Active Transportation Policies: Do Media Narratives Matter?

The intersection of media, public opinion, politics, and their relationship with public policy is well documented. Taking the issue of active transportation, we examine if media narratives on bicycle and pedestrian crashes appear important in shaping policy. We define positive and negative narratives portraying bicyclists and pedestrians as victims and villains respectively. Our research objective is to understand if media narratives have an effect on the policy tools used by decision-makers to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety. We examine if there is a relationship between the victim versus villain narrative and policy change at the state level. Using a mixed-methods research design, we analyze publication reports on crashes collected from 12 states for the period 2003–2015. We find that the victim narrative remains more prevalent in crash reporting, and the probability of policy change has a positive relationship with crash reporting rate. Greater salience of the issue in media reporting may influence increased policy change.