At 12:34 AM 07/16/2003 -0500, timwong wrote: [snip] Sheriff's officials say a 36-year-old Madison man was talking on a cell phone when he drove through a stop sign in the town of Hustiford and crashed his SUV into a car. The accident killed Kelly Micheau and injured her husband Thomas and 16-month-old daughter. [snip]
This underscores the bias that pervades our culture regarding automobiles, even to the point of biased language. To wit: - granting that "accident" is defined as "an unexpected and unforeseen event" (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=accident) -knowing that use of a cell phone while driving increases one's statisitical risk of being involved in a CRASH by more than 400% (about the same increased risk as operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, which is clearly illegal) see http://cartalk.cars.com/About/Drive-Now/scientific-evidence.html then the event posted by Tim is NOT an ACCIDENT. Neither are 80% of CRASHES, according to the FHWA, since that's the percentage of CRASHES caused by driver error. note that the dictionary definition of accident in the url cited includes the example "car accidents on icy roads." which could conceivably fall into the 20% of crashes not caused by driver error, assuming, of course, that the driver that crashes was not driving too fast for conditions. Other examples of biased language? "improve" a road, generally meaning "widen." for whom is it an improvement? certainly not for pedestrians, people who live along the road, or generally for bicyclists. see more biased language via the excellent website http://www.vtpi.org/ Chuck _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
