I'm sort of conflicted because the only really serious accident I've ever been in (toyota truck rolled end over end 5 times, maybe moving 36-40 mph in those inclines in the middle of the highway in Nevada), the driver would have been killed if he was wearing his belt and I think I would probably have been at least injured.

As it was nothing happened to us, other than we had to spend the day in Battle Mountain, and I got a painful scrape that took nearly a month to scab properly on my back.

of course we were lucky, but in the same way George Bush likes to think he pulled himself up by his bootstraps I like to think it was not just luck but brains and skill that saved my ass that day!

I can't seem to convince a couple of my friends that they need to buckle up in the backseat as well as in the front seat.

Drives me bonkers.

What makes you say the driver probably would have been killed?

Sure, there are accidents where being held in place by a seatbelt puts you in place for an impalement while being thrown out of the vehicle turns out better all around, but still, that isn't the majority of the cases. They're more in the "my uncle smoked three packs a day for sixty years, and he died at age ninety when he was shot by a jealous husband" sort of story. Yeah, the guy's uncle didn't die of lung cancer. But that doesn't mean that smoking is good for you.

"He started it with a push; he thought he could stop it with a shove. They had to amputate both legs, but they saved his life." I explain electrical safety practices by saying, "999 times out of 1000, it's a nuisance, and the 1000th time it saves your life." There's this whole domain of low-level risks where people's reasoning...just goes weird. Sure, it probably won't happen. And they're scary, people don't even want to think about them, and when people think about them you get all these weird ideas like "thrown clear" (and then you hit the pavement at 50 mph, yeah, right.) It's an educational problem, really. The levels of energy and strong materials we use day-to-day in the developed world are potentially very dangerous; we have good standard safety practices so that we're pretty safe. But explaining them to people who don't understand the forces and possible injuries is bloody difficult.

Builders of future space colonies take note.

I used to work in the billing department of a hospital, so I'm quite familiar with how many patients a hospital emergency room gets via car accidents small and large.

It's not just the big-time accidents with rollovers and flames that can send you to the ER -- even a fender-bender can give you serious enough injuries to require real and expensive medical attention -- not to mention serious pain.

My grandpa had his life saved twice by seatbelts. Once he was caught in a massive multi-car pileup on the Bay Bridge. A seal between sections had opened up, so when it rained a heavy curtain of water fell to the lower deck. It completely cut off visibility. Somebody slammed on the brakes and started a chain reaction. Without his seatbelt my grandpa would have gone through the window onto a bridge deck in the middle of a pileup. The other time he lost control on a curve and went off the road and rolled. When the car stopped, it was on its roof, and they were hanging upside down in their seats.

There never was any question in our family as to whether we would wear seat belts. I don't feel comfortable in a car until I'm buckled up.

I think the "thrown clear" bit is because a lot of people are obsessed with the idea that they might be trapped in a burning car.

Where would you rather be: In a burning (or flooding car) and unconscious, or in a burning (or flooding) car, conscious but seatbelted? Or thrown clear -- clear through a wire fence.

I haven't been to a rollover with unrestrained passengers and driver since ... Thursday. My state doesn't have a seatbelt law yet. I see a lot of this stuff.

My cousin was in the back seat of a car that was driven too fast and went off the road into a creek. So they're down in the creek and the water is pouring in the windows and they have to get out. Did he regret wearing his seatbelt? Hell no. He was banged up, but if he had not been wearing a belt, he could have gotten hurt much worse, and maybe stuck there. If he'd been "thrown clear" of the car, let's just say it was a fair ways down to the creekbed and there were rocks. As it was, the worst injury he suffered was when the girl next to him stood on his kidney while she was climbing out.

I'd like to point out that the same reasoning behind wearing a seat belt applies to wearing helmets for biking (motor or otherwise) and horseback riding. Not only do unprotected heads smack into things, but your brain smacks into your skull, or what's left of it.

