 If we change our language, we will shed light on different elements and parts of the same reality. Literally, nobody is against improving traffic safety. But the way that we approach it, think about it and talk about it, and the way in which we research it, profoundly shapes the definition of the problem of traffic safety and defines where we look for solutions. A local newspaper report. Child died after accident in Ulft. At a collision in Ulft, a nine-year-old boy died. The child came out of a garden and ran across the road. He was hit by the car of a 27-year-old driver. Because the child suddenly came out of the bushes, she could not prevent the collision. So let's try to unpack that together. Take a look at this painting. On this painting, we can spot 11 geese. So look carefully. Can you see them all? Can you spot all 11 geese? And I tell you that these geese are in a life-threatening situation. They are all in danger. What do you think? And what do you see? How can we save the 11 geese? The language we use to discuss traffic safety is not an objective, neutral mirror of reality, that profoundly shapes our mobility system, our streets and the ways we can behave on them. And the language we use today to talk about traffic safety will shape our common future. So how does that work? We use language to simplify complex reality. Think about it. What do you see here? How can you describe this picture to somebody who cannot see it? Most people would suggest to describe this picture as a deer that is crossing the road. And that is a perfectly valid simplification of reality. But simplification is unavoidable. But in simplification, we also make unavoidable choices. And the choices that we make are highly arbitrary. It is important to realize that these choices are arbitrary. Because these choices make us focus and see certain elements of the reality we are describing, but are at the same time obscuring other elements. So in other words, if we change our language, we will shed light on different elements and parts of the same reality. So what do we see here? How would you describe this picture to somebody who cannot see it? Are we looking at a child who is trying to cross the road in the rain while actually having right of way? Or are we looking at a handful of adults that try to navigate their incredibly heavy and dangerous vehicles through the living environment of children? We use language as unavoidable simplification of reality, and in that simplification we make arbitrary choices. But that is particularly problematic because of the third element of language. Language is not a neutral mirror of reality, but profoundly shapes it in the first place. Language is performative. In his book, Seeing Like a State, James Scott helps us to understand how this performativity of language works. As an example, he uses the forest. We are now looking at a picture of what he calls the primeval forest. The primeval forest is an intensely complex ecosystem, a continuously changing balance of a high number of dynamic feedback loops. And because of that, it can become a habitat for a diversity of flora and fauna. You can imagine it's easy to hide here, but it's also easy to hunt, it's easy to have a nest, and it's easy to grow. But this changed radically from the end of the 18th century, because at that time forest became seen mainly through the lens of wood production. Wood became an important material for fuel, as building material, and as a raw material, and owners of forest wanted to see if they could optimize their forest for the production of wood. James Scott shows us that for governing, you need to simplify reality. And for that reason, a whole new domain was established. We now know there's a scientific forestry, and that domain came with a key concept to understand forest, the normal balm, or the standard tree. And that tree was used to assess the capacity of a forest to produce wood. But over time, this concept started to change the forest as we know it. Because over time, owners of forest started to make their forest more effective towards this standard tree. And that brought us from the primeval forest to the production forest. In the image of the production forest, what we're looking at is how the forest step by step was organized into the concept of the standard tree. Because these are basically two rows of standard trees, trees from the same breath and from the same year standing in line. I think you can easily see how this was disastrous for all the other goals and uses of the forest. Other flora and fauna. Because how can you hide here? How can you hunt? How can you nest in a forest without bushes? Birds, insects, and small game disappeared from these forests. And you could say that the same process occurred in our thinking about streets. In the 1920s, our streets could still be seen through the lens of the primeval street. Some thinkers even called it the remaining space between buildings. It didn't belong to one profession in the 1920s. It was also a continuously changing balance of all kinds of dynamic feedback loops that also offered all kinds of different goals to use that same space. They coexisted for millennia. You can see people trading, buying stuff, selling stuff. You can see people meeting each other. You can see children playing, people relaxing, and people traveling. But in the 1920s, this ecosystem came under huge pressure. And to deal with that pressure, a new language was urgently needed. As Peter Norton described in his book Fighting Traffic, the language of the street that was formed over millennia became fluid under the urgent pressure of the mass produced motorized vehicle. It's sudden emergence on the streets and its