Safe Speed Forums

From that I would infer two things: that drivers of that time sped up and that they were less likely to become fatalities – belts must have been significantly good at protecting drivers, even those early designs!

Sure repealing the seatbelt law could well reverse the risk transfer back to drivers (probably a larger one given continued improvements of seatbelt design), but would pedestrians gain the same in benefit given the drop of limits, or total exclusion of vehicles, in vulnerable areas.
Would everyone not be better off remaining belted up whilst amplifying safe crossing campaigns (as well as making sure drivers remain predictable); afterall, we already know that most pedestrian accidents are the fault of the pedestrian.

I have not suggested any such thing. My premise throughout this debate is that a person should be free to decide what measures he takes for his own safety, so long as he does not directly endanger anybody else by doing so. That's a long way from saying I should be able to "do what the hell I like."



I agree. There are plenty of instances where minority agenda have been pushed into legislation to the detriment of the rights of others. Helmet and seat belt laws are two such examples, along with anti-discrimination laws, anti-"hate" laws, and the rest of them.



Yes, but it is a democracy which is supposed to recognize certain basic inalienable rights. Remember the old adage about a pure democracy being two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner?



I would dispute that, but even we take that as true, you are still completely missing one of the main points.



This is no different from the scenario earlier about whether as a driver I would want an unbuckled passenger behind me. If the driver (or front-seat passenger) is willing to accept the risk of me being unbuckled behind him, then it is acceptance of that risk by mutual consent. If he doesn't want me behind without a belt, then he can ask me to move over or get out.



In 24 years I've been stopped probably a dozen or so times for no belt, and been given a ticket about 6 or 7 of those times.

But the point I was trying to make wasn't so much that I as an individual have been fined for exercising my right to choose, more than everybody who make the same choice as mine is in that position. Millions of pounds, dollars, etc. have been taken from people over the years for simply making a personal choice about their own well-being.

Thank you Richard -- My feelings exactly.

The seat belt law and helmet laws are no such thing. They were not passed through parliament on the basis of a moral whim but on the real need to ameliorate the system wide effects of people killing themselves in motor vehicles and on motor cycles. These events do not occur in a vacuum and incur system wide costs, both monetary (an important consideration in a market driven economy) and in terms of human suffering.
Anti-discrimination laws are borderline, the others I may just agree with.

As for the rest, well we've covered all this before. Democracies sometimes have to legislate for the wider good of all of its people, a quite sensible and logical strategy which will occaisionally offend the principles of some of its people. Tough.
You have had your chance to make a change via your petition and democracy has worked against you. Tough again.

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Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

I too am tiring of this egregious logic. So far there have been zero indicators that seatbelts in any way do more harm than good; at best we've had various anecdotes suggesting their benefit may be negligible or non existant in certain types of crashes, but no citeable sources proclaiming them to be the greater evil.

As for the altruistic concerns that they may cause motorists to pose a greater risk to pedestrians, this needs more study at best. If the profile of crashes was unchanged before and after seatbelt introduction, then of course we would expect non-vehicle-occupants to form a greater proportion of the casualty stats, since the seatbelts are clearly saving the occupants!

I would caution once again against using 'before and after' sample sets immediately adjacent to the introduction of the law to assess it's effectiveness. The greatest benefit is likely to be realised when the vast majority of drivers on the roads have been subject to the law throughout their driving careers, and as such feel no differential through constant belt use.

All practicalities aside, for those arguing the purely libertarian standpoint, I would suggest that seatbelts, child seats and motorcycle helmets are not the fight to pick. If they save on injuries, suffering, lives and costs in even the tiniest majority of cases then they are worthwhile to society. There is no appreciable benefit to society through the individual's choice in this matter. As always, the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few.

Paul, (and Safespeed Paul too). Just for the record, are you actually saying that you don't believe seat belts provide a proven overall benefit to vehicle occupants?

I get the feeling (from numerous posts now) that Paul 1966 would like to believe that the case for seat belts being of overall benefit to vehicle occupants is NOT proven. This seems to have become mixed up with the slightly different argument that, beyond any reasonable doubt, seat belts provide a net benefit to vehicle occupants BUT that this has somehow had a NEGATIVE impact on those outside the car (pedestrians, cyclists etc) and that the two have largely cancelled each other out.

