This was one of those heavy weeks on the North Shore, with heartbreakingly sad news emerging out of Horseshoe Bay following a collision involving a bus driver and pedestrians.
Confirmation from police revealed the devastating extent of the tragedy: a boy, four years old, was dead, and his mother and another woman, reportedly a family friend, were injured and taken to hospital. The mother was in critical condition, but obviously she’ll carry injuries both internal and external the rest of her life.
There are no words to convey the sadness or alleviate the pain, and yet we still all offer our most sincere condolences and send thoughts of healing and support to the victims and their friends and families. Our hearts also go out to those who witnessed the tragedy, and those who stepped up to help in the aftermath along with the first responders, whose job it is to race towards such scenes when all others can’t help but look away.
Our thoughts also go to the driver of the bus. It will likely be a long time before we have a definitive answer about what went wrong that led to this tragedy, but regardless of the reason, that driver will no doubt carry the weight of this incident for a very long time.
As a community newspaper, it’s one of those headlines that you hope you’ll never have to write. The headline is also the reason for this column.
In the moments after the incident, working under time constraints with the need to get information out quickly and accurately, we posted a story under the headline One Child Dead, Two Women Injured After Being Struck By Bus Driver At Horseshoe Bay.
The word in question is “driver.” We got several letters and inquiries as to why our headline included the word driver.
Other headlines did not. Horseshoe Bay Bus Crash Leaves 1 Dead, Others Injured was one such example.
Was ours a mistake? Were we being insensitive, unclear or making an unfounded judgment by including “driver,” people asked.
It was none of those things. It was a conscious decision, and the result of previous discussions and debates within our newsroom and company. I know that similar debates have been had in many newsrooms across the world as a subtle shift is occurring in how we think about collisions, particularly those involving motor vehicles and cyclists or pedestrians.
Traditional headlines often took the driver out of the equation: Cyclist Hit By Truck, for example.
Vehicle drivers are one of the only groups afforded that anonymity. Guns don’t shoot people, gunmen do. Bats don’t hit home runs, baseball players do. Bikes don’t crash, cyclists do.
But often trucks and SUVs and cars seem to act of their own accord. Including the word “driver” is not to assign blame – police say we won’t know the full details of what went wrong in this horrible tragedy for months – but to acknowledge the simple truth that a vehicle can’t collide with someone on its own, unless it is a self-driving vehicle, in which case you’ve got a different story to tell. This was not that.
The wording is not perfect. There can be the implication that a headline is assigning blame. There can also be some confusion – when you say struck by a driver, could it mean the driver got out of the vehicle to hit someone?
We’ve asked all these questions of ourselves a number of times, and it hasn’t been a unanimous decision. It’s still up for debate, in fact, but this is where we are now.
We know we’ll hear about it no matter what we write. The response, in fact, would be more intense if we wrote a headline the opposite way. Headlines like Cyclist Injured After Getting Hit By SUV draw immediate opposition.
Tragedies tend to bring big emotions out of people, which is completely understandable.
The undeniable truth is that in these collisions, particularly those involving a motor vehicle and a pedestrian or cyclist, the consequences, no matter who is to blame for the collision, are invariably worse for the person outside of the vehicle. Drivers need to know that, have it in mind every time they start their wheels rolling. It’s not a fair fight, and the driver is very much part of the equation.
This linguistic wrangling, of course, is utterly inconsequential in relation to the real human tragedy a family is facing following last week’s devastating collision. A family has lost a child, and two more face painful recoveries.
For those wishing they could do something to help, a GoFundMe campaign has been set up for the victims. And this week the father of the boy posted a heartfelt message saying that his son loved transit and would want everyone to show kindness to bus drivers in wake of the tragedy.
We’d also suggest, for those searching for something in tragedy, to take this as a reminder of the responsibility that comes with driving a vehicle. Be careful behind the wheel, always.
No matter how it is worded, we never want to have to write another headline like that again.
Andy Prest is the editor of the North Shore News.
