[HN Gopher] Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns ...
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Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP
Author : chiefofgxbxl
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-10-12 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (visionzeroreporting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (visionzeroreporting.com)
| gSdYMA wrote:
| Does anyone know who is behind that project? Who is developing
| it?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I think this is going to be a major application for "attempting"
| to identify "types" of biases. I'm being super cautious here
| because the term bias is painfully misunderstood in most
| circumstances and often misused as a cudgel rather than a
| context. But I think it could be educational to observe
| cultural/social/political trends by distilling content this way.
| briandear wrote:
| This could also be used for gun crime reporting as well.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| That would be politically infeasible. The overwhelming
| narrative would be "young black male gang member kills other
| young black male gang member, destroying the hopes and dreams
| Victim A's grandmother had for him", and that already doesn't
| get widely reported.
|
| https://heyjackass.com/
| csense wrote:
| I was expecting things like "woman was hit by a car" to be
| replaced by "A car hit a woman" (prefer active voice).
|
| Instead it refers to pedestrians as Vulnerable Road Users. It
| says the information that "alcohol was not a factor" is a
| "Distracting counterfactual. Readers place more blame on victims
| when articles use more counterfactual statements. Counterfactuals
| also obscure the systemic nature of incidents and place
| unreasonable burden on individuals."
|
| I thought this would be an automated grammar assistant for basic
| English writing techniques you should have learned in high
| school. It's not. Instead, it's a tool for injecting bias into
| reporting.
| gault8121 wrote:
| This is an interesting tool! It would be cool if you could take
| say 20 articles from Gothamist, Streetsblog, NYT, NY Post, Pix11,
| etc. and see how they all ranked in this system. That could be a
| really interesting blog post. -- Which tools are you using for
| these NLP judgments? Are you using SpaCy at all? Are there any
| models you've built here, or is this all rules on top of an NLP
| model? I'm working on NLP models for education, and we use SpaCy
| a ton. I'm peter@quill.org if you want to learn more about how
| we're using this.
| xraystyle wrote:
| > Show HN: Ensure all car crash articles are biased against the
| driver and vehicles generally using NLP
|
| Seems like a better title for this.
|
| In the analysis of the first article, under the "recommendations"
| about counterfactuals, it's literally telling you to remove
| relevant context about the incident, to ensure the readers can't
| possibly come to the "wrong" conclusion about who's responsible.
|
| Distrust of news media is at an all-time high[1] and if people
| can't see how this sort of thing contributes, I really don't know
| what to say at this point.
|
| 1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-
| distrus...
| natch wrote:
| To better understand what their intent is, I recommend clicking
| on the little hamburger menu at the top and reading the "Issues"
| page listed there.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I like it.
|
| I like that it tags segments of text as opposed to the document
| as a whole.
|
| Since it is confined to a domain and has a well-chosen problem it
| seems to be highly correct and thus useful.
| elfchief wrote:
| I'd say they should do one of these for police shootings, except
| the whole system would probably overload and melt down.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene"
|
| It is quite common for the driver to flee the scene while leaving
| behind the disabled vehicle.
|
| ...one of my old coworker's vehicle was involved in an accident
| with a pedestrian who ran full speed in front of her while it was
| dark outside and the vehicle was traveling at the legal speed
| limit. Said vehicle was unable to stop in time which resulted in
| the speeding pedestrian striking the vehicle.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Are you sure it wasn't that the road moved under the
| pedestrian's feet locating her in front of the vehicle comoving
| with the road in one direction and along it in another?
|
| I think you haven't presented evidence.
| markstos wrote:
| Here's why the reframing matters:
|
| Accidents are "oops" that are to accepted as fact of life. The no
| reason to change the system. Accidents happen.
|
| Crashes are not accidents. They have a cause and the cause can
| addressed. Crashes can be prevented.
|
| So the reframing shifts from talking about a system we should
| accept how it is to one that can be improved.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It would be inaccurate, unethical, and potentially libelous for
| any newspaper to construe the events of a potential criminal
| act (or any event, really) without doing any investigation to
| support that conclusion, and primarily in order to further an
| editorial agenda.
| markstos wrote:
| I've been employed as a newspaper editor and am familiar with
| libel laws and the ethics of journalism. What's been
| advocated for is accurate reporting, not conclusion-jumping.
|
| Currently there are headlines like this:
|
| "Car hits cyclist"
|
| Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate
| object? They don't say "car hits bike".
|
| A more accurate headline would be "Car driver hits cyclist".
|
| The other way to improve reporting is to call a preventable
| crash what it is, a crash and not an "accident".
|
| More here: https://www.bicycling.com/news/a20049939/five-
| cyclist-blamin...
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate
| object? They don't say "car hits bike".
|
| The car physically touched the bicyclist, hence "car hits
| cyclist". The driver did not physically touch the
| bicyclist, hence "driver hits cyclist" is inaccurate. "Car
| hits bicycle" is accurate but not the most relevant fact to
| report (unless nobody was riding it at the time?).
|
| I'm not sure why this point has not been discussed in this
| thread. Maybe my understanding of English is insufficiently
| advanced, but "driver hits cyclist" literally implies to me
| that one person punched another, not that the car crashed
| into the person riding a bicycle (although this can
| generally be inferred from the context).
| markstos wrote:
| > The driver did not physically touch the bicyclist.
|
| A headline would be used even if the car did physically
| touch the cyclist but hit the bike and knocked the off.
|
| Also, we don't have headlines that say "bullet shoots
| child", because the person shooting the gun did not
| physically touch the child. In some of these cases, the
| car is the lethal weapon, the agency of person driving
| the car matters.
|
| > but "driver hits cyclist" literally implies to me that
| one person punched another
|
| "hits" can mean "impacted" or "run into", so it's
| accurate here even though it's not a punch.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate
| object?
|
| To humanize the victim without ascribing blame, when blame
| is unknown. For the same reason you wouldn't have a
| headline that read "Alice killed Bob with her car": even
| though that may technically be true, it's needlessly
| critical. Needless from the perspective of an editorially
| neutral party, like a newspaper, but not from the
| perspective of an activist, like this website.
| markstos wrote:
| Consider when a terrorist drove a truck into a Christmas
| market:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Christmas%20market%
| 20k...
|
| Most headlines were like "Lorry kills 12 at Christmas
| Market", like there was a killer truck on the loose.
|
| Here's an alternate framing of an article where a car is
| a fatal weapon:
|
| "Driver plows car into pedestrians at German bus stop,
| killing one" https://www.dw.com/en/driver-plows-car-into-
| pedestrians-at-g... The lead clarifies that "no
| assumptions should be made at this point".
|
| It's factual that a man drove a truck into a Christmas
| market and another person drove into a pedestrian at a
| bus stop. That can be reported without an assumption of
| guilt without re-framing the story as if the cars drove
| themselves.
| eric_the_read wrote:
| I tried it out on https://www.denverpost.com/2021/10/07/medina-
| alert-hit-run-c..., which I would think in general a group like
| Vision Zero would approve of, and it got a C (-1 points), because
| of the phrase, "[The] vehicle will have heavy damage". This seems
| pedantic, at best, since the whole point of that phrase is to
| help the public identify the vehicle (and presumably the driver)
| which was involved in the accident.
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Thanks for alerting me to this - that sentence is itself fine,
| and the tool is incorrectly marking it as problematic. I'll
| debug that!
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think that "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet" or
| "impairment was not an issue" are examples of counterfactuals;
| the authors should crack open a dictionary look up what that word
| means in general use, and additionally how it is used in
| philosophy and science.
|
| If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to
| have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those
| are simply _facts_ , not _counterfactuals_.
|
| (An article about an accident should report all the hitherto
| known facts; then it can't be accused of having a bias with
| regard to cherry-picking the facts.)
|
| There is a problem with "alcohol _doesn 't appear_ to be a
| factor" in that it lacks conclusiveness. Appear to whom? For what
| reasons, and why aren't they sure? The driver was able to touch
| their nose with their eyes closed, is that it? I think a
| reasonable rule should be to cull any probabilistic statements,
| or statements with hedge words introducing uncertainty: remove
| all such statements from third parties, and under no
| circumstances invent new probabilistic statements in the process
| of editorializing.
|
| In fact, it's the use of the word _accident_ that may have the
| counterfactual issue (and good point here). There is a
| supposition behind it which may be false. Maybe it wasn 't an
| accident? You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident
| until other hypotheses have been ruled out, like the driver had a
| specific murder motive, or is crazy. It's also hard to call it an
| accident if the driver was blatantly reckless: acted contrary to
| the rules of the road which are intended to prevent such
| occurrences, and which the driver is legally obliged to follow as
| a matter of licensing. If a walking person falls into a fountain
| due to texting on their phone, it's difficult to swallow the word
| _accident_ , since they were practically begging for something to
| happen by moving through an environment while choosing to block
| it out.
| [deleted]
| speedybird wrote:
| > _I think a reasonable rule should be to cull any
| probabilistic statements_
|
| Isn't that _all_ statements, if we 're being honest bayesians?