accompanying speeds resulted in the mass killing of children. And that was of course completely unacceptable. The entire society discussed this in terms of justice. And nobody could argue against the sheer injustice that was taking place on our streets. But in a slow process that took about 10 years of incremental changes, the discussion slowly changed. And justice, as first principle was replaced by other first principles, the street was now discussed in terms of control, in terms of efficiency, and in terms of freedom. Around 1930, 10 years later, the period of fluidity ended. There was a consensus and a new language to talk about our streets emerged. The freedom of the individual car driver was central in that language, and the street would mainly become an efficient network to cater for that freedom. Ladies and gentlemen, it is the 1930s and traffic engineering was born. At first, traffic engineers were not educated as such, they came from water management, because water managers just solved huge puzzles for the city in terms of sewage and water pipe networks. So they were asked to develop a new language, and that new language after the 1930s slowly started the process of solidification. The choices made to think about our streets solidified, solidified into norms and into design guidelines. And then they solidified into traffic models and mobility institutions. They solidified into rules and laws and regulations on how to behave on the street, and finally they solidified in asphalt and concrete. So what we see as an intersection today is the solidified version of the choices in our language we made in the 1930s. The water engineers at first, of course, saw our streets as pipelines, and they started using biological metaphors to describe what was happening there, terms like flow, circulation, arteries, and traffic in farks. Later this was complemented with metaphors borrowed from physics to make it more scientific. We still to this day have gravity models, we see humans as particles that collide, and use biomechanics to think about vulnerability. Later still, the traffic engineers borrowed from economics, and they started to simplify the human as a homo-economicus. This made us focus on humans as egoistic, rational, and calculating individuals with a calculator in their minds and their ego in their hearts, who maximized their own utility. Being underway was defined as a disutility, a derised demand, because the homo-economicus utility was either being at A or at B, everything in between therefore should be minimized. As an automatic result of that, travel time savings became the holy grail of governments around the world, and, importantly, every interaction became a conflict. So the ideal street and the ideal intersection is a conflict-free intersection, where everybody has his or her own space and every intersection is managed by external technology, the traffic light, the much heralded Dutch sustainable safety model. Of course, as long as everybody follows the rule. Where at first, most saw this public space as a question of justice, now we all accept that it became a question of efficiency. It now solidified not only our streets, but also our imagination. Streets as places mainly for flow, throughput, and level of service. Just as in the forest, this is disastrous for every other function of the street. J-Walking was introduced and around the world people got zebra crossings where they should push a button to back to cross the street. Our children get on a very early age safety instructions on how to behave on this dangerous public space, and they get playgrounds because they were no longer allowed to play on our streets. In that solidified context, we talk about traffic safety. And in that language, we collect our data, our traffic safety statistics. Statistics that flocked away a bit year by year. 620 traffic fatalities in the Netherlands. 650. Wow, much to do. There is an increase. 610. Okay, okay, we were doing well. We saved a number of lives. And in that way of thinking, we have collectively accepted systemic traffic violence as society. 70 severely injured individuals in the Netherlands today. 350 people will get severely injured in the next week. More than 20,000 severely injured individuals at the end of this year. We collect statistics and add up categories that are similar from the point of view of efficiency. But those categories are completely morally incompatible in terms of justice. People who die and people that kill each other. Statistics that tell us everything about the victims, but very little about the systemic nature of the causes. We talk about accidents 70 times a day, every day. Statistics that give us the impression that traffic violence is a natural phenomenon that we simply have to face. In which people succumb and suddenly cross roads. Statistics that allow us to put it into our models, to put it into trade-offs with travel time savings and to make policy decisions. But statistics that make us forget about the countless human traumas and tragedies added on a daily basis. Instead of human tragedies, traffic crashes are presented as glitches in the machine. Dehumanized interferences with the overall functioning of a well-oiled machine. Where effects on traffic flow often trump the impacts on the people involved. Culver in 2018 stated, and I quote, The naturalization and denial of vehicular violence have allowed car deaths to become largely invisible relative to their horrific ubiquity. And shielding it from any substantial critique to this day. End of quote. Statistics in other words that make us believe that the only thing we can do is saving lives. With scientific organizations, annual traffic safety summits, behavioral