[swsieber]

I think the blame game is part of it.

OTOH, I think we play the blame game is because people refuse to take responsibility.

And one other contributing bit is the entitlement(/victimized) game.

Honestly though, both the blame and the entitlement games are poisonous because they provde an easy vehicle for anger and offloading responsibility.

FWIW I support the shift in semantics (from accident to crash), because of two things : 1) driving brings a calculated risk, and 2) safety when driving suffers from the tradegy of the commons (I think that's the term) - it's easy to relatively ok (safe for yourself) to drive like a maniac when everyone else is driving ok.

I think using the term accidents hides those dynamics more.

Edit: I'd like to note that I think that this a useful mental model to have, not necessarily the correct model. And there's definitely more nuance than I expressed. Also, I'm not sold on the criminalization part - I do think that a terminology shift might help.