On March 24th around 8:00 pm, 38-year-old Kyle Stahl was riding his white moped eastbound on the 3100 block of Northeast Sandy Boulevard when the driver of a car made an illegal u-turn right in front of him. Stahl was taken to the hospital where he succumbed to his injuries one week later.
The title of the PPB statement regarding this collision is, “Scooter Rider Deceased After Crash in March in the Kerns Neighborhood.” The local media — like they always do — simply copied that statement verbatim. One even wrote that the moped rider “crashed into” the driver. Unfortunately, most people who scroll by these headlines will assume that this was an example of how dangerous “scooters” and their drivers are.
I put scooters in quotes because, as I shared above, Stahl was actually riding a moped. We have over 3,500 shared e-scooters deployed in Portland and the vast majority of people assume “scooter” is something more akin to a device with small wheels that you stand on. Given that, I don’t think the PPB statement does a fair job describing what happened.
What we have here is an innocent road user who was killed as the result of an illegal turn. Imagine how our traffic culture and understanding of the risks and consequences of our driving behaviors would change if we were more thoughtful about framing collisions.
Again, here’s my headline:
“Driver kills vulnerable road user while making illegal u-turn” (or I could have swapped “vulnerable road user” for “moped rider”).
My headline is 100% accurate, fair, descriptive and clear.
Now compare that with the PPB (and resulting local media) headline:
“Scooter Rider Deceased After Crash in March in the Kerns Neighborhood”
This is unclear and leads to questions like: What type of scooter? Or was it actually a moped? Was it a solo crash where the operator just lost control? Was a car driver even involved?
In today’s media environment, headlines are extremely important. They often end up being the only part of the story a person will register.
I’m glad to see that the driver was cited for violating the careless driving/vulnerable roadway user (VRU) law. That’s a good example of the PPB taking a VRU crash seriously. Now, if we could just get their communications folks to be more careful how they frame crashes, we’d make some progress.