RERELEASE: There Are No Accidents with Jessie Singer

The War on Cars

The War on Cars, LLC

Cars, Society & Culture, Culture, Bicycling, Politics, Urbanism, Walking, Transportation, Cities, Transit, News Commentary, News

4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2022

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

***Happy holidays! This is a rerelease of our interview with Jessie Singer, the author of There Are No Accidents, which originally came out in February 2022 as Episode 80. It's one of our favorite episodes from 2022. We'll be back with new episodes in January.***

What do we mean when we say something is an “accident”? When a motorist kills a pedestrian or cyclist it is often described in the press and the criminal justice system as a “car accident” — even when there is a clear cause such as a driver who was drunk, distracted or speeding. According to a new book by journalist Jessie Singer, events that most people describe as accidents are anything but. Singer argues that who lives and dies by accident in America is not random but utterly predictable. Using the word, she says, protects the powerful and leads to “the prevention of prevention.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ralph Nader would be very disappointed in the modern street safety movement.
0:04.3	We've told the story that car companies want us to tell, that traffic safety is a matter
0:09.3	of traffic engineering. It entirely frees them and they really gotten drunk on that
0:14.4	power lately with the size of vehicles. They know the more powerful and the bigger
0:18.7	the vehicle is the more of us who will die. This is the war on cars.
0:27.0	I'm Sarah Goodyear.
0:29.0	With me are my co-host Doug Gordon and Aaron Napersdeck.
0:32.0	Hello, hey. On this episode... co-host Doug Gordon and Aaron Napa-Stak.
0:32.8	Hello, hey.
0:34.4	On this episode, we're going to ask,
0:36.7	what do we mean when we say something was an accident?
0:41.7	Right. You hear it all the time when a motorist hits and kills a pedestrian or cyclists, the news will
0:48.3	say it was a car accident, it was a bike accident. Even when there is a clear underlying cause such as a
0:54.8	driver who is drunk or looking at his phone or speeding.
0:58.8	And it's not just the news. In New York City we used to have something called the NYPD Accident Investigation Squad,
1:05.0	and that was the police unit that showed up in the aftermath of car crashes where pedestrians and cyclists were seriously injured or killed.
1:14.5	What does it mean when the authorities assigned to investigate catastrophic crashes and
1:20.8	fatalities show up with the word accident embedded in their name.
1:27.1	Bicycle and pedestrian advocates thought that it meant a lot and after years of
1:32.3	work the name was changed to the NYPD
1:35.6	collision investigation squad. This problem goes way beyond car crashes. In the
1:41.5	United States in 2020 more than 200,000 people died in what were classified
	...

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