"We don't say 'plane accident' ..."

The use of fault-displacing language is not an accident. Some history I never knew.

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident

It also drives me crazy that it's always the vehicle that hits or kills the pedestrian, cyclist, etc and not the DRIVER… I think a headline like this one "Pedestrian killed by dump truck in Lower Queen Anne identified" makes as much sense as this would "Gun shoots 19-year-old man in South Seattle after robbery" (the real headline was "19-year-old man shot in South Seattle after robbery")
or "Ax kills 100-year old New Jersey man's sleeping wife, then knife kills him" (real headline "100-year-old New Jersey man used ax to kill sleeping wife, then killed himself with knife"), but we seem to have no problems at all divorcing the user from the tool in the case of a motor vehicle.. nearly always it's the vehicle called out in the headline and not the driver, unless the driver was drunk, then it usually does say drunk driver kills - maybe we have MADD to thank for that change of viewpoint.

That was an excellent article. I had no idea that it was such a purposeful process.

I think the reason most people have no problem continuing to use the word "accident" is that they identify themselves with drivers, and can easily visualize themselves having an accident. There are so many drivers, and they're so habituated to driving that traffic, congestion, air pollution and the rest is not a personal issue that they feel any responsibility for.

Not that groupthink is specific to drivers. Almost every day I see pedestrians waiting at a red light, one or two will see that the road is clear and cross anyway (this isn't illegal here), and a dozen people will blindly follow *without even looking.* Sometimes my bike and I are "the next car" arriving after a gap in traffic, and I'll see a sea of people crossing on a red, not looking at me.