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| There seems to be some conflict with how to define
| "counterfactual". Merriam-Webster defines it as "contrary to
| fact" [1], so that comes down to a statement being either true
| or false. But the way I'm using it (and the research my work is
| based off) aligns more with the Cambridge dictionary usage:
| "thinking about what did not happen but could have happened, or
| relating to this kind of thinking" [2]. Further, Stanford
| Philosophy states, "Modal discourse concerns alternative ways
| things can be, e.g., what might be true, what isn't true but
| could have been, what should be done. This entry focuses on
| counterfactual modality which concerns what is not, but could
| or would have been." [3]
|
| > If you have word from the police that the driver was not
| found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a
| helmet, those are simply facts, not counterfactuals.
|
| I do believe these are counterfactuals, consistent with
| definitions from [2] and [3]. For example, if a bicyclist is
| hit and killed and the news article states the fact he wasn't
| wearing a helmet, sometimes it feels like the article is
| insinuating that if the bicyclist _had_ been wearing a helmet,
| he would have survived. Of course, we cannot know that without
| investigating how fast the driver was going, how heavy the
| colliding vehicle was, etc. Some of those crashes are simply
| unsurvivable. The article espouses a "what could have been"
| thought. Please feel free to disagree, but provide links so I
| can read more.
|
| > You can't logically call a pedestrian hit an accident until
| other hypotheses have been ruled out
|
| I agree, but it seems that journalists take a different view.
| They see "crash" as intentional (i.e. you used your vehicle to
| murder someone), and that's why they use the word "accident".
| The way I see it, accident implies the incident was
| unforeseeable and unpreventable. I also think "accident"
| requires a higher burden of proof: just like all squares are
| rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, I think all
| accidents are crashes, but not all crashes are accidents. In
| the absence of a conclusive police investigation demonstrating
| complete unavoidability, the word accident should not be used.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/counterfactual
| [2]
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/counterf...
| [3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/counterfactuals/
| nzmsv wrote:
| By the same token though, everyone on this discussion is
| jumping to "we must reduce speeds in cities" without doing
| any analysis of whether the collision would be survivable at
| the lower speed they are proposing. They just assume they
| don't need to because they have the moral high ground.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Maybe you should also include in the site this explanation
| praxulus wrote:
| Your counterfactual explanation makes sense in the helmet
| example, but I think most people wouldn't be able to figure
| out that connection without such an explanation. Even if it's
| correct, it's still confusing. For example, I can't figure
| out what the relevant counterfactual is in the alcohol
| example.
|
| That's not to say that these are purely value-neutral facts,
| it still makes sense for them to be called out by this tool.
| I wish I had a better term for them though, rather than just
| complaining about the current label.
| kazinator wrote:
| I think the issue is this: there is a bias when certain
| news sources only mention facts about what drivers did
| _right_ (like not being impaired) and about what
| pedestrians or cyclists did _wrong_ (like not wearing a
| helmet).
|
| We cannot easily detect this pattern of bias from just a
| sample of one article from the given source, however, even
| from one article, there can be a hint of this bias. For
| instance, a statement about the impairment level of the
| driver is not made, but the status about the bicycle helmet
| _is_ made.
|
| To avoid, or at least reduce biases, the reporter has to
| have a standard template of all relevant fact types, fill
| it in with everything that is known and then report on
| everything. If the cyclist was wearing a helmet, report
| that; if not also report that.
|
| (The available facts may be biased, like what the police
| and other on-scene responders take in and communicate.)
| FabHK wrote:
| I think the term "counterfactual" comes from the implied, well,
| counterfactual:
|
| - if the cyclist had been wearing a helmet (which they
| weren't), then they might have survived
|
| - if impairment had been an issue (which it wasn't), then the
| driver would've been responsible for that
|
| And I guess they're particularly often used for victim blaming:
|
| - if the rape victim hadn't worn revealing clothing, they
| probably would have been safe
|
| etc.
|
| So, while I agree that the issue is not particularly well
| presented here, it does seem plausible to me that implied
| counterfactuals frequently distract from the culpable party (by
| pointing out all the hypothetical things that the victim "could
| have done").
| natch wrote:
| As feedback, speaking of contextualizing things, it would help if
| you would contextualize your colored highlighting by bringing
| some of the explanations of issues onto the page itself where the
| content is marked up. Or have links (maybe have the highlighted
| words be links) going to a writeup telling why those words got
| that color.
| uDontKnowMe wrote:
| Thank you so much for this, it's great work!
| beaconstudios wrote:
| this seems to me like it's designed to shift the blame from
| unilaterally on the VRU (bad), to unilaterally on the driver
| (also bad).
|
| You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a
| systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the
| driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things.
| As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight
| the context around the crash if there's no clear fault (such as
| an intoxicated or negligent driver, or a pedestrian running into
| the road within minimum braking distance), such as lack of bike
| lanes, blind corners, etc that would apply pressure to
| authorities to make the roads safer.
|
| Not all crashes can be default-blamed on the driver.
| codezero wrote:
| If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna
| and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm
| sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would
| be the exception to the rule, right?
|
| When operating a car you should be expected to be in a
| heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of
| your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian.
|
| The bias in the current narrative (against pedestrians who have
| little autonomy vs a car) is so strongly on the wrong side that
| I don't think asking for a middle-ground approach is worth
| arguing.
|
| I can't tell you how many times I've read stuff like this:
| https://www.bikelaw.com/2021/10/waller-bike-crash/
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think that's a false choice; rather than choosing between
| anti-VRU bias (as present) and anti-driver bias (as
| proposed), why not choose to report the specific facts of the
| incident at hand? Blaming one party all the time is stupid,
| because one party is not always at fault.
|
| Edit:
|
| Your cessna example makes no sense, as cars and planes do not
| generally share space. Should bikes and cars share space? No,
| but that's part of the systemic aspect of the problem.
| codezero wrote:
| I am arguing people and cars don't generally share space
| either. When a car hits a person, it's rare and I do think
| it should bias against the large, dangerous hardware, while
| also examining the facts. We have a century of bias-
| towards-cars coverage which permeates all society, police
| officers writing their reports are biased from what they've
| read and how they are trained, I don't think it's an over
| correction to default to assuming the larger, more
| regulated and dangerous side of any collision is by default
| assumed to be at fault, and for the other side to be the
| exception to the rule.
|
| I say this as a person who's driven a car for 25 years and
| never hit any people, and who has been hit by a car by a
| driver who wasn't paying attention multiple times. What's
| worse, is drivers are often angry at cyclists for even
| existing, rather than taking responsibility for being aware
| of their surroundings.
|
| The cessna example is a little over the top, but not
| totally out of line as a metaphor.
| ape4 wrote:
| Instead of just "a woman was killed" it could mention the
| devastating effect to her family.
| karaterobot wrote:
| How does the program know how the family reacted?
| ape4 wrote:
| The program just needs to flag if this info is missing.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm afraid I find this somewhere between creepy and ridiculous.
|
| On the ridiculous side: the idea that calling a car accident an
| "accident" is somehow wrong - as if, because I understand that
| what happened was an accident, I am somehow incapable of thinking
| "hey, maybe we need better road safety legislation".
|
| On the creepy side: the general approach which is, instead of
| making public arguments about why cars are bad, to manipulate
| language so as to push people to your side, using results from
| behavioural science.
|
| Of course, if you think the author is on the side of the angels,
| then this is great! But the techniques can be used by equally
| self-righteous people, with whom you may disagree.
|
| Treating people like sheep is gross. Don't do it.
| [deleted]
| ihaveajob wrote:
| The problem with using "accident" as the default term is that
| it preempts any evidence-finding, implying that it was nobody's
| fault. If someone shoots their gun randomly and someone gets
| hurt by just being there, nobody will call it an "accident",
| but somehow if the weapon is a car, the driver gets the benefit
| of the doubt regardless of the facts.
| dash2 wrote:
| Of course if there is evidence that the driver deliberately
| tried to kill someone, nobody will call it an accident. I
| would imagine that the vast majority of car deaths are indeed
| accidental, not murders. This seems to contrast with the
| situation of gun deaths. No?
