Safe Speed Forums

I am mainly on the personal choice side when it comes to using seatbelts etc.

It may be that if you have the right to choose not to wear a seatbelt then you have the responsibility to inform your insurance company and pay the increased premiums. I know the ramifications would be complex, there would still need to be a mechanism that ensures that safety is not compromised on grounds of cost or ability to pay but I hope you see the basic point.

Seatbelts may in some circumstances lead to increased risk of injury but the way I see it is that such issues are much more amenable to analysis and improvement than those involved in being bounced around the inside of a vehicle.

I wear a seatbelt and the car I use for track days has harnesses and a roll bar.

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Driving fast is for a particular time and place, I can do it I just only do it occasionally because I am a gentleman.
- James May

I was thinking along those lines but from my experience - one accident and attending many RTCs I am sure the net benefit is greater than 10% by a large margin.

I wear a seatbelt out habit now ,I don't conciously feel any more secure wearing on it's just habit .

I could argue that I drive better when driving old cars without a seat belt but I'm sure that wouldn't transfer to the general population.

We could reduce the need for belts by having the passanger seats face backwards (as in RAF aircraft )

Possibly more sickbags though

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Driving fast is for a particular time and place, I can do it I just only do it occasionally because I am a gentleman.
- James May

During the seat belt debates the Dept. of Transport commissioned a report by J. E. Isles, which made studies of eight countries which had already enacted compulsory seat belt laws. The conclusion was that in none of those countries had the law led to a detectable change in the fatality rate. You can read the full report on Prof. John Adams' site here:

http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uplo ... report.pdf

That wasn't the result the government wanted, and the report was suppressed, not seeing the light of day until after the law had been passed.

You can see Prof. Adams' comments on the subject here:

http://john-adams.co.uk/2007/01/04/seat ... es-report/



Well, Col. Stapp is certainly braver than I am and I salute him as well, but I can see a certain irony here. Didn't he deliberately put himself at risk? Shouldn't a Nanny State government punish him for doing so?

This is ultimately what the seat-belt issue is all about -- A person's right to assess the possible benefits and hazards, and to decide for himself whether the benefits outweigh the risks or not, or whether he is willing to accept those hazards anyway.



That could became a royal pain to anyone driving the car regularly. On most vehicles there is a connector where the buckle switch is wired to the loom. Re-connecting if you want to sell on is usually as easy as disconnecting in the first place.



It's been a year or more since I last looked at the document in question, so I may be a little off on the details of that specific case. It might have been that the driver managed to get right down on the floor in front of the seat rather than just across the top of the seat. I'll have to try and dig out the report to check.



Obviously the percentages must always total 100, so if one goes down one or more of the others will increase to compensate, but that still leaves plenty of room for conjecture on that graph.

If the only effect of the seat belt law was to reduce fatalities among car occupants, you'd expect both the pedestrian and motorcycle percentages to increase, but the latter did not.

Furthermore, if the downward trend in the car line was due to belts, then why is there not a similar shift in the percentages in 1989 and 1991, when use of rear belts became compulsory for under-14s and then for everybody, respectively?



Ah yes, I recall that one. Note the coroner's rather contradictory comments:



So the belt should be used, even though we can speculate as to whether she'd have been better off or not? Hmmm.......

You could still be involved in a crash that was not your fault and virtually impossible for you to avoid, no matter how careful you are.

Without knowing the numbers we cannot be sure. If the number of people killed on motorcycles is many times that for peds/cyclists the percentage change may not be visible on the scale of that graph, even though it is there.

Do you have the numbers for 1983 Paul?

I don't see why it should be such a royal pain in the arse to clip the belt into its buckle and then sit on top of it? Taxi drivers do it all the time. They clip the belt in when they take delivery of the car and they leave it there until they sell it!

Taking a belt buckle apart is actually not that easy and you'd also need to be careful that the same switch used to trigger the annoying buzzer wasn't used to arm the belt pre-tensioner! diconnecting the multi-plug under the seat could also disconnect the belt pre-tensioner trigger - in which case you'd most likely get the airbag warning light on all the time to annoy you instead!

With regard to the coroner's comments, I think he was playing safe.

"One can only speculate whether Francesca-Lee would have suffered fewer injuries if she had been wearing her belt - but it's unlikely she would have been ejected from the car."

You seem to have interpreted this as him saying that he doesn't know whether she'd have been better off or not. I don't read it the same way. I think he's saying that she died as a result of injuries sustained after being ejected from the car - she may have received the same number of injuries if she had been wearing her belt but he doesn't say that they may or may not have been worse. In all likelihood, I believe they would not have been - and I think he did too. In that context, his conclusion makes prefect sense.

