I’m part of the younger generation - seat belts have been mandatory as long as I can remember (though they’ve only become a primary offense recently). I wear my seat belt whenever I drive, except between my mailbox and my apartment. My life has been saved by a seat belt at least once.
But I still don’t want the government telling me that I have to wear one for my own safety. I know that already, I already have plenty of motivation to wear it, and if someone else doesn’t care about their safety, that’s their problem.
I don’t want them telling me I have to wear it to lower insurance rates. The police are not there to enforce the insurance companies’ rules. If the public demands lower rates than they’d get without mandatory seat belt laws, let individuals install seat belt monitors in their own cars to lower their own rates, just like they can do with alarms and ABS.
I don’t want them telling me I have to wear it to prevent injuries that my tax dollars would otherwise pay for. I don’t mind paying taxes to provide a safety net and/or emergency services for my fellow man, even if the need for those services is caused by personal choices, like the choice to play football, eat steak, smoke cigarettes, or not wear a seat belt. The freedom to make those choices is an end in itself, and even though I think smoking and not wearing a seat belt are stupid choices, I’m not willing to make those choices on everyone else’s behalf.
in illinois until 1990 a woman arrested for misdemeanors (driving with a susp. license, driving the wrong way on a one way street, etc) would be routinely strip searched. it wasn’t until multiple lawsuits and the law ruled unconstitutional (men were not stripsearched under the same misdemeanors.) was this changed.
if a woman was pulled over in ill. for not wearing a seat belt before this law was changed, she could be and if she lived in chicago or calumet city would be taken to the station and stripsearched.
i’d say that would be an example of how a law for public safety can have a rather horrible end result.
omniscient’s location reminded me of the lawsuits of the 80’s and 90’s over the ill. law.
depending on how the seat belt law was written and the state or commonwealth a well intentioned law could have a result that was not intended.
as far as seat belt inforcement goes i believe it should be built into the vehicle, not into legislation. i had a friend who was killed in an accident. he went through the windshield. i alway wear a seat belt and be sure anyone in a vehicle i’m in does as well. it is easy enough to build vehicles where the belts are automatic.
The fact is that various technical fixes have been considered (including belt reminders, automatic belts and so on) without anything like the required success. Legislation, however, has been proved elsewhere to be simple and demonstrably successful as an educator to get from one generational view to the next.
If, as a nation, the USA is resolved against this cheap, effective and innocuous approach then fine: but (as anyone who has engineered safety systems for the USA knows) this civil liberty costs lives and dollars. It’s a big price for a liberty of dubious worth.
So tell me exactly why you feel it’s more appropriate to legislate against the drivers than it is to legislate against the car makers? If the car makers were tasked with technical design solutions to make usage compulsory, ones which would render a car not street-legal without, I think it would not only prevent abuse of authority which the seatbelt laws have the risk of doing, but it’d also be much more effective in the long run since it’s become very clear that people will disobey the law in significant numbers.
Obviously, I don’t think that seatbelt laws are cheap, or innocuous either…
So what I understand you to say is that your country targets minorities and young men for police harassment, and you feel that seatbelt laws give them an opening to harass minorities and young men even more. I don’t think the seatbelt laws are the problem, if this is the case. By the way, I would have to presume something before I have made a presumption. Asking a question is not a presumption.
I honestly don’t know how legislation would affect belt wearing rates in the USA - maybe you’re right that significant numbers would disobey. However, the experimental evidence from other countries suggests that this is not the case. My expectation would be that legislation would be more effective than technical fixes.
Remember that the USA already HAS legislation aimed at the manufacturers. It enshrines the freedom to travel unbelted by requiring manufacturers to design their cars to protect such people. This punishes the sensible voluntary wearers such as your good self by making your car less safe than it would be in Europe, for instance.
I am sure that a nation that can put people on the moon can devise even more complex techical fixes to ensure mandatory restraint, but you’d need a dogmatic aversion to usage laws to think that this would be more cost effective.
OK, I withdraw “innocuous” - I was just teasing - but legislation IS effective, it IS cheap, and it’s well-established. If you’re concerned about the secondary effect of inappropriate policing then maybe we should look at the USA’s policing strategy. Surely better than turning your back on an effective strategy that would save the lives of belted and unbelted alike?
[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
Coming next to a nanny state near you – State fines and punishment for:[ul][li]Smoking in your autombile (Oops, that one’s been proposed already)[/li][li]Eating Twinkies & Munching on Doritos (Or just enact taxes high-fat / carb-laden foods)[/li][li]Playing music at levels that could possibly damage your hearing[/li][li]Drinking spirits, wine or beer in excessive or dangerous levels[/li][li]Over-exercising at the gym (With weight limits and RPM caps on the treadmills)[/li][li]Extreme sports (Parachuting, mountain-climbing, skateboarding & bungee jumping)[/li][li]Driving a convertible sports car (Where flipping over equals death)[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Interesting, I always find the slippery slope argument disingenuous; I take each proposal on its own merits.
Critical1 nailed it on the head (and a few others have concurred). If there was an iron-clad waiver that so-called free spirited people would sign, absolving taxpayers of any cost due to their personal wrecklessness, then I’d be in favor of it, and then they could do whatever the hell floats their boat.