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| There's a few really busy streets in my neighborhood where
| people regularly go 10-20 MPH over the speed limit.
|
| Not surprisingly, there are quite a few hit-and-runs on
| those streets.
|
| While it's probably the case that the folks who are
| speeding are just being selfish ("I want to minimize my
| time on the road") but they are doing so at the cost of
| safety. The equivalent w/r/t guns might be that someone was
| firing their gun willy-nilly, with little regard to their
| surroundings. If someone died in such a scenario, yes, it
| would have been an "accident" but we would also assign
| fault to the shooter (gross negligence, manslaughter, I am
| not a lawyer so I don't know the exact terminology).
|
| The reality is that cars are EXTREMELY dangerous and yet
| Americans don't tend to think of them that way, and we
| definitely don't drive them (as a society) with that
| mindset.
| riffic wrote:
| There are degrees of intention (Fonseca, 2020). Most people
| are quite deliberate about the speed they choose to drive,
| or the level of care they put into the act of operating a
| vehicle.
|
| City planners and engineers are intentional about what they
| choose to build or not build.
|
| This is a shaky foundation of an argument IMO.
|
| https://laist.com/news/car-crash-accident-traffic-
| violence-l...
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I'm not sure. I read a lot of gun violence reporting like
| "person a was struck by a bullet and later died due to
| complications" vs "gunman shot and killed person a". It's
| kinda the same thing.
|
| I would make no assumptions about if car accidents are
| accidental (which for some reason seems to be the default)
| or not - and that's more or less the point of the article.
| dml2135 wrote:
| The issue is that the term accident implies a lack of
| intension, while in most crash reporting we actually have no
| idea if the collision was intentional, negligent, or whatever.
| Using a term like crash or collision is actually much closer to
| the bare facts.
| fermigier wrote:
| As I have stated in another comment, according to Merriam-
| Webster, a (car) accident is "an unfortunate event resulting
| in particular from negligence or ignorance". It doesn't imply
| intention (in which case it would become a homicide, in the
| case the victim is deceased), but certainly implies
| responsibility from the driver.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Worth noting the history behind this issue of biased reporting:
|
| > In the late 1920s and '30s, a consortium of automobile
| manufacturers, insurers, and fuel companies known as the National
| Automobile Chamber of Commerce funded a wire service that
| provided free reporting on crashes to short-staffed Depression-
| era newspapers. Reporters could send in a few basic details about
| a local collision, and the wire service would craft a narrative
| that exonerated the driver, blamed any pedestrians who were
| involved, and -- crucially -- transformed virtually every "crash"
| into an understandable or even inevitable "accident." Newspapers
| around the country published the industry-approved stories, often
| without edits.
|
| Source:
| https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/05/streetsblog-101-how-j...
| [deleted]
| mtlynch wrote:
| This is cool! I appreciate the effort here to make the roads
| safer for bicyclists and pedestrians, as I'd love to see more
| people prioritize this.
|
| The homepage confused me because the presentation of the two
| examples made me think that they were before/after at first. It
| took me ~30s to realize they were just two separate articles.
|
| I'd like to see a bad article juxtaposed with an improved version
| that someone created using your tool.
|
| I'm maybe used to tools like Grammarly, but when I clicked /
| hovered over the highlighted text, I was surprised to see nothing
| happen. I found it a little difficult to scroll back and forth
| between the highlighted text and the context where it appeared in
| the article. Having an explanation appear next to the cursor on
| mouse click/hover might resolve this.
|
| It would also be cool if the tool allowed me to import by URL
| (with some suggested real articles to show this is a problem in
| mainstream news sources) rather than require the user to
| copy/paste manually.
| podiki wrote:
| Very nice, I like it! And as a frequent cyclist and writing
| instructor, really appreciate this kind of work on many levels.
| Good to see NLP towards social good like this.
| yodelshady wrote:
| That's actually pretty amazing work.
|
| Being super preachy, as a cliched straight white etc etc... after
| riding a bike I sort of get complaints about -isms, emotionally,
| in a way I wouldn't without.
|
| Everyone has already concluded that _you deserved it_. Whatever
| happened. It does not matter if you were wearing hi-vis, or had a
| light, or were in a bike lane, or the nearest bike lane is 5
| miles away and on the pavement for some reason, or were 3.1 ft
| from the kerb or 2.6. If you were stopped at a red light and are
| now sprawled in front of it because a van didn 't, you're clearly
| lying. If a motorist jumps a set of temporary lights and hit you
| when you had the green, you're clearly lying. _You deserved it_ ,
| always and forever, is the only argument you need to know, the
| rest is window dressing.
|
| Now we wonder why kids don't get exercise.
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| I'd love to hear even one anecdote of 'kid believes bikers are
| unfairly blamed for accidents' -> 'kid decides never to
| exercise again in any form'
| burnished wrote:
| Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your
| safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively
| repugnant, all due to you being on a bike.
|
| If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel
| safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your
| options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and
| if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less
| exercise. As it was, telling some one about a scary
| experience like a car almost hitting me was usually almost
| always met with a story about how terrible cyclists are. Its
| weird.
| speedybird wrote:
| Color me unconvinced. Kids know that skateboarding isn't
| safe but I see plenty of kids skateboarding, many of them
| _without helmets!_ Generally speaking, I think kids are
| insensitive to risk and think they 're invincible. When
| weighing the risk of cracked skull against looking uncool
| with PPE, they often forgo the PPE.
|
| I think perception of physical danger is low on the list of
| reasons why kids don't get as much exercise as they should.
| Lower on the list than helicopter parents, "stranger
| danger" paranoia, and the appeal of video games.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Sounds like you should cycle in safer places then? Airline
| pilots don't complain because highways aren't a safe place
| for planes to be, and similarly it can be pretty dangerous
| to ride a bike in a place where cycling is an afterthought.
| Shifting the blame back to the drivers doesn't change that,
| if anything it tarnishes the reputation of cyclists even
| further. I get a similar feeling when I see people on
| Hacker News complain about how many DAUs Facebook has:
| making people feel worse about their online time isn't
| improving the status-quo, if anything it's making their
| alternative look more attractive by comparison.
|
| Bad infrastructure is an infrastructure issue. Trying to
| gussy it up as a social one is going to be a really tough
| case to make when there are actual human rights violations
| happening in-media-res.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Bad infrastructure is an infrastructure issue. Trying
| to gussy it up as a social one is going to be a really
| tough case to...
|
| Last I checked infrastructure spending was mostly
| dictated by social policies. Either that or we've had
| generations of truly incompetent infrastructure planners
| who have all failed to realise that drivers in cars
| aren't only people who need to get from A to B.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Sounds like you've answered your own question there.
| fermigier wrote:
| I like the general idea, and the use of NLP to implement it.
|
| But I am dubious about some of the principles behind it.
|
| - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit the
| pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two people,
| not between a person and a vehicle. (Of course this does not
| apply to a phrase like "the vehicle fled the scene" - it is clear
| that it was the driver who fled the scene). While it's obvious
| the driver is responsible for the trajectory of their vehicle,
| it's also clear that the injuries and deaths are caused by the
| fact that one of the elements involved in the collusion is a 1+
| ton piece of steel, and the other one a 70kg human being.
|
| - Regarding the term "accident", I see in the Merriam-Webster
| that it is defined in this context as: "an unfortunate event
| resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It seems
| to me that this definition does not exonerate the driver from
| responsibility (lack of vigilance or competence).
