Mandatory Seat Belt Laws Cause Dangerous Driving, and Invade Privacy

Synopsis: House Bill 99-1212, which makes driving or riding in a car without a seat belt into a "primary" traffic offense, is yet another attempt to control peoples own decisions about risk taking. Research shows that when reckless drivers are forced to buckle up, they drive even more recklessly. Thus, careful drivers (who wear seat belts by choice) are endangered. Moreover, mandatory seat belt laws also increase the risk that minorities or other groups will be victimized by pretextual traffic stops.

What the Bill Does: This bill makes failing to wear a seat belt a more serious offense. At present, drivers are not cited for failure to wear a seat belt unless they are stopped for some other reason. This bill would make failing to wear seat belts a primary offense, meaning that police officers could stop vehicles and write citations whenever they see the seat belt law being violated. The bill makes the driver responsible for a Class B traffic infraction unless he, and all front seat passengers, are wearing seat belts.

Discussion: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that wearing a seat belt in an automobile accident reduces the risk of serious injury or death by roughly 50 percent. NHSTA argues that if the U.S. could achieve the 85% seat belt use rates enjoyed in "other countries," 5,421 fewer people would have died in motor vehicle accidents in 1996. These estimates are based on police-reported restraint use information for each individual occupant fatality, and include potential lives saved in all seating positions. Proponents of increasing the penalty for not using seat belts claim that increasing penalties increases usage, and that increased usage lowers traffic injuries and deaths.

Some states already have primary offense laws. A survey of seat belt use among the fatally injured suggests that seat belt use in that group was 15 percent higher in states with primary offense enforcement laws. In 1996, states that treated seat belt use as a primary offense reported that seat belts were used 74 percent of the time. States that treated seat belt use as a secondary offense reported usage rates of 61 percent.

Unfortunately, data like these fail to show that making seat belt usage a primary offense decreases traffic injuries and fatalities. In fact, no jurisdiction that has passed a seat belt law has shown evidence of a reduction in road accident deaths. To explore this odd but highly robust finding, experimenters asked volunteers to drive five horsepower go-karts with and without seat belts. They found that those wearing seat belts drove their karts faster. While this does not prove that car drivers do the same, it points in that direction.

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Contrary to popular belief, mandating the use of seat belts does not decrease the risk of injury. It actually has the opposite effect, since people tend to drive in a less safe manner believing that the seat belts provide additional security. Accident rates were the lowest relative to the volume of overall drivers before seat belts were even introduced, let alone mandated by the State.

http://liberty.i2i.org/1999/02/10/mandatory-seat-belt-laws-cause-dangerous-driving-and-invade-privacy/