The reason that people do not wear seatbelts is the same reason that people don't wear helmets, drive drunk, play with loaded firearms, mess around with fireworks and bait dangerous animals. That is that people are stupid.

One reason that people often give that they don't wear seatbelts is that they're uncomfortable. Well, I've been wearing them for so long, it's uncomfortable if I don't wear a seatbelt.

Think of it as insurance, like having a fire extinguisher in case of a small fire in the kitchen, a pump-action for home defense, or a spare tire in your trunk.

When people tell me that it is uncomfortable, I usually ask them if they think it would be more comfortable to have their sternum impaled by the steering collumn.

I think that wearing a seatbelt is a habit you have to develop. Telling my age now but I remember when seatbelt laws were first enacted. I was stubborn and only consistent nagging from a wife who works in the insurance business convinced me. Now I don't even think about it. In fact I've even put it on to move a car in the driveway.:DL

I honestly cannot fathom why people are stupid enough to think it won't happen to them.

I recall a bus trip my family and I did to France from England a few years back. In France if the bus is fitted with seatbelts its mandatory to wear them so everyone dutifully buckled up.

Getting back on the bus on the ferry at Dover almost no-one except my family did so. Whilst driving up the M25 back towards our destination we drove into quite a nasty thunderstorm. My wife who was sitting a few rows in front of me called back and asked if the girls all had their seatbelts on. The pommy bloke sitting next to her said "Its all right love, were back in England, you don't need to wear them."

She replied, "Are you kidding? With this weather and slippery roads anything could happen, don;t you remember that bus accident a few months ago in Egypt?"

All you could hear for the next few seconds was click, click, click as everyone on the bus buckled up.

Just buckle up. It saves lives. Mind you I suppose its a form of natural selection if you choose not to.

A thought just hit me. If someone is stupid enough to
a.) Think it can't happen to them
b.) Not buckle up

And they eat big heaping helping of asphalt as their ejected from the vehicle, then I wonder who pays for the mess? Ambulance, corner, police, Fire department, they all show up as first responders. On top of all that, possibly even disposal of the body if there are no next of kin. Who pays for all that? The Taxpayer? If so, then im inclined to disagree with ya gents. If the public has to pay the tab for someones idiocy, then the law is fine i think.

Agreed. We have had laws in place here for some time making it mandatory to wear a seatbelt if travelling in a vehicle including buses where fitted and taxis.

It made a big difference to the number of deaths on the road and reduced the number of serious head traumas as well.

Have you also read the second part of my post? My point is my money. Simple as that.

Well, over in the US maybe but here I would be indirectly paying your medical costs with my insurance fees. So I think it is my business if I have to indirectly pay for people who will be sitting in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives.

Don't you think you're going a bit out of proportion?;)
To build cars like that would make them much more expensive and reduce the usable space in it by quite a margin, or you would have to build them bigger in order to get the same space as now + the roll cage.
Seatbelts are cheap and effective. They don't add much in the way of extra costs or discomfort (at least I never felt discomfort from a seatbelt, I actually don't even feel that thing is there at all while driving.)

And here our opinions differ again.:yep:

Again, I pay for the treatment (I'm not sure how your medical system works exactly but over here everybody has health insurances and the fees are, at least to some degree, coupled to the overall costs the insurance has to pay. The more people need treatment the higher the fees become).

When I was an EMT and we rolled on an MVA the first thing we would look at was the windshield. If there was a starburst, we knew it was a going to be a bad call.

If we saw a small starburst lower on the windshield, we knew pretty sure that we would be sponging up a kid. :nope:

As for seatbelt laws?

I am ok for getting rid of seatbelt laws as long as the liability falls on the adult who chooses not to wear a seatbelt. That includes all hospital bills and any civil actions for any "wrongful death" lawsuits. If you were in an accident where, if you wore a seatbelt, you would have less injuries, then you choose to accept all the consequences of your decision not to wear a seatbelt.

But as long as other people (who were not involved in your decision not to wear a seatbelt) or insurance companies (who were also not involved in the decision) are held liable, then I think it is reasonable to have laws to protect them.

What is not acceptable is for people to choose not to wear seatbelts and then want societal protection when they get hurt (or their families when they get killed). You can't have it both ways.

Many states have culpable negligence laws on the books. These need to be applied to any adult who chooses not to wear a seatbelt.