| PeterisP wrote:
| I find "the vehicle fled the scene" as a useful phrase that's
| used to distinguish this situation from the very different "the
| driver fled the scene" which is commonly used in the (not that
| rare) cases where the driver abandons the wrecked car after an
| accident, in some cases to hide that they were intoxicated.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I disagree. Shifting the agency to the driver is important
| enough to my that I recommend writers use "the driver fled
| the scene on foot" if that's what happened. (This particular
| phrase is actually used.)
|
| It seems obvious that "the vehicle" is not doing the fleeing,
| so even if this is standard phrasing it should be revised.
| dml2135 wrote:
| Easy to have both -- "the driver fled the scene in their
| vehicle"
| lkbm wrote:
| > - For example, I find it inaccurate to say "the driver hit
| the pedestrian", which to me suggests a collision between two
| people, not between a person and a vehicle.
|
| Or alternatively, they got in an argument and the driver
| punched the pedestrian.
|
| On the other hand, you'd never say "the bicycle hit the
| pedestrian". It would be "the cyclist hit the pedestrian". The
| former would make it sound like the cyclist had ejected from
| the bike and the bicycle to continue onward and collided with
| the pedestrian.
|
| Part of this may be that when a bicycle crashes into me, the
| 20LBs of bicycle is less important than the 150LBs of cyclist,
| whereas with a car it's the momentum of the vehicle that's
| deadly, but I suspect there's also just the fact that we've
| normalized absolving drivers and blaming the car itself.
|
| Obviously, the correct solution is to say "the human-operated
| car crashed into the pedestrian", just as we'd say "the self-
| driving car" if it were autonomous.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Regarding the term "accident"
|
| I think in aviation circles the word "accident" is disliked
| because it implies a certain inevitability and tends to
| terminate the search for further underlying causes.
|
| If it's a crash, then we find out why, and if it happened
| because there was some debris on the runway or a certain switch
| in the cockpit was in the wrong position, then we need to find
| out how that could have happened and what to undertake to make
| sure it doesn't happen again.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > the driver hit the pedestrian
|
| It seems reasonable to me. Imagine you're driving and you hit a
| deer. What do you say when you tell the story? "My car hit a
| deer this morning on my way to work!" or "I hit a deer this
| morning on my way to work!" Even my "Imagine you're driving and
| you hit a deer" sentence reads weirdly in the non-person-based
| language.
|
| If accuracy or confusion is still the issue "the assailant hit
| the victim" could be amended to "the assailant hit the victim
| with a baseball bat" to clarify.
| Defenestresque wrote:
| It's funny you mention this particular phrasing. I used to
| work as a 911/police dispatcher so I was often literally the
| first person you'd tell such a story to. I had so many
| instances in which I would have greatly preferred people not
| use the "I hit ___" or "___ hit me"
|
| >"I was on my way to work and this guy just hit me! He just
| came out of nowhere and hit me!"
|
| Cue the inevitable asking of a) did he strike you with a
| fist? a weapon? b) did he strike you with a vehicle? c) if he
| struck you with a vehicle, were you in your vehicle or were
| you walking?
|
| I got burned -many- times over taking the seemingly obvious
| interpretation of "I was on my way to work and this guy just
| hit me!" and assuming a "two-vehicle traffic collision" just
| to find out the caller was actually exiting a coffee shop
| when someone physically assaulted him, or was walking back to
| his parked car when he watched someone back into it, etc..
|
| Even "I was driving to work and someone hit me" leaves such a
| plethora of questions unanswered that yes, in instances where
| -clarity- is important (having to be clear and succinct, not
| casually retelling the story at a bar) I would much rather
| hear "I was driving my vehicle when another driver collided
| with me" which isn't meaningfully longer and clarifies many
| questions about what happened.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| > the driver hit the pedestrian
|
| Seems reasonable. Cars don't kill people of their own volition
| without a driver. And in similar circumstances we wouldn't say
| something like an AR-15 killed a person, we'd say a
| gunman/gunwoman/shooter did. Why should drivers get treated
| differently?
| Zigurd wrote:
| If I hit you with a wrench, saying "the wrench hit you" is
| clearly awkward and obscuring what matters.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I don't see the analogy. "I hit you with a wrench" by and
| large implies intent. A pedestrian being hit by a car is very
| rarely an intentional event.
|
| Further, you tend to have control over the wrench in this
| scenario (and if I was hit by a wrench because you e.g.
| dropped it unintentionally, "the wrench hit me" is
| reasonable), whereas insufficient control over the car is
| usually the problem in a crash.
| paulgb wrote:
| I like it! I assume the red/yellow/green are roughly
| bad/warning/good, but what do the blue highlights mean? I agree
| with another comment that a tooltip to say which of the
| categories you listed a given span falls into.
| 65536b wrote:
| I'm somewhat concerned about the ethical implications of this
| beyond the scope of just car crash reporting. While impressive,
| the nlp model will have to be tuned by someone, someone with
| biases the model will inevitably inherit. Seems to have obvious
| potential as a propaganda tool, which might be used by the 'good
| guys' today, and be used by malicious actors tomorrow.
| ipsin wrote:
| It would be nice if the color-coded key ("Object", etc.) linked
| to the detailed sections below.
|
| When I first saw "Object" in the summary, I didn't know what it
| meant.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more
| neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction
| that vision zero finds more appealing. E.g. in the first article
| we should view the woman as a vulnerable road user, bearing no
| responsibility for being struck by a vehicle even though video
| evidence shows that she fell into the street.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yes, I do not think you bear responsibility if you collapse and
| someone strikes you with their car and then flees the scene.
| JackFr wrote:
| Don't be obtuse.
|
| A person collapses into the street and is struck by oncoming
| traffic - no one is to blame. It is an accident.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Imagine this were a workplace: some kind of suspended
| catwalk where accidentally falling off it is fatal. It
| would be an OSHA violation not to have guard rails to
| prevent this from occurring. Likewise, if this is a road
| where cars are moving too quickly to stop in time to avoid
| fatally hitting someone who falls onto the road, there
| ought to be a barrier between the pavement and the road
| except at designated crossing points.
| lamontcg wrote:
| If I see a cyclist one of the things I do is slow down and
| give them space specifically because bicyclists do
| occasionally fall. A good chunk of my awareness is also
| assigned to evaluating how they're riding in order to
| anticipate any kind of problem. The fact that most
| motorists don't believe there's any kind of responsibility
| for everyone to behave similarly is a problem.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Changing your behavior gives the cyclists and the road
| users around you (other cars, pedestrians looking for a
| spot to cross, etc, etc) the impression that you're a
| skittish or novice driver and are uncomfortable with the
| situation. This puts them on alert that you might do
| something unexpected (you are presumably a novice after
| all). This takes attention away from all the other things
| that demand their attention and reduces overall
| situational awareness.
|
| The best favor you can do all other traffic is to be as
| predictable and unremarkable in your actions as possible
| so that they may reliably plan their actions around
| yours.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > you are presumably a novice after all
|
| I'm 49 and I've been driving since I was 16.
|
| You can absolutely react to hazards without appearing
| skittish, which also alerts other traffic to the hazard
| if they're paying close attention.
|
| Trying to drive like a robot all the time is something
| that actual novice drivers think makes them better
| drivers.
| zip1234 wrote:
| Perhaps if she is struck then the drivers were going too
| fast? Maybe the speed limit should be lowered. Perhaps the
| street could be designed in a safer way to make this less
| likely to happen. Calling everything an accident is
| ignoring the actual causes.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Who's being obtuse? It looks like neither you nor the
| parent comment assign blame to the woman that the driver
| struck. From here, it looks like you are in agreement.
|
| The parent comment didn't even say one way or another if
| the driver who struck the woman should get any blame...
| ecshafer wrote:
| If someone collapses into the street, the driver should be
| able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast. Who I
| can think to blame here: * The auto manufacturer for not
| having sensors to detect this.
|
| * The city for making car dependent areas
|
| * The city for making roads that have cars drive so fast by
| pedestrians, that the pedestrian can die if hit
|
| * The driver for not driving more reasonably
|
| * The city for not having a barrier between the sidewalk
| and the road, China has these in a lot of areas, a curb
| with a hedge between the side walks and roads, or a fence.
