Dear journalists, you hold the key to reducing road harm

Dear journalists,

Today, five people will die on the UK's roads. And tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. By the end of the week, 35 people will have died and more than 2,500 will have been injured.

And yet, despite this horror going on all around us, we just carry on, as normal, largely unaware, until of course the unthinkable happens, and we become a victim ourselves. Then we get it, when it's too late.

I've met some amazing, inspirational people since working with RoadPeace. Many of them have become victims of road collisions. None of them believed that it would happen to them. But it did.

Mothers have lost children. Wives have lost husbands. Sisters have lost brothers. Children are growing up without their parents.

My plea is for the media to help. Please. Journalists, you have it in your power to help.

By sharing the facts more readily, and more openly, so that ordinary members of the public, who are all road users, know the true risks that we all face every day when we leave our homes.

In 2022 alone in the UK, there were:

• 1,766 road deaths

• 28,941 serious injuries

• 112,619 slight injuries

• 143,326 casualties of all severities

And if the media aren't convinced by our facts, then please listen to people like Professor Scarlett McNally, a Consultant orthopaedic surgeon working in Sussex.

In an article in the British Medical Journal, she said:

"Last year, 27 450 people were killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads. If these deaths or serious injury from road traffic crashes were a cancer, they’d represent the fifth leading new cancer diagnosis in the UK—with only prostate, lung, breast, and bowel cancer higher. This is a public health matter, and health inequalities play a big part.

"Children in the most deprived 20% of areas are six times more likely to be injured than those in the least deprived 20%, and 16 children are killed or seriously injured in road crashes every week on their way to or from school."

I get it. I was a journalist. Our topic isn't 'newsworthy' because road crashes happen every day, on roads all across the country. They aren't unusual (but that's the tragic point of this piece).

If a bus carrying 35 people crashed and all of the people died, that would be a story. But because those 35 people die individually each week, in separate collisions, that isn't a story.

Please, media - let's not make it the unthinkable. Please help us to tell society how it really is - that people are being killed and injured all around us every day.

Language matters

Please stop calling crashes 'accidents' because that just feeds the problem. It's a dismissive term, which suggests that something was unavoidable. But the majority of crashes are avoidable.

As a journalist, I was trained to use real language, not police speak. So, when reporting on a collision, the word accident is preferred because that is the word your average person in the street would use. But that average person in the street will forever use this unhelpful language if we don't start to educate them on the facts.

We need people to know that driving is a privilege, not a right. Using a phone at the wheel has consequences. Driving at speed in a two-tonne vehicle, which is capable of killing and injuring many people, has consequences. We need them to know that we all MUST take far more responsibility for our actions when we use the roads, however we use them.

If we don't tell them, they will only find out the truth when it's too late.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Morris,

Road harm reduction campaigner, driver, cyclist, dog walker and Mum of two