On June 21 middle-school math teacher Janice Wendling and her husband, Mark, a power plant engineer, were training for an upcoming charity bike ride near the southwest suburb of Morris.
And yet, the Morris Herald-News reported that, earlier that month, the boy had been clocked by police doing 87 in a 55 mph zone on I-80 in Joliet. And earlier on the day of the crash, he’d been ticketed for driving 24 to 36 miles over the speed limit in nearby LaSalle County.
For example, in December 2013, Stroger Hospital administrator Robert Vais fatally struck Hector Avalos, a former marine and aspiring chef, as Avalos was biking in Douglas Park. Although Vais was found to have nearly twice the legal blood-alcohol level, he was sentenced to a mere 100 days in prison. Incredibly, Judge Nicholas Ford mentioned that Avalos was wearing dark clothing at the time Ford hit him as a reason for the light sentence.
—D.C. resident Colin Brown in response to a pedestrian-shaming PSA
A few days later the paper ran an antibicycling rant by DePaul adjunct lecturer John McCarron, arguing that motorists shouldn’t be expected to check for bicyclists before making right turns, although two of the crash victims had been killed by right-turning drivers.
Changing the way we talk about crashes could go a long way toward addressing this issue. News outlets generally refer to collisions as “accidents,” implying that they’re simply unfortunate incidents that were unavoidable, even in cases where the driver was clearly at fault. Recognizing this, the New York City Police Department recently changed its policy and stopped referring to crashes as accidents.