I'm not. I think the risk of death to vehicle occupants in a crash is reduced by about 10% on average by seat belts.

I don't know what the impact of seat belts is on the risk of crashing. I suspect they must increase it somewhat by three mechanisms:

- By discouraging movement that improves vision
- By risk compensation reducing margins for error
- By distraction from the belt itself (adjusting it, doing it up, fiddling with it when it's uncomfortable, etc)

I suspect that the risk compensation effect increases the risk to those outside the car.

Systemwide I reckon it all adds up to zero. But I can't prove it, or even provide decent evidence.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

So you are saying that even if the actual ratio of seat belts being beneficial vs. harmful was as close as 50.1% to 49.9%, you would still be happy for them to be mandatory?



You keep on about the benefit to society and seem to want to ignore the individual's rights. Are you descended from Marx? (And I don't mean Groucho.....) Or do you really just think that we are all sheep to be herded by the government as it sees fit?

When I asked about whether you would support immunizations being made compulsory you were against it. Surely by your own argument for belts, vaccinations should be mandatory if they show the slightest benefit to society as a whole?



Correct. I accept that in some types of crash a belt will be beneficial, even life-saving. But I believe that there are many other types of accident in which the belt will be harmful, even prove fatal. I do not believe that the precise nature of accidents can be quantified and analyzed in sufficient detail to even begin to form a case that a belt will be of overall benefit to a vehicle occupant in any given situation.



Is that just a "gut feeling" on the 10%? Even if that figure could somehow be proven to be true, is that a sufficient reduction in the chances of death to warrant compulsion? (Assuming for one moment that the state has any right to impose such compulsion for "your own good" in the first place.)



Agreed. As I mentioned somewhere about 20+ pages ago, look at the number of people you see fiddling with a belt while pulling away from the curb into traffic -- A time when one really should be paying more attention to the road than to the belt and buckle. I suspect this is a direct result of the law -- People who haven't realized they didn't buckle up immediately and are trying to get the belt on as quickly as possible just in case they're spotted by a cop. Even if they were somebody who would use the belt voluntarily, without the law they would probably wait until a more convenient moment to buckle up.



I believe it does too, not necessarily for all drivers, but certainly for some.

No thats not what I'm saying. Are you being deliberately obtuse?



Come now, you're doing it again! For a society to function the needs of the many must outweigh the needs of the few, its not Marxism, or any other form of government you find disagreeable! One of a government's jobs is to safeguard the populace, against unnecessary death, injury or suffering, and against having to fund avoidable medical care.

Did I say anything about immunisations?



You have yet to provide a single case, that can be corroborated, where a seatbelt has done an occupant more harm than had they been unbelted.

You really are just trolling aren't you? This has been addressed several times before and yet you keep repeating it like a stuck record.

_________________
Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

I was for it in some situations.
There is a difference between simply putting on a seatbelt and travelling to a clinic for feared and painful injections.
To respond with silly analogy of my own: if a super infectious version of AIDS was doing the rounds and an inhibitor was found to prevent further spread, would you not mandate use of it?





That’s a bit antagonistic.

I can’t say I buy that, not at all. A driver is still able to move around in their seat freely. The resistance offered by belts is no worse than when on a gentle incline or accelerating.


Probably, but is it a short-term effect while drivers get use to having it; does it still apply now that we have a generation used to using them?


It’s adjusted rarely. It’s done up once at the start of the journey, as is the fiddling when you don’t put it on right. After that there’s no problem – unless someone can actually describe/explain how otherwise?


I knew I had made an assumption about your previous graph but didn’t have time to chase it; now I’ve examined it, it transpires that I had indeed completely misinterpreted it.

I don’t believe the data shows a risk transfer; it’s just that the graph presenting everything as percentages made it appear that way (to me anyway). A fall of one group will inherently mean a percentage rise of another, even if that other group is unaffected and didn’t change.

Numerically, it shows that car occupants enjoyed a trend of a 450 count fall (a 16% drop for that group from before mandation) while pedestrians and cyclists suffered a 70 count increase (a 3.4% rise for that group - could almost be considered as noise).

