perhaps the ability to occupy all the lanes at once makes Mr. Padgett's cranes safer.

Right, Irv?