The Deadly Myth That Human Error Causes Most Car Crashes

In this opinion piece recently published in The Atlantic David Zipper highlights that the responsibility for road safety largely falls on the individual sitting behind the wheel, or riding a bike, or crossing the street is a myth. Transport departments, law-enforcement agencies, and news outlets frequently maintain that most crashes—indeed, 94 percent of them, according to the most widely circulated statistic—are solely due to human error. Blaming the bad decisions of road users implies that nobody else could have prevented them. He puts forward a powrful argument that this is just not true.

David Zipper is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government . He writes frequently about the future of urban mobility and technology.