Opinion: A collision involving a bicyclist and a vehicle. Who’s missing from that sentence?

Language describing collisions often omits the driver—and shows a massive cultural blind spot

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July 15, 2026 9:16 a.m.

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We regularly ride bicycles throughout Montgomery County. So when we read the recent coverage of the Damascus Road incident by Elia Griffin, one line stopped us cold: a man suffered life-threatening injuries in what the article called “a collision involving the bicycle he was riding and a vehicle.” The sentence is written as if the two simply bumped into each other.

To be clear, this isn’t about the individual behind the wheel, who hasn’t been charged with anything and whose name isn’t the point. It’s about how these sentences get built, a construction that erases the human actor from every crash story regardless of fault, as if cars act on their own.

This kind of language allows us to keep believing that crashes like this are simply what happens, an unfortunate but unavoidable cost of sharing the road. They aren’t. Nearly every time we ride in Montgomery County, there’s honking, cursing and harassment. That behavior reflects a driver entitlement shaped by decades of poor road design and media coverage that treats automobiles as entitled to get where they’re going as quickly as possible. That attitude makes no one safer: not pedestrians, not cyclists, not drivers.

We should all be concerned about the death and injury of pedestrians and bicyclists. Montgomery County has committed, through Vision Zero, to eliminating traffic deaths by 2030. That promise means nothing if we keep treating each crash as a discrete, regrettable accident instead of a predictable outcome of a road we chose not to fix.

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In 2025, fatalities involving pedestrians and cyclists in Maryland dropped 33%, from 173 the year before to 116. That is not a statistical fluke or a shift in luck. Officials attributed the decline to expanded automated speed enforcement, stronger penalties for impaired and aggressive driving, and a Complete Streets policy prioritizing safety for all road users. These modest changes, unevenly applied, have already reduced the number of vulnerable road users killed. That should embolden us, not reassure us. We know how to fix this problem. We just have to care enough to do so. These are real people dying from our inaction. We are all responsible when deaths and injuries like this happen. It is not a car magically colliding with a cyclist. It is years of policies and inaction that have created an unsafe environment for those sharing the road.

Damascus Road is a classic example. It is a winding country road with high speed limits, set for how fast cars can go rather than how safely people can share the space. For a cyclist, there is no margin for error. The risks are not because of the presence of bicyclists, but because of poor road design, high speeds, big cars and an entitlement culture that makes drivers believe they are the only ones who matter.

The state’s own numbers prove there is a better path forward. The only question is whether we’re willing to go further before the next Damascus Road, or write about it afterward in the passive voice.

—Anthony Clayman and Donald Tobin are regular cyclists in Montgomery County. Donald is the Gordon, Wolf & Carney Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and Anthony is a resident of Montgomery County and a high school teacher in Prince George’s County.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine