Comparative phenomenology of road accident causation

This research project is to investigate the reasons behind road accidents and how this new reasoning may help people realize how dangerous our current societies, organized around the automobile, are. We aim to come to a different understanding of why accidents happen. This will help us better imagine what is the problem with our current life built around moving at high speed in, or being near to, or in the way of a heavy and dangerous object. We bring forward what is hidden, misunderstood, or suppressed in why road accidents happen. The project will look at accidents from a different perspective than usually done by police. Traditionally they find the reason in one of three elements: the driver, the car or the environment. Traditional research claims that most of the time it is the driver that is responsible. Such a conclusion is drawn as there are only these three entities investigated. There is more to the reasons of accidents; the main reason is the way our lives are structured by what we call automobility. Automobility involves most everything we do or experience in a city: the road, the car, the workplace, the school, but also why we think it is necessary to go to these places, to do things or how we imagine moving about, whether it makes us happy, sad, powerful or traumatized. Automobility is not just the things, but also how we think about these objects in our imagination. We will be talking to people who have participated in road accidents in some capacity to gather information on their experiences, how they felt, encountered, wondered about their road experience at the time, before and after the accident. This will offer us a different view of reasons why accidents have happened, and also how people experience their connections when on the road with people, objects, light, noise and so forth. Once these experiences are analyzed, we will ask our participants to exchange their ideas in a series of meetings and discuss what is at the center of such experience. We will also discuss with them how such accidents and their reasons can be made more visible for others to see. We experience that accidents are quickly clean up and explained away so mostly they remain invisible. This invisibility of accidents, we assume, is a main factor why people do not realize how dangerous and lethal our current way of life organized around automobility is. The project is led by Robert Braun, associate professor and senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna and Csaba Szalo, associate professor at Masaryk University.

This project began with a simple but urgent question: Why do we accept the enormous harm caused by cars as normal? Around the world, road traffic crashes kill more than a million people every year, injure tens of millions, and cause uncounted harm to animals and the environment. Yet, society tends to describe these events as "accidents" - unfortunate, unpredictable, and ultimately nobody's fault. Our research challenges this assumption. We show that the violence connected to everyday car use is not an exception, but a built-in feature of how modern life has been organized around automobility. Over three years, our research team explored how people experience road danger and collisions not just as isolated incidents, but as part of the ordinary, daily environment of moving through cities and rural areas. We combined interviews, fieldwork, memory workshops, and collaborative research experiments to understand how individuals live with, make sense of, and cope with the constant presence of risk on the road. Rather than looking only at statistics, we focused on the lived experiences of drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, survivors, and those who have lost loved ones. A major finding of the project is that the current way of explaining car crashes - usually by blaming "human error" - hides the deeper causes. Instead of seeing violence as something occasional and extraordinary, we found that it surrounds everyday mobility: we call this a "violence-field". People learn to navigate this persistent threat without fully noticing it, because society has made it seem normal. Roads, cars, regulations, expert knowledge, and cultural expectations work together to make this ongoing violence appear natural and unavoidable. This insight has important consequences. It means that improving safety is not only a matter of better technology or more careful drivers. It requires thinking differently about how our societies are built. When streets are designed primarily for cars, other forms of life - walking, cycling, animal movement, and social interaction - become more dangerous or even impossible. Our research suggests that real change must start by acknowledging that car-centered mobility comes with permanent harm, not incidental mishaps. By making this concealed violence visible, the project opens the way for alternative visions of mobility. These include city planning that prioritizes safety and community, transportation policies that reduce car dependency, and public discussions that treat road harm as a preventable social issue - not a tragic but unavoidable cost of modern life. In short, the project's most significant contribution is to show that the harms of automobility are not accidental. They are systemic - and therefore, they can be changed.