Interestingly, motorcycles showed a more significant trend of a drop during that period (170, not bad for their smaller group), more than the rise of pedestrians and cyclists.

All these strongly suggest to me that there was no risk transfer at all.


Everywhere I look, all I see is a net benefit of seatbelts.

The benefit is amplified by the likelihood that more people nowadays are driving instead of cycling/walking so you would have to suspect this difference (car occupant fall compared to pedestrian/cyclist rise) is even greater today (as reflected by the latter ratio of fatalities).

Did you allow for trend? When I looked some time ago, I was confident that the risk transfer was real. As I recall it emerged when I accounted for trend.

(i.e. that 3.4% rise was against a -5% baseline)

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

So what are you trying to say then? You stated that if belts save on injuries, cost etc. even in the tiniest majority of cases that they are worthwhile to society, and that you support the belt laws because you believe they benefit society overall. What other conclusion am I supposed to arrive at?



It is not one of the government's jobs to force a person into doing something for his own good, so long as he is not directly harming anybody else.



It may not have been you specifically, in which case I'm sorry if I'm attributing comments to the wrong person. But the subject was discussed some pages back.



I have quoted several cases which show just that.



It has been addressed only in the sense that you have repeated the same line over and over that if the law benefits society overall then it's acceptable. I don't doubt we could think of many things which might provide an overall benefit to society but which would be a completely unacceptable violation of individual rights.



So you do not believe that a person has the right to decide upon his own medical treatment.



No.



Not as freely as without a belt. Obviously there are also variations in the degree of movement due to different types of belt coupled with seating designs, but any way you look at it, a belt does restrict movement to a greater or lesser degree. (Which is exactly why you've been telling us that they are a good thing, after all.)



Here you may have a point. Is somebody who has grown up always using a seat belt likely to be affected by the risk-compensation factor in the same way as somebody who starts using a belt and somehow then feels safer? Probably not.

One of the studies quoted by Prof. Adams included drivers who habitually used belts being asked drive unbuckled, but that was over 20 years ago, and many of the habitual belt-users then had most likely not been so all their lives. It would be interesting to take a group of people today who have always used belts their entire lives and have them drive unbuckled to see the results.



You've never seen somebody try to adjust the position of the shoulder strap or lap belt during a journey?



That's true, but it's also notable on that graph that the dip for motor vehicle occupants corresponded with an increase in the pedestrian/cyclist percentage, but there was no similar increase in the motorcycle percentage. If the shift in percentages was due to the belt law, then wouldn't you expect the motorcycle line to rise at that point as well?

And where is the shift in percentages you would expect to see when the use of rear belts became mandatory? (1989 for children, 1991 for everybody). Admittedly if such a shift were to caused by belts, then I would expect it to be less significant, since many fewer cars at that time even had belts in the rear, and as noted elsewhere, people were less inclined to obey the rear-belt law when it was introduced as the front one.



Everywhere I look, I see no firm evidence whatsoever that compulsion to use seatbelts has had any net benefit at all. There are far too many other variables to take into account.

We have also been over why I keep repeating the same thing, but here we go again.
You are trying to convince me you are right, and the arguments you have so far used have failed completely. As your arguments are essentially the same each time, then each iteration of the same bollocks will elicit the same riposte this stands to reason; change the record and say something sensible and you may get a different response. Because, as it is, the reality of the situation in the real world rather than your imaginary one is always the same regardless of how many times you repeat it.
Furthermore, democracy does not mean what you obviously appear to think that it means, and just because that is so does not mean we have slid all the way across to communism, marxism or whatever. In repeatedly making such a claim you are little more than a rapist of the readers intellect, defiling the names of freedom and democracy to suit your own grubby, selfish agenda.

_________________
Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical, liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

Did you miss the 'corroboration' aspect. We have nothing but your word that the seatbelt has ever caused injuries any worse than those likely to have been sustained without it.

This is where it all falls down.

Being dead honest: probably not entirely.

It appears to me that the absolute additive 'all motorised except motorbike' trend for 3 years immediately after the law were fine and dandy, but showed a reversal of trend after that (what happened in 1989/1990? - [could the later fall be related to the 1991 seatbelt amendment?]), then seemingly caught up with the overall trend (until it was lost in 2000).