|
| The pedestrian who collapses is the last to blame in my
| view.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > If someone collapses into the street, the driver should
| be able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast.
|
| Or they collapse mere seconds before the car strikes them
| making the __accident__ unavoidable.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| The duration between when the pedestrian collapses and
| when the driver runs over the pedestrian is not as
| relevant as you seem to be implying. If someone is
| standing in a crosswalk in broad daylight and falls over,
| even if the pedestrian collapses 0.1 seconds before
| someone runs them over that doesn't leave the driver
| blameless. Why, in broad daylight, in the middle of a
| crosswalk, was a driver 0.1 seconds away from running
| over a pedestrian? That sounds like poor road design,
| poor driving, or another factor. The same logic applies
| even as we worsen the conditions: if it was dark, where
| was the lighting? If the pedestrian "suddenly appeared"
| from behind an obstacle, why is there an obstacle that
| close to a road and why can a pedestrian get so close
| that they can "appear" from behind that obstacle?
|
| Roads should be designed so that pedestrians cannot
| accidentally end up 0.1 seconds (or pick your duration)
| from being crushed by a driver. And drivers, state-
| licensed machine operators, should face an _incredibly_
| high bar of scrutiny when it comes to damaging
| pedestrians. Yes this probably means very different road
| designs than the ones we have now, that is one of the end
| goals of this kind of effort.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I can say with confidence that this effort will not
| result in roads being re-designed, ripped up, re-poured,
| and money paid for the effort.
| lolpython wrote:
| What in the world are you talking about? Many US cities
| have already created traffic calming programs due to
| advocacy like this.
|
| https://lmgtfy.app/?q=traffic+calming+site%3A.gov
| Spivak wrote:
| Yeah, this isn't an act of god that no one could have
| possibly foreseen. This is system designed by humans that
| we have 100% control over.
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| This is the key point of the research and the tool I
| built, and clearly I still have some work to do on making
| this clear on my site:
|
| The objective is not to shift blame from one party to the
| other, even if its shifting from VRUs to drivers. The
| important thing is that we emphasize that all car crashes
| _have a cause_ and _known solutions_! Nearly all news
| articles miss this point, and tend to place blame (even
| inadvertently) on the parties involved rather than
| discuss how to prevent future incidents from happening.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| FWIW, one way in which you lost me early on was framing
| it as VRU vs driver. I don't see it in such simple terms.
| There are road users. It is not always the pedestrian
| that is killed. Sometimes it is another driver. And
| pedestrians can absolutely be the cause of a wreck where
| the driver dies. Not to mention, someone can be a VRU
| now, and a driver in a few minutes, then a VRU again.
|
| There are lots of good reasons to make roads safer, lots
| of methods for doing so, and none of them require making
| drivers the villains.
| ballenf wrote:
| > If someone collapses into the street, the driver should
| be able to stop in time, unless they are going to fast.
|
| Even 5 mph is too fast if the collapse is shielded from
| view until the last instant.
|
| In other words your statement boils down to "driver can
| stop unless they can't".
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If the collapse is shielded from view until the last
| instant, but still possible, there's an engineer
| somewhere who designed a road irresponsibly.
| kortex wrote:
| Exactly this. The human-factors-engineering take is that
| these should be mutually exclusive:
|
| - a driver should be able to brake if a person falls
| suddenly (streets)
|
| - a person is isolated from/ is incapable of falling
| suddenly into oncoming traffic (roads)
|
| It's the same reason highways are fenced off, extended to
| streets and roads. A big part of the problem is America's
| reliance on stroads: too fast to be hospitable for non-
| drivers, insufficiently isolated to protect non-drivers.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad
| dml2135 wrote:
| It is extremely unlikely that someone will be killed by a
| 5 mph collision, and it is certainly less likely than a
| 30 mph collision.
| nzmsv wrote:
| Cars are heavy things and can kill you even if they move
| at 5mph:
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/22/anton-
| yelchin-d...
| FabHK wrote:
| > no one is to blame. It is an accident
|
| That is _not_ the mindset with which aviation arrived at
| its amazing safety record.
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Respectfully, I think you're demonstrating the sort of thinking
| the corpus of research surrounding this seeks to shine a
| spotlight on: blaming the victim, rather than focusing on safe
| and forgiving design.
|
| Should our built environment be such that falling down in
| public should end your life? Do people deserve to die simply
| because they want to cross the street? Why do we design
| residential neighborhoods where parents are afraid of letting
| their kids play outside due to traffic? Do drivers of 4,000+
| lbs of steel and glass bear greater responsibility than
| pedestrians and bicyclists.
|
| In the article you mention with the woman falling into the
| street, the article makes no mention of street design. Further,
| emphasis is placed on the victim, but nothing is said of the
| driver.
|
| - What is the speed limit on that road? Fast-moving vehicles
| will require faster reaction time and longer stopping
| distances. Maybe areas that mix traffic with VRUs need to be
| reworked.
|
| - Did the driver appear to make any effort to stop? If so, why
| doesn't the article mention it if they already have video
| evidence? If not, did the driver not see the woman? Was the
| driver distracted?
|
| - Did poor illumination contribute to this collision? (If so,
| that's a design element: street lighting).
|
| > I gather that the intent is not to make the reporting more
| neutral or accurate, but to change the framing in a direction
| that vision zero finds more appealing.
|
| I'm posting this to demonstrate my work and seek honest and
| meaningful criticism to improve the tool and help improve
| public discourse around a public safety matter that is killing
| 30k-40k people per year in the U.S., and injuring millions. You
| can avoid the underhanded and snarky quip.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Calling them "editorial anti-patterns" because they don't
| frame the discussion how _you_ would like it to be framed
| is... well, an antipattern in itself.
|
| Let me be clear: Your goal of improving road safety is
| laudable, and the aspects your tool highlights are
| conceivably a way to achieve that. But priming visitors to
| expect "editorial anti-patterns" and then instead presenting
| "insufficiently biased-to-the-pedestrian" snippets is
| dishonest.
|
| While there are recommendations in there I fully support
| (e.g. "highlight systematic problems"), I am particularly put
| off by repeated suggestions like "the driver hit the
| cyclist": Unless the driver itself physically made contact
| with the cyclist, this is between inaccurate and confusing.
| It sounds like a fist fight broke out when the fundamental
| happening was someone being injured by sudden contact with a
| vehicle.
|
| You can still involve the driver in the sentence if needed,
| but please don't advocate for confusing reporting in the name
| of unconditionally blaming individuals.
|
| Also, suggestion for an addition: If you want to improve road
| safety, you could also recommend report on the maintenance
| status of the vehicle (e.g. were the brakes well-serviced?).
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback!
|
| I certainly have a lot more work to do over the next few
| weeks to improve the tool, and I think much of your comment
| will be addressed once I place a lot more weight on Framing
| (see my other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28842314).
|
| For your "driver hit the cyclist" example, I would like to
| avoid confusion that there was a physical altercation like
| a fist fight between the driver and cyclist. However, I
| stand by the sentence structure, because I don't want to
| personify or give agency to vehicles (e.g. "vehicle hit the
| cyclist") when it's the driver who is in control, and
| focusing on driver calls into question more thematic
| elements like distracted driving, speeding, visibility and
| lighting conditions, etc.
|
| Is there a way you'd recommend rephrasing "driver hit the
| cyclist" to satisfy both our suggestions?
|
| > Calling them "editorial anti-patterns" because they don't
| frame the discussion how you would like it to be framed is
|
| To be clear, I'm not trying to force _my_ desired framing
| on authors or inject bias into articles. I am simply
| working off of the research I 've seen, such as Editorial
| Patterns in Bicyclist and Pedestrian Crash Reporting [1]
| and all the other citations in that paper, that there is a
| very real and measurable effect on the language used in
| these articles and the readers' perception on blame and
| preventative measures.
|
| However, I am certainly thinking about the feedback I've
| received from everyone in this thread.
|
| > If you want to improve road safety, you could also
| recommend report on the maintenance status of the vehicle
| (e.g. were the brakes well-serviced?).
|
| That sounds like an interesting idea. I know that vehicle
| status can contribute to crashes, and legislation has been
| enacted to improve this. For example, all vehicles now
| require tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) because
| improper tire pressure was leading to lots of crashes.
