Look, for instance, at the bitter opposition of municipalities across America to the implementation of curb ramps and other design refinements needed for handicapped accessibility.  It took a protracted legal fight to finally make curb ramps ubiquitous across the country.  Unfortunately, all too often, only well-funded lawsuits force many transportation officials to finally “get it.”  Experience has subsequently shown that curb ramps have not only been beneficial to a small minority of persons in wheelchairs, but also to parents pushing their children in strollers, delivery people and movers with hand trucks, as well as many other less ambulatory persons in the community. Also, as a city planner, I am keenly aware that this country’s development and land use patterns do not necessarily need to be dominated by motor vehicles.  There are ways to accommodate autos without letting them run riot over the landscape.  The physical solution to this ongoing contemporary problem was developed early in the 20th Century by British planner Raymond Unwin, applied thoughtfully by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright in their Greenbelt towns, and further refined by German city planner Ludwig Hilberseimer.  In more recent times, the solution has been applied at the Lafayette Park redevelopment project in Detroit and the Village Homes subdivision in Davis, California.   Levin Nock has produced an attractive and well-articulated presentation of these ideas at http://www.greenwayneighborhoods.net/.  Streets and roads can be laid out in branching networks in coordination with greenways that include pedestrian and bicycle paths.   This could be done in such a way that we could walk (or bike) long, continuous paths to school, the market, the park, or other daily destinations without ever needing to cross the paths of motor vehicles.  This can be accomplished simply through the intelligent use of dead-end streets (cul-de-sacs), and through grade separation, especially where the terrain is advantageous.  If such coordinated and separate circulation systems could become the convention and standard in America, pedestrian and bicyclist deaths and injuries from collisions with automobiles could be radically reduced to almost nothing.  Not only does this scheme promote much greater convenience and safety for pedestrians and bicyclists, it also significantly reduces the coverage of the land with impervious pavement for streets and parking lots and their ancillary storm water drainage systems.  (Cars are such space-hogs.)  The land saved can be much better used planted in trees, grass, and vegetation to reduce the urban heat island effect, to clean and replenish the air with oxygen, and to absorb storm water runoff.

Even the NHTSA knows better than to call all collisions accidents: http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/airbags/Archive-04/PresBelt/crash_accident.html

Having worked at a local television station, I know that most reporters aren’t going to do much more than a stand up on the street corner in which they describe the crash and provide a few details about the victims. But point out to the reporter that: a) the street is posted 30 mph and people drive 50; b) it is a mile between protected crosswalks; c) there is a pattern of injuries/fatalities; d) etc. — and suddenly you’ve got a story and you’ve changed the tone of the reporting.

The above isn’t a hypothetical; it describes a community in car-centric Alabama where I worked.