One rider posted an account of deliberately destroying a riding helmet (so that someone wouldn't dig it out of the trash and think they could use it with that little dent in one side) that saved her head after a fall. Neither bullets, an axe, nor a sledgehammer produced more significant damage to the helmet than the fall had.

My personal anecdote relates to my elder brother, in his boy racer days (20 years ago). A Golf GTi, a fast downhill stretch of A-road, and a patch of black ice ...

I think he was doing something between 70 and 90 miles per hour when he hit it. The car came to rest a third of a mile down the road, facing the wrong way, with only three wheels able to touch the ground at the same time. (It rolled several times.)

He walked away from it, albeit rather shaken, and switched to driving Volvos ... cautiously. I'm kind of glad I grew up in a family where wearing a seatbelt was drilled into me about the same time I was learning to use a knife and fork.

What have we all learned from this, children?

Don't leave bowling balls on the rear deck of your car.

(And, y'know, the seatbelt thing.)

Back in the early sixties my father had seat belts installed in our car. Everyone we knew thought this was exotic. Later, when he was on the ambulance squad, he would occasionally go on about how prescient he had been. And because I was trained to this so early, my household rule is that the-car-doesn't-move-until-everyone-is-belted-in-I-don't-care-that-your-mother-doesn't-make-you-wear-the-seatbelt-when-she-drives.

I once went on a road trip with a woman who refused to wear seat belts because she didn't like anyone telling her what to do. I wonder if she's still alive.

Aconite @10: Seconded. I've crash-replaced three bike helmets in the last ten years. None of those were in particularly exceptional circumstances (racing, off-road, etc) -- just something unexpected happened and my head hit the ground.

Or, in one case, the hood of a car. And then hit the ground 15 feet away after being thrown by the force of the impact with the vehicle.

Around here, helmets are becoming more and more the norm rather than the exception, it seems -- though it still irritates me no end when I see parents riding with their kids, and the kids are wearing their (required-by-law) helmets and the parents are strangely bareheaded. Perhaps they simply have thicker heads.

Some public-safety messages.

Especially this one (not safe for Teresa): No Seatbelt, No Excuse

My brother died in a car accident on May 18, 1976. I started wearing my seatbelt on May 19, 1976, feel naked in a car until I've buckled up, and will not shift out of "Park" unless every person in the car is belted.

One of the more grotesque accidents I know of occurred here in Oregon a few years back. A man was driving under the influence while his five-year old daughter was playing with toys in the cargo space of his station wagon. He collided with something, and she went flying out the open back window; she was killed instantly. He went to jail.

Umm.... as one of those idiots who routinely doesn't put on her seatbelt (mainly because the damned thing tends to creep up to right under my neck), even though I actually got a ticket for it a few years ago, I have to say that your graphic description will probably change that.

So I thank you and my family thanks you.

While learning to ride a motorcycle in my laters years (as compared to my early years that I still have an elbow scar from) I took the Rider Safety Course (which, BTW, I highly recommend, they're in all states, it's cheap, and they have a long wait list so sign up now). In the classroom side the instructor was talking about helmets (which a student needed the second day, went down on pavement doing 10mph or less, she had just started up when she went down, fortunately had a full face helmet which saved her pretty face, the helmet was scratched all up, I always wear my helmet, jacket, and gloves, even for short rides). The instructor was talking about all those idiots you see who have the helmet in a bungie net on the rear seat of their bike. He asked if we all knew we were going to be in an accident if we would wear the helmet. Most people raised their hands. He said, "Wrong. It's a trick question. If you know you're going to be in an accident you don't get on the bike, period. The trick is, you never know when you're going to be in an accident."

I had been rather casual about wearing my seat belt until 1984. Then some friends (baron, baroness, senseschal and I can't remember the fourth) were killed in a violet accident returning to Des Moines late at night from an SCA Event. Wiped out Coeur d'Ennui's entire board save maybe one.

