In 2019, more than 173,000 people in the United States were killed “by accident.” In 2020, that number grew to more than 200,000. More people die by accident today than at any time in American history. Yet despite the death toll, there is no fun run for accidental death research or public memorial for the accidental dead. What we call accidents—the traffic crashes, the house fires, the falls, overdoses, and drownings—rarely register as a point of public concern.
But for me, the way we die by accident is a concern—because my best friend died by accident, at least according to the guy who killed him.
When I was 16, I fell in love with a young man named Eric Ng. He was intense and kind, handsome and funny. We made quick high school sweethearts and instant best friends. In time, he would become a math teacher and I a journalist. At 23, my only life plan was that he would remain my constant. Then one day Eric rode his bike into Manhattan but never rode home. He died on the sidewalk of massive internal injury. The driver who killed him told a policewoman at the scene, “I got into an accident. My car hit this person.”
“My car hit this person,” he said, as though he wasn’t even there.
So many people die “by accident” in America because the same accidents happen again and again, repetition like some grotesque Groundhog Day. Months before Eric was killed, another cyclist was killed on the same street. After, more would die in the same place. Around 38,000 people will die in car crashes in the U.S. in 2022, and I can predict this because it happens every year.
One reason for the repetition is what we do after someone dies by accident: We find someone to blame. Pedestrians and cyclists in the U.S. know this story all too well: She was looking at her phone; He was wearing dark clothing; They were not wearing a helmet.
This is not unreasonable. Blame is how we control the terror stirred up by the seeming randomness of accidental tragedy. Laying blame makes a terrifying, unfamiliar event less frightening and more familiar. As the shame and vulnerability researcher Brené Brown describes it, “Blame is simply the discharging of pain and discomfort.”
But there is nothing productive in this process. In fact, in seeking comfort, we condense all the world’s complexity to one kernel of cause: a single villain. The ability to keep the uncontrollable world at bay is quite a power—which is one reason we blame victims most of all: because the dead cannot contest that power.
We can find a prime example of this in our bicycle helmets: basic, low-cost shock absorbers. Upon contact with a hard surface, helmets absorb some of the impacts, reducing the risk of brain injury. When helmets are absent, blame steps in.
In the aftermath of a bicycle fatality, the helmet-wearing or helmetless status of the person on the bicycle is almost always mentioned; it appears regularly in news coverage and accident reports. When Eric was killed, the New York Times pointed out that he was not wearing a helmet. He was also struck head-on by a 2000 BMW 528i, weighing 3,495 pounds and traveling 60 miles per hour. Mentioning whether or not Eric wore a helmet is akin to blaming an egg for cracking against a pan.
The truth is that helmets help, but only to a point. If a person cycling hits a pothole, a helmet would act as a significant injury preventer, cushioning the impact of their head against the asphalt. But if a person cycling is run over by a 13,000-pound truck, they and their helmet would be crushed.
There is also evidence that drivers are more reckless when driving near cyclists wearing helmets, that laws requiring helmets make people less likely to ride a bike, that repealing those laws would make people more likely to ride a bike, and evidence that this effect—fewer people riding bikes—actually increases the number of per-capita bike crashes. While a higher number of people who ride bikes in an area is linked to fewer bicyclists showing up injured at local hospitals, there is no such correlation for areas that require bicycle helmets by law.
Further, among countries with high rates of bicycling, the ones where people wear helmets the least also have the lowest cyclist fatality rates. In the United States, which has the highest rate of helmet use of all those countries, the rate of cyclist fatalities is also highest.
Perhaps most importantly, even Giro, one of the largest helmet manufacturers in North America, says that the company does not design its helmets to protect from cars. And across the country, helmet laws are enforced in a way that indicates that even police do not believe the purpose of the laws is safety.