campaigns and traffic safety officials. And institutionalized traffic safety training for our children. We also teach our children to swim, right? Because we cannot just ignore the fact that water is everywhere, right? We wanted to better understand how traffic violence is discussed in the popular media. And for that purpose, we created an online platform, thecrashes.org. I will add a link to the show notes below. On thecrashes.org, everybody around the world can sign up as a volunteer and easily add local newspaper reporting on traffic crashes to our database. And this gives us a much more detailed insight into the cold statistics of traffic safety. The platform also offers a sobering overview of the sheer magnitude of the carnage that happens all around us on our roads today. Day in, day out, local newspapers are filled with reports such as, Cyclists severely injured, later deceased, at a hit on the windscreen of a van in Boxstall. But since we do not read all local newspapers ourselves, the systemic nature of this gets lost for the general audience. Thecrashes.org allows us to provide this overview to our audience. From the reports, we can see not only who is killed or injured, but also which other vehicle was involved. We see, for instance, in the 2020 sample of the Netherlands, that in Dutch newspapers we can read about 110 people who died in a single vehicle crash. 67 car drivers and 5 cyclists. Incredibly tragic. But we also read about 210 people who died in a collision with another person and another vehicle. Crashes in which multiple people are involved. Crashes that are often incredibly violent for all those people that are involved. And this is not a matter of victims versus killers or about who is to blame or responsibility. All the lives of the people that were involved in all these crashes are all unintentionally changed forever. We can also see how many people get injured and hurt each other. No less than 970 times, we read about someone in a car that got involved in a crash in which somebody else got injured. 330 cyclists and 120 pedestrians. We read about people that kill each other or cause severe injuries. Unintentional. But systemic. From an efficiency standpoint, you could argue that these categories are all the same as the single vehicle crashes. But from a justice standpoint, these categories are fundamentally incompatible. And from the impact on all those involved, they are worlds apart. All this collected data also allowed us to study the framing and semantics of these articles. And I will share the article link in the show notes below. In one dedicated week, we collected no less than 368 crash reports in local newspapers in the Netherlands. That's more than 50 violent crashes on Dutch streets in a single day. If we take a look at the headlines, we can see that most of these mention a victim in terms of a person. But most do not mention a secondary party involved. And when a secondary party is mentioned, it is most often referred to as a vehicle. Pedestrian injured at collision with truck in Ede. If we zoom in on those crashes that involve the pedestrian or cyclist, or as they say, a vulnerable road user and the vehicle, we can look at the syntax of the headlines and see how they implicitly give an impression of agency of the parties involved to the reader. Most headlines fall into category number six, a non-agentive sentence in which only the cyclist or pedestrian is mentioned. Cyclist, 50 years old, severely injured after collision. Ten times we see a non-agentive sentence in which the secondary party is described as a passive vehicle. Woman died after collision with truck. Somehow cyclists and pedestrians do have agency in these kinds of reports. 15 times something happened to them. Putting the onus on the vulnerable road user. Woman on bicycle hit by car in Drachten. A part of the explanation of these patterns lies in the way that these reports are generated. A newspaper often gets a picture and short description on their desk and then has to make a report out of it. And of course they have to try to avoid making any legal interpretations and to avoid providing privacy details. Therefore these reports become much like weather reports, often ending with, cause of the collision is still unknown, the police is investigating it. Browne Randell, and I will add the link in the show notes, described this in a Nature article as follows. Quote, the construction of the facts begins with the initial formulation of the study. Its parameters, purpose and scope, the construction of variables and their associated values. The development of a code book for translating observations and responses into values for each variable. The investigative work at the scene of the crash. The assigning of causes under human vehicle or environment variables. The recoding analysis and interpretation of the data, end quote. Within these constructed facts, we are searching for individual causal factors that cause these crashes. The larger car centric mobility system and the systemic nature of traffic violence are no longer a factor in the analysis. And with that description of the problem, we start our search for all kinds of campaigns to save lives. We take the traffic system for granted. It has been taken from the realm of possible critique because think about it. When the system itself is the cause, then the only solution is unthinkable. For reducing systemic traffic violence, we then have to radically change the traffic system itself. But traffic violence is not extrinsic to that system. It is the essence of what some call a violent socio-political order. And this order is not only expressed in terms of fatalities and severely injured individuals. We also see that no less than 75% of Amsterdam inhabitants are afraid in traffic. Three and four people in Amsterdam are afraid the moment that they cross their own doorstep. Our public space has become a landscape of constant fear. Fear that you will be hurt or killed. Fear that your children or loved ones will be hurt. Or being afraid that you will actually hurt somebody else when your attention slips for just a second. An average Dutchman who lives 80 years will experience the violent death of 50,000 fellow Dutchmen in traffic. 