Risk transfer would have affected the 3 'pedestrian+pedal cycle+motorcycle' sub-groups in the same way; however, the absolute additive trend of these showed no significant blip or rate of change of gradient during that time.

I say 'absolute additive' because it makes sense to simply add each subset together to form the new set. It would be misleading to add weighting to a sub-group.

Wow

I mean – wow!

Just to make sure I understand you correctly, can you confirm:
If there was a highly infectious, devastating virus that could be stopped by everyone taking an immunisation, where just 1 person not taking the immunisation will end up infecting and killing many, you still not mandate it?


How about: not as freely as having the air blower pushing you back in your seat?
The issue is whether the force is significant. I put it to you that it is not restrictive enough to cause impairment of vision. If it is then please state how (there is no reason why you can’t explain such an easily definable characteristic – should it exist).


For once we agree on something. However, as I pointed out earlier, the test can easily be invalidated if not done exactly right.
Drivers used to not belting up in a cars/go karts will be consciously acutely aware they're not wearing a belt in the short-term, but after a while that conscious awareness will abate. Also, it is will known that people's behaviour change when they know they're being monitored, usually for the better - the Hawthorne effect.


Nope, not after setting off. Granted I haven’t been looking. I don’t think something like that could be any worse than say, changing gear or indicating.


Yup!
Lightning does strike twice in one place
The motorcycle trend actually shows a slightly steeper fall at that point.


Where have you been looking? Did you look here?

This is the longest thread of the website and there's no sign of anyone giving up

Blimey! I have to say that I think those reasons for belts increasing the risk of crashing are scraping the bottom of the barrel somewhat! We ARE talking about 3-point inertia reel belts of the type fitted to just about all mass-produced cars built in the last 30 years or so aren't we?! If so, I have to say that the "discouraging movement" argument must be at a similar level to Smeggy's example of the air from the heater outlets "restricting movement" In a reversing manoeuvre, I could MAYBE see that SOME people might find them less than ideal but at these low speeds they're unlikely to make any difference and even our oppressive totalitarian police state allows you to take them off anyway!

As for the distraction, well, I guess that's just about possible for some odd shapes of people and or odd installations in cars but almost all the cars I've driven in the last 10 years or so have had practically "invisible" belts as far as discomfort is concerned. Some REAR belts are less comfortable (upper anchorage too low) but we're really only talking about driver's belts here.

The "Risk compensation" argument is one that I (intuitively) feel isn't that credible but I honestly don't know. For a start, I'd have thought it would only "work" with those wearers who BELIEVED they were safer with a belt.

The driving population must be made up of:

People like me, who (in case anyone hadn't spotted it already !) FIRMLY believe in the positive safety benefits of a belt and ALWAYS wear one. I've seen far too many crashed vehicles and crash tests and Mrs. Mole has seen far too many "customers" who didn't bother wearing belts to feel that they are anything other than "essential". We ought to be PRIME candidates for taking extra risks when driving about belted up! I got into a 1936 car the other day and felt positively "naked" without a belt!

Then there are people who don't really believe that belts make them any safer but just wear them because "its the law". They might not take any extra risks because they don't believe they're actually any safer.

Similarly there are also people who never really stopped to think one way or the other as to whether belts make them safer and just wear them out of habit / compliance (the majority?). I can't imagine them subconsciously taking any extra risks because the idea isn't in their "subconscious" to start with!

And then there are the people like Paul 1966 who have made up their minds that belts are the work of the Devil and will never wear one no matter what evidence they get presented with - now surely THEY would be prime candidates for NOT taking ANY extra risks? But on the other hand, they are the people who seem to believe that belts CAUSE terrible injuries so if anything, maybe they'd take greater risks when driving WITHOUT a belt because that's when they feel safer?!

OK, I'm taking the Mickey here a bit but only to make the point that I haven't the faintest idea how one would apply the "risk compensation" theory to the driving population as a whole and how on earth one would ever "filter" the results into something meaningful given the vast array of mental attitudes (conscious and subconscious) to belt wearing!