But until any of this happens, I see no problem with seatbelt laws.

That wouldn't work in the US. Most of the people likely to not wear seatbelts are probably lower-class, judgment proof types without enough assets to reimburse public or private parties for the costs they are responsible for. In practice they'd just claim to have worn seatbelts, receive treatment, & then stiff the government and hospitals once the truth came out; there are no debtors' prisons to enforce payments. And there are all sorts of ways these people could evade liens, wage garnishment, and so on if the courts tried to work out a payment plan.

My line of work (legal/medical affairs) has shown me how often taxpayers foot massive bills - $100K or more - because people make bad decisions and are too poor to pay for their own medical costs.

I firmly agree with seatbelt laws because, as someone mentioned earlier, NOT using them transfers costs from the irresponsible person to the general public. And I'm about as small-government as they come. :shifty:

Well, I made my point that seatbelt laws don't go far enough. If it was really about safety then you should also mandate the other things I mentioned. As for costs, it is also against the law to drive without insurance, which covers those costs, so your dollars aren't being spent.

As for safety, where is the law requiring people to have little plastic doodads on the shower floor so they don't slip and break their necks? The inspectors to come around and make sure we have them? I have to have car insurance. I don't have to have home-safety insurance.

I'll start by saying I completely agree with you, as I've already stated - let's just look at the other side of it. Not exactly true - everyone pays those costs in the form of higher insurance premiums.

The incidence and severity of injuries from motor vehicle accidents are much greater than those of slip and fall accidents in the shower.

It would be hard for one to claim to have worn a seat belt in a crash when they in fact did not seeing as the types of injuries suffered form not wearing a seat belt and the obvious damage to the windshield that a big stupid human head does there would a large amount of evidence proving that they where not wearing a seat belt and i am pretty sure that a seat belt failure would be very obvious and the person would suffer specific injuries as well the seat belt and buckle would have obvious signs of having failed.

Furthermore police crash investigators are highly trained and obviously they look for such things.

I also think that income and level of education has nothing to do with it.I know well educated seemingly intelligent people that refuse to wear seat belts I have seen people in some really worn out junk cars obviously poor low income people driving down the road wearing theirs.

I can understand the one poster said his father due to his experience of having been thrown out on an APC in Vietnam an M-113 I bet many troops sat on top rather than inside getting thrown out of one would indeed save your life that is about the only reasonable excuse/reason I have ever heard.

People not wearing seatbelts is just further proof that human beings for all our technology and accomplishments are unbelievably stupid.

It really boggles the mind how dumb people can be. The only reason to not wear a standard waist/one-shoulder seat belt would be comfort. However, anybody that's ever worn a watch can attest to the fact that for the first 15 minutes you feel it on your wrist. By the end of the day you'll forget its there unless you look at it.

I think this kind of self neglect is representative of how weak human beings are as creatures when not put into high stress survival situations. Most people exist in a happy little wonderland in their minds. That oft spoken thing of how people will suddenly change how they behave once they've had a near death experience I think attests to how a lack of danger or of the attendant awareness of danger leads to the kind of absurd complacency that one could summarize in a pop culture way as "If there was a Zombie Apocalypse tomorrow, they'd be F**'d!"

My dad has been in 9 car accidents, none of them his fault. All were ultimately proven to not be his fault. He was once struck from behind sitting at a red light and had he not been wearing his seat belt he'd have surely died. As it was he now has permanent back problems because of that accident, his ninth.

Now... ironically, in another accident he was sitting in the left turn lane in an old volkswagon beetle years and years ago. A semi was turning into the oncoming lane and cut it well short and as a result the entire driver's side of the Beetle was crushed. The ironic bit is that he only survived because he WASN'T wearing his seat belt, affording him the ability to very quickly leap into the passenger's seat. They tried to say he wasn't owed insurance on account of that fact, but then he had to point out rather obviously to them that had he in fact been wearing his seat belt they'd be peeling his flattened corpse off the pavement instead.

I think that last paragraph gives some food for thought on seat belt laws. Mostly, that no law is perfect, but statistically 8 out of 9 accidents they saved my dad's life. In one however it would have killed him. :rolleyes:

Same here, cept I disagree vigourously about being against seat belt and helmet laws. I'm for them, 100% People need to be protected...against their own stupidity.