Crash or Accident?

If, like me and millions of other Americans, you used the Waze navigation app for your Labor Day holiday driving, you probably encountered somewhere along the way a screen like this one:
Screen Shot 2017-09-03 at 2.56.27 PM
Last year, that screen would have been different. Rather than notifying the user of a crash, the word would have been accident.
The change is due in large part to the efforts of Jeff Larason, a former Boston traffic reporter who’s now the director of highway safety for Massachusetts. For about four years, he and like-minded colleagues, including Candace Lightner, founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, have been trying to get rid of accident in reference to traffic collisions. If a drunk or distracted driver plows into another vehicle, they argue, how accidental is that? “The word wrongly implies that human decisions and actions have nothing to do with it,” Larason says.

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