112,000 Dutchmen died in traffic since the horrendous floods in 1953 in which 1,836 people died. And that flood led to the massive national investment in the now famous Delta Works. Every day the lives of so many families change forever. In short, traffic violence is not like the water in which we have to learn to swim. It is much more akin to gun violence and that is also something most countries around the world don't teach the children to live with. Dorothy Baer, the German Secretary of State for Traffic and Infrastructure states When somebody dies in a traffic crash, on average, 11 family members, 4 close friends, 56 friends and acquaintances and 42 rescue workers are permanently affected by this heavy fate. Child died after an accident in OFT. At a collision in OFT, a 9-year-old boy died. The child came out of a garden and ran across the road. He was hit by a car of a 27-year-old driver. Because the child suddenly came out of the bushes, she could not prevent the collision. This was in 1990 and the 9-year-old boy was Dion. Dion was my best friend and I was actually only 1 meter away from him when this happened. Coincidentally, his mother and his brother came by by bicycle only a few minutes later. Dion's life ended abruptly. His mother's life was destroyed. His brother, his father, still live in continuous fear now for the grandchildren. Me as a 9-year-old boy, my mother, my father, my sisters, all changed ever since. Our classmates, our soccer friends, the neighbors and bystanders who heard the crash and heard my eyes cold screams afterwards. Police officers, medics, the driver of the car and her family. So, do you remember the question I asked in the beginning? On this painting, we can see 11 keys. Have you already spotted them all? Can you see them? What if I tell you that they are in life threatening danger? What do you think? What do you see? How can we save them? Instead of human tragedies, our newspapers report traffic violence as undesirable glitches in the traffic machine. Dehumanized nuisance for its general functioning, in which the effects on traffic are often deemed more important than the impact on the people involved. This does not only happen in our newspapers, it also happens in our traffic safety statistics and in our traffic safety campaigns. Our attention automatically goes to saving lives by instructing the victims. Please wear a helmet. Please make sure to be seen. Look left, right, left before you cross the street. And our attention automatically shifts to individual behavior. Don't drink and drive. Don't be distracted. Please try not to speed if you don't mind. But then we forget to see the real danger. Look again. How can we save the 11 keys? Do you see him? Do you see the fox? What if we really want to work on solutions? Then we need to shift our focus to the real danger, the fox instead of the geese, and focus on taking away the danger. Against many beliefs there is a huge support for such an approach. If we do not present it as something that is taken away from drivers, but instead as something that is given back to so much to all the other users of public space, especially our children, people support measures. The Dutch government just passed a motion with a majority vote in which 30 km would become the new norm in all build-up areas. Safety as a norm and only going faster if there are very good reasons to do so, instead of the reverse. Speeding in living streets is also, year after year, annoyance number one in all kinds of surveys. Recent studies by the Technical University of Delft show that people value overall traffic safety much higher than individual travel time. Transport research tended to ask that question in a consumer frame, a homo-economicist frame. But if we asked this in a citizen frame, the value of overall traffic safety increased with a factor of 7. And also, it's technically possible. We are currently running pilots and use cases around technologies to restrict the speed of motorized vehicles in areas where we no longer accept their violence. Just imagine what we can achieve together if we all put our weight behind this intelligent speed assistance. Limit speeds around schools, limit speeds in our living streets, limit speeds around playgrounds where our children should be able to flourish, limit speeds in public spaces where we want to enjoy ourselves without constantly worrying about our safety. Then, we focus on the fox in the tree. And then, we not only save the lives of the 11 geese, but we also allow them to scurry around carefree. To sum up, literally, nobody is against improving traffic safety. But the way we approach, think and talk about it, and the way we do research on it, strongly impacts how we define the problem of traffic safety and where we look for solutions. Instead of choosing together to no longer accept the injustice of systemic traffic violence, and instead of ensuring that people can once again use the street without constant fear, we continue to choose to focus our attention on behavior, protection and the indication of the geese. But that is a choice. It is our choice, and it's your choice. So let's choose together to change that.