| Back-up cameras are required because people, particularly
| small children, were being run over when in reverse. States
| have different requirements for periodic vehicle safety
| inspections (in New York State where I live it's once per
| year).
|
| If a crash is being reported involving older vehicles,
| maybe journalists could mention if those vehicle predate
| certain safety mandates. For example, vehicles before 2007
| in the U.S. may not have TPMS [2]
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Edit
| orial...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-
| pressure_monitoring_syste...
| karaterobot wrote:
| Yeah, this is a little odd to me. The app frames itself as a
| way to improve reporting, but the way it intends to improve it
| is by imposing an inherently less neutral position on the
| language used. There's no fact-checking going on here that
| would lead the program to decide the original report was
| incorrect and needed updating, _except that it doesn 't frame
| the story in the designer's point of view_. An extremely
| postmodern app.
|
| It's possible (and not unlikely) that this is how more news
| will be processed in the future.
| 015a wrote:
| To be fair: The model does not appear to automate remediation.
| It just highlights problems.
|
| Also: If all of this is done toward the goal of reducing
| vehicle-related pedestrian deaths, maybe the dictionary says
| that's technically a bias, but I have a hard time seeing the
| argument that its a reprehensible one. Pedestrians may bear
| some responsibility; the driver is not always at fault; at the
| end of the day, a pedestrian has never killed a driver. The
| point here isn't/shouldn't be about fault; its about
| underscoring a power imbalance.
|
| Have you ever heard the old saying: If the team succeeds, its
| everyone's success; if the team fails, its the manager's
| failure? Same thing. In situations of power imbalance, it is
| Good to bias fault toward power. As they say: with great power,
| comes great responsibility. Most drivers on American roads have
| zero sense of responsibility.
| dml2135 wrote:
| You're right that the intent is not to make the reporting more
| neutral, but you are missing the point -- the reporting is not
| neutral to begin with.
|
| Take an example from the tool: - The SUV crashed into the
| woman. vs - The driver crashed into the woman.
|
| It is not that one of these statements is "neutral" while the
| other one is biased. In both cases, the author is making a
| choice of emphasis.
|
| What Vision Zero advocates is that the former's emphasis is the
| wrong one, and that ascribing more agency (not necessarily
| blame, but agency) to drivers is the right emphasis to take.
| But no one is saying that that the choice of words is not
| subjective either way.
| Tarrosion wrote:
| A few months ago I wrote a short Twitter rant about a Boston
| Globe article that described a pedestrian being struck by a
| driver really poorly.
|
| Thread:
| https://twitter.com/evanjfields/status/1387131251811831812/
|
| Article:
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/27/metro/woman-28-seriou...
|
| To my surprise, this tool finds no problems with the article and
| gives it a B.
|
| (I'm really tickled by the tool, like the idea, but based on a
| totally not rigorous sample, seems like the tool leans a bit too
| much into sort of sentence structure analysis and elides some
| semantics?)
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Thanks for linking this issue, and I'll certainly look into it.
| I agree with your analysis on Twitter: manually annotating the
| article should yield the following issues:
|
| 1. Focus: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (emphasis is
| placed on the VRU)
|
| 2. Object: she was struck by a Toyota Corolla (agent is
| referred to as an object, rather than a person, e.g. driver of
| the Corolla)
|
| 3. Object: a 2010 Toyota Corolla being driven by a 29-year-old
| Brookline man, was driving east (again, the wording personifies
| the vehicle instead of assigning agency to the driver heading
| eastward)
|
| I will need to debug this particular example further, but it
| appears the "2010 Toyota Corolla" and "Toyota Corolla" are not
| being classified as CARLIKE, a label I trained an NER model on
| to help deal with all the ways you can name a vehicle: year-
| make-model, make-model, year-model, model, model-ish, generic
| terms like truck/pickup/pick-up etc., short-hands like Chevy
| instead of Chevrolet, etc.
|
| Furthermore, the tool is not identifying "woman" as a VRU. It's
| a little bit ambiguous because while "[she] entered the
| roadway", it's not 100% clear that means she is a VRU: a
| driver/vehicle can enter a roadway too.
| Tarrosion wrote:
| Interesting context, thanks! Cool tool, will be glad to see
| it get tuned further :)
| gok wrote:
| A liar on HN, chiefofgxbxl, died earlier today when he was run
| over. It was not the driver's fault. It was reported by police
| that chiefofgxbxl deserved this fate for being a pedestrian in
| the way of an SUV, and for claiming to use "Natural Language
| Processing" when all he was really doing was using Javascript to
| scan text for a hardcoded substring list.
|
| Your tool believes this article has no problems.
| dang wrote:
| I realize this may have been a joke taken too far, but your
| comment breaks several of the HN guidelines and the Show HN
| guidelines egregiously. Please make your substantive points
| without personal attacks in the future!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
| dymk wrote:
| This is neat, but something bugs me about the framing of the
| intended goal versus how you propose to get there.
|
| If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put pressure on
| leadership to make roads generally safer, why do almost all the
| corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame from the
| individual pedestrian onto the individual driver? Many of the
| suggested fixes are just their own form of counterfactual -
| they're facts, sure, but they don't contribute to public
| understanding of _why_ the crash happened.
|
| The examples of removing counterfactual outright and including
| thematic framing (focusing on road conditions, frequency of
| crashes, and aggregate statistics that tell the story of how
| often crashes occur) seem to be the best set of suggestions for
| correcting public perception on road safety. Not making sure the
| public knows this _one specific driver_ hit a pedestrian, rather
| than their car.
| benatkin wrote:
| > If the intent is to raise public awareness and to put
| pressure on leadership to make roads generally safer, why do
| almost all the corrections follow a pattern of shifting blame
| from the individual pedestrian onto the individual driver?
|
| I think "almost all" would have to include the various use of
| the word accident when the fault hasn't been fully determined.
| I've been following Project Zero for years now and that is a
| big part of our shtick. And that certainly is not shifting the
| blame from the pedestrian to the driver. It is merely removing
| a harmful assumption.
| avianlyric wrote:
| In all of these scenarios the driver is the better protected
| and less vulnerable participant.
|
| Ideally we should be improving infrastructure to ensure that
| the risks created by high speed lumps of metal is reduced as
| far as practically possible. But until that happens, we have to
| acknowledge that in the majority incidents drivers are only
| ones capable of changing the outcome. Additionally drivers
| should take one a greater responsibility when operating
| vehicles in areas where they might encounter more vulnerable
| road users. Vulnerable road users will always end up paying a
| substantially greater price in any incident, so it's reasonable
| to ask drivers to be more careful to avoid those incidents.
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| This is a great question and I agree with you entirely.
|
| Ultimately, Framing (thematic vs. episodic) is the most
| important consideration for these articles. It's important for
| articles to discuss road design, safety initiatives, etc. in
| order to equip readers with the knowledge necessary to get
| governments to act.
|
| However, Framing is also the most difficult pattern to detect
| simply because there are so many different thematic elements
| you can discuss, and many different ways to say each one. Here
| are a few examples:
|
| - This is the 3rd pedestrian fatality this year.
|
| - Residents have long complained about people racing down their
| street.
|
| - Washington St. has had a long lasting problem with weather-
| related crashes.
|
| - According to the NHTSA, there are X crashes per year related
| to prescription drug-induced drowsy driving.
|
| - Street width directly correlates with driving speed, which in
| turn increases the time needed to react and brake.
|
| I'm relying on manually annotated articles (700+ so far) and a
| custom-trained spaCy model to detect these elements, and the
| accuracy of that model depends on having enough training data.
| Since thematic elements are so rare in real-life articles, I'm
| having a difficult time providing enough training data. Hence
| why the tool emphasizes the other editorial anti-patterns, for
| now, but this will change once the Framing reporter gets
| better.
|
| Anyone have any suggestions for augmenting my training set for
| thematic elements?
| Bermion wrote:
| We need to limit speed and the amount of interactions between
| cars and pedestrians. This will necessarily be at the expense
| of the drivers who will have to drive slower and get less space
| since they have historically been prioritized.
|
| It is much easier to implement the necessary measures (against
| the will of many drivers) if it is clear that drivers run over
| people, not that people accidentally end up under cars.