I absolutely agree that the problem is much larger than the seatbelt law. Largely for that reason I see this law as especially dangerous. If police were able to be trusted to always act without bias or malice I wouldn’t have as large an issue. As I see it the people need to be protected from the government, a premise with which this country was founded upon, and the seatbelt laws open a huge door for abuse.
While I readily admit there is nothing inherently sinister about making people wear seatbelts, the laws which have been created to do so are. Worse, they unnecessarily exascerbate an already serious issue in this country.
Well, the fact that seatbelt laws in the US are pretty close to unbiquitous, at least everywhere I’ve lived (I don’t know what every states laws are), and that as quoted earlier in this thread somewhere usage rates are only about 65% (IIRC) seems to illustrate that the laws aren’t all that effective. I do think that as generations become accustomed to them these rates will rise, though it’s difficult for me to credit the laws with this entirely. Education has to play at least as large a role, though the ability to measure this seperate from enforcement is likely impossible.
It seems pretty dubious to me to assume that relying on the manual compliance of 300 million+ people, numerous times a day, based solely on risk of fines and safety education could ever be close to as effective as a hardward solution which forces driver to buckle up in order to drive.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but I think it’s pretty off topic. If you’re implying that there are laws put on the manufacturer a forcing them to make cars that don’t have mandatory seatbelts, you’re flat out wrong. Airbags are mandatory as a supplement to seatbelts. Seatbelts must be installed, but obviously the car is still operable with it unconnected. The reason for this is sheer economics, they don’t have to be made that way and the manufacturer would lose sales if they did. I’m not sure how any of this makes my car less safe if I comply. Also, if you’re going to try and tout that cars sold in Europe are safer than here I’m going to need some cites, big time. Secondarily, you’re going to need to try and show that any discrepancy in safety between teh two has absolutely any correlation to seatbelt laws. Frankly, I’m doubtful.
Like I said earlier, the technology to do so is certainly available and probably pretty cheap to implement, if not negligable. Hell, almost all cars have nag lights and bells installed now, which could easily be built into an ingition cutoff. Usage laws require enforcement. Enforcement requires man hours. While cops aren’t likely tasked with just enforcing this (excepting seatbelt action days), the added task does act as an additional cost which is sizable when multipled across the huge police for in this country. This doesn’t even take into account the fines which are levied, which have a sizable effect on cost measurements compared to putting the onus on car makers.
So, the math looks like this:
Cost for car maker enforcement
*Enforcing NTHSA regulations on car designers, basically free since compliance would not be resisted.
*Stopping violators who take the effort to disable the safety measures.
*Cost in new equipment on each new car, probably very slight.
Cost for driver enforcement
*Enforcing Traffic Saftey Laws against 300 million motorists.
*Fining offenders taking money out of the economy.
*Educating drivers with PSAs
*Court costs
Do you really think that enforcing it on the back end is cheaper than enforcing it on the front? Is anyone actually going to argue that?
Plus, compliance would go way up, to close to 95%. Since making it a design feature would mean that only those technically savvy enough, and sufficiently motivated, would take the effort to diable the protections, as opposed to now in which anyone is capable fo choosing to break the law intentionally or just by forgetting.
As I see it, making the car makers take the responsibility and taking it off the drivers is by far the wiser course of action.
As I’ve argued above, I don’t see it as cheap or effective when compared to my alternative, doubly so if you put a value on the reduction in libery. And while I will agree wholeheartedly that there is an issue with policing in this country which needs to be addressed as a seperate issue, that doesn’t mean that it’s wise to pass laws which perpetuate the problem. Frankly it’s stupid and negligent to create a situation which makes it so easy to get away with.
Even if I agreed that seatbelt laws were wise and reasonable, the fact that the policing practices are so flawed would appear to be a greater risk than unbelted drivers. Supposing I was for seatbelt laws, I’d insist that the policing issue was fixed to my satisfaction before passing such a law.
Something I’d forgotten about until now…airbags in America are significantly larger than those in Europe, in an attempt to compensate for the higher proportion of non-seatbelt-wearers. One result of this is more injuries from airbags (injuries to belted drivers), particularly to short people who need to sit close to the wheel.
This is a real concern - my 5’8" roommate, no short person by any standards, had her nose broken by an airbag going off. Short people and kids are killed by airbags.
Do you have any proof of this? How much has the rate of unwarranted police pullovers increased since mandatory seatbelts? Are you honestly of the belief that removing the mandatory seatbelt law, but no other minor infringement law, would reduce this behaviour? What exactly sustains this belief?
Sorry for being unclear, but GorrillaMan separately stated the gist of it.
Law in the USA sets standard that cars must meet for both belted AND unbelted drivers (Federal Motor Vehicle Standard 208). In other words, there are tests of what happens to both types of occupant, and minimum standards that must be reached in both cases. As a result, the size and power of the airbag is determined by the unbelted case. For this reason a compromise must be reached between the demands of the two.
