The driving public in Ontario has two choices: either be misled by social media or be misinformed by official news media. Such conclusions are repeatedly demonstrated whenever a serious collision occurs on the roads of the Province of Ontario in Canada. Both social news media and official news media follow their own predictable scripts.
In the world of social media there will be occasions where a member of the public has come across a collision site and snaps a photo which is subsequently posted on their selected social media site. From this will come hundreds or even thousands of replies about what likely happened or who was at fault. Many of these comments are created by trolls whose purposeful design is to create nonsense content. And many are created by persons who may honestly believe what they write but have no clue about the basics of physics, collision causation or interpretation of physical evidence. In this make-believe world everything is possible and believable, as long as the public is gullible enough to believe the persuasive comments of someone who “speaks their language”. This is the age of “Donald Trumpism”.
On the flip side is the misinformation provided by official news media. In the present age official news media are riding on the coat-tails of their predecessors before the internet. In those years of a “real free press” there were multitudes of news agencies competing against each other to provide the most accurate news in the quickest time-frame. In those pre-internet years news agencies had numerous investigative reporters who existed, not only in large metropolitan centres, but even in small towns. If you did not get the story, or if you did not get it right, your opposing news agency would expose you and the public would know. But as the internet and social media took form, official news agencies began to drop off, first in the smaller towns and then into the bigger centres. Almost every independent newspaper died. Those official news agencies that survived were bought out by large corporations that created the appearance that the original independent agency was still in existence while in reality they became all the same, owned by the same conglomerate. Even these large corporate news agencies could not afford to have investigative reporters in every town. And even the large unban centres could not afford to keep paying the salaries of investigative reporters. It became standard policy to create news stories from a template, minimal originality and specific facts, just a standard form in which you simply paste the details of collision location, names of the involved and so on. The present status quo is dangerously on the edge of complete misinformation and a threat to democracy as a whole.
Historically, the public in Ontario has never been properly informed about the dangers of transportation incidents on public roadways. Previously this was partly due to the lack of information possessed by collision investigators. Before the 21st century collision reconstruction methods were much different than they are now and the methods required time-consuming analysis involving interpretation of physical evidence and application theoretical principles such as conservation of momentum and energy transfer/dissipation. By the time a useful result was available many weeks or months could pass by and much of the public would no longer be interested in that result.
In today’s age collision analysis can still be time-consuming but certain results can be obtained sometimes in hours. As almost all passenger vehicles are equipped with event data recorders (“black boxes”) it is theoretically possible to conduct a download of collision data shortly after investigative personnel arrive, if they have the proper downloading hardware to do so. Unfortunately the complications of our world mean that vehicle manufacturers do not cooperate with government agencies to create a single, universal downloading device. The numerous independent hardware means that investigative agencies have difficulty paying for them and many important incidents fall to the wayside. Although precise and detailed data is often available investigative personnel will never reveal that data to the public, unless forced to do so during a trial that could occur many years in the future. By then the public is no longer involved and loses interest. Even at trial official news reporters simply have little or no knowledge about collision reconstruction analyses, let alone the legal minds of the lawyers and judges who try to present the image that they know what they are talking about. In most instances neither lawyers, or their experts, are sufficiently independent enough to provide an accurate account of how a person died or was seriously injured. How can such a process filter down to official news reporters and then onto the public that needs to hear/see/read the truth?
Accounts of serious collisions are also focused primarily on bringing an offender to “justice” by throwing them in jail. Once that is deemed to be sufficient the legal process moves onto the next party. At no point is there any serious attempt to identify road safety dangers stemming beyond the offending driver.
In serious and independent road safety research the acronym “HVE” is understood and applied. HVE refers to the words Human, Vehicle and Environment. These are broad references to the main causes of road transportation incidents. They indicate that collision causes, and even more importantly Injury causes, come from human, vehicular and environmental factors. Agencies such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) know this acronym very well and apply it even though they may not make reference to it. These agencies have the least conflict of interest with respect to collision and injury causation. Unfortunately their investigations are very few. The vast majority of transportation incidents receive no such independent and properly, scientific scrutiny.
The bottom line is that, in the Province of Ontario, the public has absolutely no credible, reliable, and independent information about how and why their counter-parts are being injured or killed. It is akin to placing the public in a duck shoot in some amusement park: a shooter is given a gun in an attempt to strike one of the line of ducks passing by on some conveyor belt. The shooter rarely makes contact but the ducks have no way of protecting themselves or of stopping the insane process. This is the apparatus that exists in real-life on Ontario roads. The driving public is the “line-of-ducks” moving along Ontario roads with no knowledge when they may have the luck of being the victim of a transportation tragedy. They have no way of protecting themselves because they have no knowledge of how the previous “duck” became injured or killed. That knowledge is available to the selected few who have access to the detailed investigations of police who have exclusive jurisdiction over the collected evidence. But the public will never see that. What the public gets is misleading commentary on social media which may have no basis in reality, or they can be misinformed by the lack of information provided by official news agencies.
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