1 Mississppi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississipi…. Yes, just 3 seconds is all it takes to buckle your seat belt. Yet, a recent study published in Consumer Reports found that 11.5% of Americans risk their lives daily because they don’t buckle up.
Why not take 3 seconds to save your own life?
The title of the Consumer Reports article lead readers to believe that people are so hurried that they may unintentionally forget to use the seatbelt or feel to rushed to take the extra time to buckle it. Published reports and surveys found on the internet offered all kinds of reasons.
- People stated that they are worried the seatbelt will wrinkle their clothing.
- Others believed that because the car was equipped with airbags, that was enough to protect them in a crash. (Please be aware that airbags are designed to work in tandem with an airbag, and not wearing a seatbelt when an airbag deploys is actually more dangerous.)
- It’s uncomfortable. (This complaint was made primarily by people with a high BMI.
- Some reported that they’d heard that seatbelts were the reason people became trapped in overturned or burning vehicles. (Accidents like these only make up 1% of all crashes and the chance of a seat belt malfunction in the event of one of these crashes is even less than 1%.)
- Other people admitted that they don’t wear seatbelts simply out of defiance, stating that they don’t think there should be a law telling them what to do. (See below how these decisions hurt everyone else.)
- My personal favorite was that people generally believe that they are “good drivers” and that they won’t get into an accident.
All of these people are drivers. What about passengers?
Data for unrestrained backseat passengers show that people who don’t buckle up in the backseat are not only risking their own lives but the lives of everyone else in the vehicle. Anything or anyone who is not belted down in a vehicle has the potential to become propelled into the driver in front of them or into other passengers. Objects or people will be propelled at the rate of speed that the car was traveling when the accident occurs, so even a 30 mph is deadly.
I wear my seatbelt. Why should I care if other people don’t?
In 2010 a NHSTA study concluded that the cost of motor vehicle crashes to society was over $242 billion dollars. Accidents involving unrestrained paseengers cost over $10 billion. This figure represents healthcare costs, lost productivity and damage to the vehicles. When this figure goes up, our insurance premiums do too. We also pay in increased taxes, travel delays and excess fuel consumption.
Can’t car manufacturers make safer cars even for people who don’t wear seat belts?
Auto manufacturers are required to design vehicle cabins to accomodate drivers and passengers who refuse to wear their safety belts. According to design experts this actually makes the cabin less safe than what it could be for belted passengers. To accomodate an unbelted passengers, cars sold in the United States are required to have larger airbags and more of them. This increases the cost of the vehicle for everyone and decreases the comfort of the cabin by making it smaller. The vehicle would also be lighter resulting in reduced emissions and lower fuel consumption.
How do we convince people to buckle up?
Research suggests that the best way to convince someone to buckle up, is to make it a law. States where not wearing a seat belt is a primary offense, the rate of usage is 91.2%. States that only have it listed as a secondary offense, the usage rate is a pathetic 78.6% . Virginia is a secondary offense state, although in Virginia, a driver can be ticketed for failure to wear a seatbelt, as well as be ticketed for all of the other unrestrained passengers in the vehicle.