From this very site:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/stats/graphs.html

1.8 Pedestrian fatalities - Looks like being around 1900 per year.
2.1 Cyclists - Increased from 300 to 350 during the period in question.
2.3 Motorcyclists - Around 950 to 1000 I'd say.

So pedestrian/cyclist fatalities combined are at least double the number of motorbike deaths.

Wrong. You seem to have no consideration for those unfortunates who have to shovel your spilled brains up off of the tarmac.

You want to ride without a helmet or drive with no belts, fine, just dont expect someone else to clean you off the road because of your own selfish stupidity.

Morons abound in britain today.

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"Safety" Scamera Partnerships;
Profitting from death and misery since 1993.

Believe nothing- Question everything.

You can, but if I was going to be driving the car for years I'd much rather just disable the thing.



You don't have to take the buckle apart, just disconnect the switch under the seat.

That's a valid point about a multiway connector possibly carrying airbag sensors as well though. You might have to just locate the buckle-switch wires instead. I drive older vehicles, so I tend not to think about airbnag issues too much.



"One can only speculate whether Francesca-Lee would have suffered fewer injuries if she had been wearing her belt" -- I don't see how that isn't also an implicit statement to that effect.

But I think you're right about the coroner "playing safe." I think it'he was covering his own rear end because he's probably under pressure to never let slip anything which might show belts to be either hazardous, or at best simply ineffectual.

Just out of interest Paul, is your perception of increased risk in an accident the reason you balk at the seatbelt laws?

Right, so never mind helmets, we should ban motorcycles from the roads completely in that case.

The statistics show that motorcycle riders are many times more vulnerable in an accident than the occupant of a car (the latter with or without a seat belt). Why then, should a "selfish" motorbike rider be allowed to place himself in such a vulnerable position? Doesn't he have any consideration for those who have to come and "scrape him up" either?

In part. There are some accidents in which a belt might be beneficial, others in which it might be harmful, and on that point alone it is the individual's right to assess those risks and make a decision for himself. (Just as it is his right assess the possible risks and benefits of surgery and decide.)

But even if that were not the case, as a matter of principle I do not believe the government has any right to force a person to do something "for his own good."

If you accept mandatory helmets and seat belts, there's almost no limit to which the same concept could not be extended. How about making vaccinations compulsory as well, on the basis that they are "usually" beneficial? Would people be as ready to accept such an overbearing law as they appear to be over belts?

Selfish riders shouldn't be allowed on the roads at all, and nor should selfish drivers!

Investigation of those figures will yield the answer that those who ride sensibly, defensively and with experience are no more likely to require 'scraping' than car drivers of equal aptitude/attitude. Those who ride/drive beyond their capabilities, or suffer at the hands of someone else doing so, will always have accidents, the key is to mitigate those risks as far as possible.

Let me ask this then: If you were involved in an accident, and lets say it was more your fault, with a driver who was not wearing a seatbelt, and they died, yet would have made a full recovery if they had been wearing one, how do you think you'd feel then?

So sensible motorcyclists who drive defensively can never become involved in a collision?



Probably the same as if I smashed into somebody else on the road and he died because he was using a belt.

You seem to be saying it's my responsibility to ease somebody else's conscience. If you caused the accident, you caused the accident, period. A seat belt has never, repeat never, prevented an accident from happening, and can quite conceivably be the cause of an accident.

Justification?

Some relevant issues have already been mentioned:



The middle point could more accurately be attributed to the seat-belt law than to the belt itself.

Somebody who makes the point of buckling up anyway might drive away without doing it once in a while. Without the law, he would probably wait until a more convenient point to pull the belt across. But because so many people have had the fear of citation and fines put into them over seat belts, that person is now more likely to try to get that belt across him as quickly as possible, "in case a policeman sees me."

I've certainly seen a lot of people fumbling with the belt as they're pulling out of a parking space into traffic, etc.

That is a ridiculous argument. If you are in a position to discuss your surgery (i.e. consious and sane) then you will be able to talk to the doctors about what type of surgery you will have and the likely outcome. It is extremely rare for you to know what type of crash you will have until it is just about to happen, unless you are a stunt driver or make a habit of deliberately crashing cars.

We can all think of hypothetical situations where not wearing a belt might be safer (e.g. maybe you get thrown out just before the car goes to the bottom of a lake) but I doubt if the chances of these actually occurring in real driving are even as high a one in a million - you probably have more chance of winning the lottery jackpot.

I'm not so sure it is.

Any manner of things could go wrong in an operation, however unlikely.

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus