By Skyler McKinley of AAA Colorado
The following transcript is the testimony of Skyler McKinley on HB26-1237 – Testimony before Senate Transportation & Energy.
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Thanks to the sponsors for bringing this bill today.
I’m Skyler McKinley, here on behalf of AAA and our nearly 800,000 Colorado members. We’re the state’s largest membership association and the nation’s leading traffic safety organization—for over 125 years.
In this building, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to save lives. We also spend a lot of time talking about how to respect taxpayer dollars along the way.
That’s exactly what excites me about this bill. Changing “accident” to “crash” seems small. It costs nothing. It really does matter.
Hear me out: The language we use to describe things shapes the value judgments we make about acceptable behavior—and as a result, how we actually behave.
When we call a crash an “accident,” we imply these tragedies are inevitable beyond human influence. After all, accidents happen. But when it comes to car crashes, that’s just plain wrong. Federal research attributes 94 percent of all crashes to driver error. The tens of thousands of people who die on American roads each year would still be here if drivers had made different choices.
That may sound pedantic until you look at the data. Academic research finds that the word “accident” shifts blame onto victims and prevents people from treating these deaths as the preventable public health crisis they are. The same research concludes that removing “accident” from our lexicon has “the potential to save human lives and prevent injury on a large scale”—significant, given that road crashes are one of the most likely things to kill you if you’re under 54.
That’s why NHTSA stopped using “accident” in official communications in 1997. Why the RAND Corporation and the National Safety Council formally recommend the change. Why the Michigan and Maryland Departments of Transportation made it official policy. Why the New York City and San Francisco Police Departments both dropped the word. Why Nevada changed every statutory reference from “accident” to “crash” in 2016. Why the Associated Press tells journalists to avoid it because it can read as exonerating the person responsible.
Colorado would be in good company.
When a plane crashes, we don’t call it an accident — because we demand answers, and we demand it doesn’t happen again. This bill asks Colorado to hold car crashes to the same standard. It’s a plane crash, not a plane accident. It’s a car crash, not a car accident.
Accidents happen. Most crashes don’t have to.
