I've been increasingly noticing something among safe streets professionals and advocates that is bothering me, I'm going to share and am happy to engage in discussion about. (Maybe I should do a research project and publish it, then talk about it, but that's not my MO.)

I'm obviously a proponent of a true #VisionZero or #SafeSystems approach. I preach it, I teach it. But while I think we need to approach design, planning, and engineering that way, it is not a short term panacea. Of course, most folks doing this work understand that, even if they

focus on it, whether from an advocacy, teaching, or practice perspective. My issue is I've noticed what seems to be an increasing habit of dismissing individual driver behavior as though we shouldn't focus on it. Enforcement is problematic to say the least, culture shift is hard,

and I fully endorse @KMRalph's work on the "Distraction of Distracted Pedestrians" but I don't think that should extend to drivers. Even though @OregonWalks's excellent and extensive data collection effort found little evidence in police reports of driver distraction, that data

is obviously hugely biased, both in driver's stories and police willingness to accept the driver's account. That does NOT counter their important points about needing to change the STREETS. But even if that is what folks rightly want to focus on, I ask that we don't use language

that makes it seem like expecting drivers to do a MUCH better job of operating these massive machines capable of extraordinary speed and power is not worthy of focus, or is itself a distraction. We need safer environments that result in, or force, better behavior. No doubt.

But that's the long game. There is simply too much concrete and asphalt that needs narrowing, re-allocating, etc. People are dying now, every day, almost every hour. We need people working on every front, coming at this problem from every angle. VZ folks know this, of course.

But here's an example. @KostelecPlan rightly criticizes the "94% of crashes are driver error" conventional wisdom, because it is often used to absolve engineers and planners of any culpability in designing environments where errors are fatal or injurious.

But I've noticed that criticism come up more often as a dismissal of driver behavior (or vehicle tech or design) as a major contributor, too. I worry, to be very frank, that it reflects our own windshield bias and desire to absolve ourselves (the royal we, that is) of fault.

It is hard to get at the nuance, even in a bazillion-tweet thread. But as someone who strongly believes that language and framing play a large role in how we think about and address traffic violence, I couldn't help but notice this swing maybe so far in the direction of systems

Frankly, I worry that subconsciously we as practioners and advocates can still be guilty of being a bit relieved to blame the system (accurate) and act as though individual choices and behaviors aren't central (inaccurate). So tl;dr, watch for that bias in our thinking and words.