When cars and bikes collide, the people involved are often left out of the story.

I open every story I see about people riding bikes being hit by people driving their cars. Partially, it's because I might know them, a fact that was painfully clear a few months ago when someone I knew was killed by a person driving a car when she was in a bike race. More recently, last week I read about a crash in View Royal where a person riding a bike was hit by a person driving a car. That crash ended with the person riding a bike being taken to hospital, and the person driving the car was cooperative with the police.

The issue I have, besides the fact that people riding bikes are getting hit and killed by people driving cars and everything that goes along with that, is how we talk about these incidents.

In the story last week, the police officer who was interviewed said, "The cyclist made an unsafe lane change and drove out in front of the car, and was hit by the car travelling behind it.鈥�

Let's parse this out a little bit.

The quote starts with "the cyclist," which immediately puts the victim of this crash into a category that is "other" than most people reading the story. This now-othered person is then described as doing something unsafe, which blames them. That "unsafe" activity is that they "drove" out in front of a car. Driving is something that people riding bikes categorically aren't doing, and saying this person "drove" in front of the car puts an equal emphasis on the action done by the person riding the bike and the person driving the car.

The sentence ends by saying that the person riding the bike was hit by the car (passive voice, taking agency and immediacy out of the interaction), which was "travelling behind it," which again implies that the now-dehumanized object was somehow innocently going about its autonomous day.

This officer's comment, while probably made off the top of his head, dehumanizes the victim, assigns blame for the incident, and creates a false equivalency between bikes and cars (a bike weighs between seven and 15 kg, a personal motor vehicle can weigh more than 2,000 kg), and takes agency away from one of the people involved in the crash.

I wasn't present when this happened. It is entirely possible that the person riding the bike was riding in an unsafe manner. But even the most unsafe person riding a bike is fundamentally safer than someone driving a car. In a bike-on-bike, bike-on-person, or bike-alone crash, the worst thing that would happen is the person riding the bike is injured. Replace that with a car and every time there is property damage, and almost every time, more than one person is injured or killed. Even if this person was riding in an unsafe manner, the person driving the car has more responsibility to act safely. We don't blame people who get shot in hunting accidents for walking in front of bullets.

The other problem here is that this officer spoke this way because it has become so entrenched in the way we communicate to dehumanize the people involved in these sorts of collisions. Journalists do this since we try to present the facts objectively. We also have to be careful to avoid damaging someone's reputation and convicting them outside of a court of law. That's why we use the word "allegedly" when reporting on court cases and legal issues. Until it is proven in a court of law, we cannot say otherwise.

Police are similar. If you read any police press release, they are also couched in this passive language. It creates an emotionless summary of the facts, but if we're not careful it can also have a hidden effect of implying blame or other meaning. Cars are already good at separating us from the world around us. We watch the world roll by as if on a screen. But the deep need for us to couch our language, avoid accidentally assigning blame and remove all personhood from the conversation is not helping.

If you read back over this story, you'll see that I didn't use the word "accident" to describe the crash, since that makes it seem like an inevitability instead of something preventable. I also didn't use the words "cyclist" or "driver" once, except when quoting other people. Instead, I used the terms "person riding a bike" and "person driving a car." That's intentional, as it reminds you that everyone involved in this is a human person, not just the vehicle they chose.

Maybe if we remember that, I won't have as many stories to read, hoping that my friends aren't the "person riding a bike."