| dymk wrote:
| I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made
| safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the
| unsafe conditions of the road.
|
| It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the
| matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the
| case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person
| because they think a news story will be more accusatory of
| them.
| Bermion wrote:
| Roads aren't badly designed because no one has "reported"
| them. Improving roads for pedestrians needs to be a
| priority for politicians, instead of convenient commuting
| by cars. And for that to happen, voters need to see the
| world like it is: drivers run over pedestrians.
| Zak wrote:
| What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is
| that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so
| of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing
| road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers.
| Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases
| aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety.
|
| I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good
| answer for every high-risk road situation, but for those
| where it is, changing the speed limit alone is likely a
| poor solution.
| [deleted]
| rtlfe wrote:
| > I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good
| answer for every high-risk road situation
|
| Why not? There's clear evidence showing that crashes at
| higher speeds are much more deadly. IMO any street that
| allows pedestrians and bicycles should be designed for
| 20mph car traffic. If you want to drive faster than that,
| do it on a limited-access highway.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There are multiple solutions to your 20mph car traffic
| restriction, one of which is "disallow bicycles and
| pedestrians on this stretch of pavement".
| Zak wrote:
| Limiting access to the road, e.g. using pedestrian
| overpasses, fencing, segregated sidewalks and bike lanes,
| etc... is among the options I had in mind. I don't think
| one solution fits every problematic road.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so
| of drivers
|
| And having to navigate traffic that is not of a
| homogeneous speed creates cognitive load for all drivers.
| So then they don't notice things like cyclists and
| pedestrians.
| aclarry wrote:
| But the solution that comes out of that framing is to somehow
| shame drivers into being better, as opposed to making roads
| better.
| eli wrote:
| Blaming the driver starts the root cause analysis in a
| different direction than blaming the pedestrian.
| dymk wrote:
| Neither solve the root problem - poor road design
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| Poor road design is mainly a political problem. We know
| how to make good roads, on the technical side it is a
| "solved problem", but we lack the political will to do
| it. So setting the proper framing did solve the root
| problem
| dymk wrote:
| Then target leadership. They're the ones responsible for
| building better roads (which is the whole advertised
| purpose of this project!).
|
| Writing an NLP bot that rewords articles to blame the
| driver 100% of the time is nothing but an exercise in
| getting a nice revenge dopamine rush. But drivers aren't
| the ones building roads.
| trytophan wrote:
| Leadership (politicians) respond to public sentiment and
| attitudes held by their constituents. They're not going
| to build safer streets, despite the benefits and means to
| do so, without the political will of citizens. Shifting
| the way the public perceives fatal car crashes would
| compel more people to bring up the issue with their local
| leaders and gather the momentum needed for such changes.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > why do almost all the corrections follow a pattern of
| shifting blame from the individual pedestrian onto the
| individual driver?
|
| Because the overwhelming majority of multi-party crashes
| involve one party violating the norms of how whatever traffic
| type they are is expected by the rest of the traffic to behave
| and shaming people is, for better or worse, an effective means
| of motivating specific behavior.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I agree, the best outcome would be if news stories said things
| like
|
| * "5 crashes have happened at this intersection so far this
| year"
|
| * "The speed limit at the crash site was 35, above the standard
| arterial speed limit of 25"
|
| * "The road at the bend had sharrow markings, which cycling
| advocates say are ineffective and inferior to marked or
| protected bike lines."
| bluGill wrote:
| One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is
| a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to
| make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you
| get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body
| degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad
| driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to
| drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tailgating ticket
| even though it is rare to see someone maintain their proper
| following distance in traffic.
|
| Don't take the above as excusing bad road design.
| lkrubner wrote:
| I live in the USA. My friend Kristin is from Germany. She got
| her driver's license in Germany when she was 28. She trained
| awhile for it and then took 3 tests: city driving, highway
| driving, and nighttime driving. From how she described it,
| the training and the testing was much more rigorous than
| anything that has existed in the USA.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I live in Ireland, used to live in the US, and had to take
| the Irish driver training and test as an adult, experienced
| driver. (Who had been driving approx as long as my
| instructor had been alive).
|
| The test was difficult, picky, and the things that they
| were looking for were not necessarily correlated with safe,
| strictly legal driving. (e.g., target speed in a 50KPH zone
| (urban area) was 53, not 49, and to not approach that with
| conviction made you a too timid driver.)
|
| And despite the intensive tests -- drivers here are crap.
| On the dog walk tonight, there were 3 cases of drivers
| failing to yield at crosswalks.
| emj wrote:
| I know nothing about the infrastructure in Ireland, but
| the drivers in the US kill at least twice as many people.
| Letting people drive cars at 50 km/h in an urban area is
| crazy, everyone you hit at those speeds die.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| What speed in miles would you think is Apr. Because
| 50km/h give you pretty good relation time. The trick is
| not to get in a crash from the start
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I think we're fine how it is in the USA. Germany's
| licensing system is absurd overkill and the cost and time
| commitment leaves out a lot of people who have a need to
| drive but can't afford it.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| In 2019, USA rate of traffic-related deaths was 7.3 per 1
| billion vehicle-km. Germany's rate was 4.2 per 1 billion
| vehicle-km.
|
| If the USA had Germany's rate, 16939 lives would've been
| saved.
|
| And you think that's "fine"?
|
| Here's where I got my info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
| bluGill wrote:
| Germany's training is easy compared to what would be
| required to make humans be good drivers.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| This is a complicated topic. One thing I can recall is that
| there's more pedestrian collisions as there's been more
| safety technologies and larger cars and average vehicle miles
| travelled (can't find the study, this might be a lead:
| https://safetrec.berkeley.edu/news/new-
| release-2020-safetrec... )
| dionidium wrote:
| > _People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as
| just a price you pay to drive._
|
| Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, _" never got so
| much as a speeding ticket"_ to suggest that speeding is the
| epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the
| reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of
| and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in
| automobile crashes.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Oh please. This is the kind of comical rhetoric that gets
| road safety advocates ridiculed.
|
| In practice speeding or at least the instance that resulted
| in getting ticketed is usually inconsequential.
|
| Between highways signed well under the normal traffic
| speeds, revenue enforcement and fishing stops the
| overwhelming majority of speeding tickets are trivial.
| People engaging in the kind of speeding most people can
| agree is excessive are a tiny minority. If they weren't
| people wouldn't use a speeding ticket as the epitome of a
| trivial infraction.
|
| Of course speed is a _factor_ in death and destruction.
| That 's tautologically true thanks to how the equations in
| Newtonian physics are written but you don't see anyone (who
| isn't getting laughed at) advocating for the return of the
| national speed limit for obvious reasons.
| jstanley wrote:
| Predicated on having already crashed, the chances that
| speed was a contributing factor to the severity is very
| high. That's why people want lower speed limits.
|
| Predicated on simply having been driving over the speed
| limit, the chances of an accident are very low. That's why
| people don't care about speeding.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This only captures crashes with other road users.
| Increased speed increases a lot of other risks, such as
| risk of injury to pedestrians at crosswalks or sidewalks,
| increased risk to hitting a building, and of course the
| general depressing effect that happens on non-car usage
| of roads (how many people will want to ride a bike on a
| road where all car drivers are speeding?).
|
| (This is one of my big issues with US speed limits. All
| the discussion around it is always scoped only to other
| cars for the most part.)
| sokoloff wrote:
| Every speeding ticket that I've gotten in the US was issued
| on a controlled access road with a speed limit of at least
| 55mph. None were for as much as 20 over. Most were from
| pack travel where deciding to travel at the posted limit
| would result in far more passing and aggregate risk to
| roadway users.
|
| I do believe all of those are minor infractions (and of
| course they were inconsequential, except for the delay and
| expense [if convicted] of the ticket). Revenue enforcement
| here is mostly done on controlled access highways; it's
| shooting fish in a barrel.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| That's another part of this issue. Traffic enforcement in
| the US is more ideological than it is utilitarian.
| Automated enforcement tools like red light cameras and
| speeding sensors run into intense political pushback in
| the US. Speeding tickets are usually ways to boost
| revenue instead of actually trying to deter speeding
| behavior. Traffic stops are arbitrary and usually based
| on the political and ideological goals of the Police
| department and current local government party instead of
| actually trying to reduce traffic incidents. In fact, as
| far as I know, traffic incidents are mostly used to drive
| infrastructure changes instead of really feeding into
| changing traffic policing.
|
| There's real political pushback from trying to actually
| decrease traffic incidents because actions to decrease
| these incidents result in higher overhead for current
| drivers, something historically lightly enforced.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the
| point you cannot see.
|
| People bring this up often. As far as I can tell such people
| are not heavily represented in car crash statistics.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is because it is impossible to measure: people tend to
| drive less as their vision degrades, vision degrades at
| different rates for different people (we can't use old as a
| proxy), they tend to mitigate their vision problems by
| driving slower. Probably other factors to account for too,
| that I don't know how to account for. Not heavily
| represented is not the same as not dangerous.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught
| to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a
| person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity;
| people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't
| buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that
| the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-
| drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus
| disincentivizes people in most parts of the US from ever not-
| driving. Woe to you if you don't drive because the US isn't
| setup for transit equity.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I dunno, some of this is also the fact the US people are
| huge babies about certain things, like being able to walk
| places. For example, there was a reddit thread from an
| American flabbergasted that people in the UK will actually
| go on 30-minute-long walks down to their local shops. Is a
| 30 minute walk really that absurd?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| It's a set of interrelated issues. Much of the US is
| zoned/regulated to be friendly to drivers and not
| pedestrians. For an egregious example, most of Downtown
| LA (so not the suburbs) you can walk for 30 minutes and
| maybe only see 5 different stores. Because of this,
| American culture has stopped talking about walking. As
| such for a lot of Americans, walking for 30 minutes to
| get somewhere is absurd culturally, but driving 30
| minutes to go to a store is much more acceptable.
|
| You can see the effect even more when it comes to
| recreational hobbies and sports. Americans don't really
| just walk or bike around. Walking and biking/cycling are
| usually specific activities, so most Americans buy
| special exercise clothing or exercise gear to go (by car)
| to specific spots friendly for walking and cycling to
| perform their recreational activities and come back.
| Walking is still a popular casual activity in urban areas
| but in a lot of suburban areas there aren't even the
| sidewalks in place to make it safe to walk around. Most
| Americans only really dress/prepare for the walk from
| their house to the car and from the car to the
| store/office/destination, then back if they're not
| specifically out to perform their recreational athletic
| hobbies.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| Depending on region, a 30 minute walk can be dangerous to
| one's health due to hot, humid temperatures or smoke
| inhalation.
|
| (Besides that, a 30 minute walk can be inconvenient- the
| stuff you're buying might not support being carried for
| 30 minutes. I tried to get a friend to consider giving up
| a car-based life and they asked me how they're going to
| move their stuff for LAN parties and gun hobby related
| activities.)
| bluGill wrote:
| > Is a 30 minute walk really that absurd?
|
| Yes, because the number of stores in that 30 minutes is
| so low. Most of them are also setup for cars, including
| selling quantities that assume a car to get home.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| A 30min walk would get me to two convenience stores and a
| doughnut shop. It would take me about 1hr to walk
| (briskly) to the nearest grocery store.
|
| And I live in a city where the zoning can be described as
| "we'll rubber stamp literally anything that isn't hazmat
| processing we're desperate for money". And this is a
| ~150yo neighrborhood in a multi-hundred year old city in
| the northeast, not some socal dump that was built out
| long after the advent of cars.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Let's say all that is true. How does using a computer program
| to reword all traffic accident reports as being caused by
| drivers solve this problem? Doesn't it just make people trust
| accident reports less?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| People reading the news aren't the only people who use
| traffic crash reports. They are also used (and can subtly
| influence) the people who make decisions about road
| planning. The culture we have of blaming
| pedestrians/cyclists and exonerating drivers (when, to be
| clear, the drivers are the ones creating the danger) leads
| directly to planning decisions that perpetuate road
| conditions that would be unconscionably dangerous in any
| other engineering field.
| nradov wrote:
| My optometrist told me that when he first started his
| clinical practice he was shocked to discover how many people
| are driving around with serious visual impairment.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The amazing thing is how many of the most egregious incidents
| involve drivers with suspended licenses or no licenses. At
| the moment, in the US, due to bail reform consequences are
| minimal unless someone is actual killed.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| That's just a reflection of the fact of how necessary cars
| are to a reasonable life. The state is naturally going to
| be reluctant to screw people out of their means to get to
| their obligations because the state doesn't want to create
| more people who are dependent on it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Couldn't part of the larger "why?" be that individual drivers
| are not sufficiently subject to liability for causing accidents
| with pedestrians, cyclists, etc.? If it is the case that it's
| almost impossible for a driver to get in any trouble for
| causing such an accident (except in the most egregious cases of
| reckless driving) then it doesn't make sense to avoid talking
| about that.
| chana_masala wrote:
| I hope you can look past the negative responses here. I think
| this is very well intentioned and well done. It would be nice to
| see more rationale on the website like what you've written here
| chiefofgxbxl wrote:
| Hi HN,
|
| I built "Vision Zero Reporting"
| (https://visionzeroreporting.com), a tool to detect editorial
| anti-patterns in local news coverage of car crashes.
|
| Maybe you've noticed that local news articles about car crashes,
| especially those that involve "vulnerable road users" (VRU) such
| as bicyclists and pedestrians, tend to employ language that seems
| to blame the victim or only discuss the incident as an isolated
| event, rather than in context that crashes are preventable and
| are caused by specific reasons.
|
| This tool is meant to help news publishers check their articles
| and learn the anti-patterns to avoid.
|
| Here's a brief explanation of the problems my tool checks for:
|
| 1. Focus - Readers find the focus/subject of the sentence more in
| control of the situation, and hence more blameworthy (e.g. "A
| pedestrian was struck by a driver" VS "A driver struck a
| pedestrian").
|
| 2. Agency - Some sentences lack an agent altogether, which places
| more blame on the recipient (e.g. "A bicyclist was hit." VS "A
| bicyclist was hit by a driver.")
|
| 3. Object-based reference - Pedestrians and bicyclists are almost
| always referred to using people-based language, but drivers are
| referred to using object-based language 81% of the time [1] (e.g.
| "The vehicle fled the scene" VS "The driver fled the scene").
| This language personifies and gives agency to vehicles rather
| than their drivers.
|
| 4. Accident - Accident is the most-used term in articles to
| describe the incident (47%). This term is being phased out by
| some news agencies because the word implies a sense of
| inevitability or that it happened purely by chance, when we know
| why car crashes happen and can take preventative action.
|
| 5. Framing - (still in beta) Articles employ an "episodic" frame,
| meaning they describe crashes as isolated incidents. Only 6% (!)
| of articles use "thematic" framing [1], meaning they
| contextualize the event by discussing road design, number of
| recent crashes in the area, quote experts, educate readers about
| road safety initiatives, etc.
|
| 6. Counterfactual - (still in beta) Counterfactuals are true
| statements, but imply the outcome could have been changed had the
| victim acted differently. While reporters may see these
| statements as sticking-to-the-facts, we've discovered in 700+
| manually-annotated articles that counterfactuals almost always
| shift blame toward the victim (A bicyclist was struck; he wasn't
| wearing a helmet. It was dark outside, the biker wasn't wearing
| reflective clothing, and the driver told police he didn't see the
| bicyclist until it was too late.) Notice that all of these
| statements may be true, but goes hand-in-hand with the Framing
| issue discussed above: the bicyclist was hit, but is that because
| there is no protected bike lane? It was dark outside, but is road
| visibility a municipal obligation?
|
| I'm looking for constructive feedback to make this tool better!
|
| My work is based primarily on the following research papers (and
| I've already shown the tool to the authors - they loved it!):
|
| [1]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330975590_Editorial...
|
| [2]
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337279845_Does_news...
| 04rob wrote:
| Is the source code available? It would be interesting to apply
| this to reporting on other topics.
|
| As far as suggestions, it would be great to see an explanation of
| each problem when hovering over it in the text. Also, the colors
| for the "Object", "Counterfactuals", and "Accident" problems are
| difficult to distinguish for color-deficient individuals.
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