If you didn’t have to design for the unbelted option then the system could be engineered to perform better than it currently does for belted occupants. The difference between the two represents lives lost amongst belted drivers.
Vehicles that are developed for both the European and USA markets usually have two different specifications of safety systems. Only the USA variant is compromised in this way. The European one performs better for belted occupants. If this were not the case then the manufacturers would save a fortune by having a common system - the piece price is quite similar (they usually start out asking for this for each vehicle and then give up and accept that it must be different).
This in only one of the reasons that the European laws produce safer cars, and not the most important one, which is that the European test regime is more realistic since it involves the car striking a deformable target. It is likely that eventually the USA will adopt this as part of its requirement too, but there’s a lot of traditional “not invented here” attitude to be overcome on the way.
Are European cars safer generally? Well, the best evidence is what happens when US cars are tested in the public EuroNCAP test regime. But maybe you shouldn’t look!
Why is this important? Just because the civil liberty argument kills people at the margins who DO wear seatbelts, because their cars are LESS SAFE than they need to be, and they have to pay more for the priveledge!
First of all I wear them (1) when my kids are in the car (my kids are always belted in, I have to set an example (2) if I’m driving on slick roads, (3) when I’m in somebody else’s car.
I don’t wear them when driving alone because they drive me nuts. They are actually a distraction. Only one car I’ve owned ('93 Infiniti) had seat belts that didn’t dig into me in one way or another.
And I don’t have wrecks.
I oppose making them a primary traffic-stop offense because there are dozens of other things the cops could be doing that would be a better use of my money. Like, how about giving tickets to the folks who run red lights? Just for instance.
What if we took all the money & energy devoted to getting people to buckle up and put it into teaching them, if not forcing them, to drive safely in the first place? Almost all accidents could have been prevented and are the result of bad/sloppy driving habits. Some of the worst driving habits are seen in people who feel the safest in their automobiles. (Well, that’s a generalization.)
This was true in cars manufactured during the eighties and nineties. Not many were killed in this way, but nevertheless it happened. Mostly it happened to unbelted occupants.
This has been almost entirely stopped by changes to the regulations.
(1) A short-term fix allowing manufacturers to meet lower standards for unbelted occupants temporarily permitted the provision of lower-powered airbags.
(2) This has now given way to a longer term solution requiring so-called “smart” airbags which automatically adjust themselves to a lower power setting (or even switch off) if a high-risk case is detected such as a small person too close to the airbag.
We tried this, I guess you young’uns don’t remember. I had a car–maybe a '71 Vega?–that would not start unless the seat belt was fastened. And if it sensed weight on the passenger seat, unless the passenger seat was fastened as well. So I had to belt in my damn purse. Couldn’t travel with my dog at all (not that this dog wouldn’t have benefited from being belted in).
I kept the driver’s side permanently belted and sat on it. So many people used this as a workaround that it became a slogan: Don’t be caught dead sitting on your seat belt (right, like that’s where you’d be, if you were in that kind of an accident).
I don’t remember if this was mandated by law or if it was just some brilliant idea of American car manufacturers, but they gave up on it. Meanwhile I was stuck with the car for years until one fine day when a friend who was a mechanic showed me how to disconnect the thing, and my purse and grocery sacks were free to travel unbelted.
EVERYTHING NHTSA mandates for inclusion in the car costs you money! At purchase and during maintenance (and what the hell will happen to ten year old cars with the current level of complexity is largely unknown, but I am damn sure you’ll not be able to get a replacement airbag system of equivalent specification more than ten years after production. This cost is not slight by any means.
The cost for enforcement is the low one. The same sets of eyes watching for this offence as for the others, very few resulting fines because wearing rates approach 100%, consequently negligible court costs too.
We can only speculate here, but based on the experience of other countries there are relatively few people pulled over or fined for this infringement.
FINALLY, to do some citing just to show that the USA really is less effective than it could be, consider these figures from the OECD. The average US citizen has a 14.7 per million chance of dying in a road accident, compared with 6.1 per million in the UK. Greece, at 19.3 per million, is the only scarier country - and having driven there I can understand why.
Just need to point out that this statistic is crap. You’re stating the number of deaths per capita, which does nothing to adjust for the fact that our country is about 30 times larger than the UK and has a much higher proportion of citizens who drive.
The better stat is the one at the far right which measures based on Vehicle-Kilometers. Not knowing the methodology, my best guess is that this value does a somewhat reasonable adjustment for deaths per amount of driving, a much fairer measure.
You can see that the US falls right in line with all other countries, beating most, including many European nations including Germany and France. The UK still does an admirable job, but I’m not willing to attribute this to seatbelt laws.
Frankly, looking at those numbers I’d say your argument is invalid. Though I do not know how safety regulations differ between France, Germany, the UK and other EU nations. Its my understanding that at least between UK, France and Germany the regulation are very similar, and German cars ar obviously touted for their safety.
Whatever the case, using those stats, and the fact that the US and UK have much different driving requirements (read: vastly different weather conditions and frequent freeway travel) I don’t see the difference in death rates to be notable at all.
I find it highly dubious to think that seatbelt laws contribute to this in a large enough proportion to make it a good arguement for legislation.