In Seattle, police write as many as 60 percent of helmet citations to unhoused people. A study of helmet citations in that city found that Black people on bikes were summonsed four times as often and Indigenous people twice as often as white people on bikes. In Tampa, as many as 80 percent of cyclists stopped were Black, even though the population of Tampa is only around a quarter Black. Similar results are found in cities across the country: Dallas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Oakland, Washington, D.C.
The bicycle helmet is such a predominant manifestation of blame in cycling crashes in the U.S. that a researcher at Heidelberg University in Germany was inspired to track it. He analyzed the bicycle safety advice of 25 U.S. cities; the overhyping of helmets was so common that he declared it “a fixation.” Blame was central to the fixation, with helmet-oriented safety advice more likely to be both moralizing and given special attention—exclamations, italics, graphic depictions—where other safety advice was stated plainly. The helmet, he concluded, is a way to see the death of a cyclist as an accident, to lay blame as a handy distraction from the central and systemic dangerous condition: Cars can kill people.
None of this is to say helmets are bad or unhelpful—just in the aftermath of a fatal bicycle crash, a distraction from the actual problem. Like a seat belt, a bicycle helmet can reduce the likelihood and degree of injury in the case of some crashes. But the blame—such as noting whether a person killed riding a bike was or was not wearing a helmet—can actually increase the likelihood of the “accident” repeating by causing a disregard for dangerous conditions.
A large body of evidence shows that the best way to prevent bicycle-related fatalities is to create bike lanes that separate bikes and cars in the road. This reduces the number of drivers who exceed the speed limit, and the number of crashes, injuries, and deaths for cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians.
And knowing how the design of streets can cause or prevent the death of a cyclist, citing the absence of a helmet can come with major consequences: It tells us that the kernel of cause has been found, and thus it is time to move on. In this way, the chief consequence of blame is the prevention of prevention. In finding fault with a person, the case of any given accident appears closed.
The man who killed Eric—because he was drunk—went to prison. That man had made bad decisions: driving drunk, speeding, taking a wrong turn onto the sidewalk. But just like scolding my dead best friend about the helmet he did not wear, the prison sentence did nothing to prevent this so-called accident from happening again.
Because we blamed human error—whether drunkenness or helmetless-ness—and because “it was an accident,” little was changed after Eric was killed. In fact, a decade later, a person with murderous intentions would use the exact same route for a vehicular terrorist attack. Only after that did officials protect cyclists and pedestrians on the street where Eric was killed in a way that wholly prevented cars from entering the space—with barriers and bollards separating people and cars at every intersection.
Studies show that the simple act of finding someone to blame in an accident makes people less likely to see systemic problems or seek systemic changes. One prompted subjects with news stories about a wide variety of accidents: financial mistakes, plane crashes, industrial disasters. When the story blamed human error, subjects were more intent on punishment and less likely to question the built environment or seek investigation of organizations behind the accident. No matter the accident, blame took the place of prevention.
In accidents, finding fault with human error is a substantive problem reflected in government policies and infrastructure. Large cities that spend more money on police—blaming people, and trying to perfect their behavior—have a 23 percent higher rate of accidental death than the ones that spent less, and cities that spend more on roads—correcting dangerous conditions—have a 14 percent lower rate of accidental death than the others.
Other research corroborates the inverse relationship between blame and prevention. One study cataloging 12 years of police traffic stops in 33 states could find no correlation between the number of police traffic stops and the number of people killed in traffic crashes in the state.
We can find the corollary of this relationship in almost every type of accidental death, where the people with the power to change dangerous conditions disregard them as soon as a human error is found.
Mistakes are inevitable, people are not perfectible, and the only answer to the accident problem starts with setting aside blame for human error. “Accidents” happen when errors occur under dangerous conditions, but we can create conditions that anticipate errors and make those mistakes less of a life-or-death equation—the barrier- and bollard-protected bike lane does exactly that. When we change the built environment to keep people safe, mistakes do not need to result in death.
Or we can focus all our energy on blaming people for those bad decisions, and let the same accidents happen again and again.
Adapted from There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price by Jessie Singer, published by Simon & Schuster.