The drunk that hit them was going in excess of 120 mph. so I doubt that even if they'd had seatbelts on they would have survived.

I recall they were all unrestrained, the impact was so hard that it tore the drunk guy's car in half. Oddly enough he survived, but in a nursing home until passing just a few years ago.

I don't EVER get in my car without a seatbelt and badger passengers until they put theirs on.

Toni, whatever my own issues with regard to seatbelts, my kids were always restrained, and it makes me really upset to see children loose in a car. Just the other day I saw a car with a toddler standing up in the back seat.

The only time my kids were not in child restraints or seatbelts was the time my six-year old unbelted himself as I was pulling into the driveway, stood on the door of the convertible, and jumped onto the lawn, where he ran around flexing his muscles and going "Rah! Rah!". I damn near drove through the garage door. Fortunately, he was unhurt -- although he was sent to his room for a looooong time so I would not kill him. That and it was a while before he got to ride in the convertible again.

When I calmed down enough to explain that he could have gotten badly hurt, or fallen under the car and gotten killed, his answer "But I wasn't!" I said "But you were lucky." He said "Yeah, I'm lucky! I can do stuff like this!"

I know adults who have very similar reasoning processes.

I'm not playing devil's advocate. I use my seatbelt every time I'm in the car, and have been seriously glad more than once.

I managed to be in an accident where I was thrown free of my seatbelt (but not out of the car).

I was rear-ended by a loaded 18-wheeler, hard enough to break the back of the driver's seat; pushed up the highway; then popped out from under the truck bumper and rolled and spun. I left a headstar in the upper *passenger* side of the windshield -- with the back of my head. When EMS cut open the door to get me out, I was on the roof of the car, with one leg still hanging through the belt.

And through all that, I came out with just three broken ribs, whiplash, a hell of a concussion, and assorted scrapes and bruises. The broken ribs took about a month to heal and a year to stop hurting all the time, the effects of the concussion lasted about six months, and I have sensory nerve damage in my upper back, which is aggravating but not life-impairing. I suspect that had I not been wearing the belt to begin with, things would have been a whole lot worse.

(If you're interested, here are pictures of the remains of the car.)

"What makes you say the driver probably would have been killed?

Sure, there are accidents where being held in place by a seatbelt puts you in place for an impalement while being thrown out of the vehicle turns out better all around, but still, that isn't the majority of the cases."

yep, impalement was the case. when the truck stopped rolling I looked over, he was pushed to the left and the steering wheel column was pushed up where he would have been if he'd been sensibly belted in place. And this was only one of the slightly amusing factors in this incident!

If I wasn't wearing a seatbelt that day in 1987, at the very least I'd have a very different face.

No, wearing a seatbelt isn't a guarentee. But.

A friend of mine worked as an EMT for 10+ years, and said in all that time, he never once had to cut a dead body out of seatbelt.

Hell's Highway -- The True Story of Highway Safety Films.

As the child of a forensics engineer, where I got to hear all the stories (ATCHOAFE WIGTHATS), I could certainly do a 1-person Highways Of Death show. It's the sort of stuff we grew up with, conversations at the dinner table: "...And there weren't any body parts larger than this here wine cork."*

Don't ever drive with your head out the window. Please.

But my anecdote: I'm leaving a hardware store, walking across giant the parking lot. I hear an engine being gunned and look around. Someone has floored her accelerator in the lot, and she's headed straight towards a concrete-based lamppost.

She hits it.

As several of us run towards her, she gets out, still arguing on her cell phone. She'd wanted to make a point about exactly how angry she was. She'd been wearing a seatbelt and the airbag went off, and other than the uncurable stupidity, she was fine.

The front of her car had a concrete-base sized indent, and the windshield was spiderwebbed by unsecured items that flew from the back. That's how fast she'd been going.

---
* Oh yes, I can prove that this phrase was uttered at a Christmas dinner. We had guests.

Cars should not do pirouettes. A teenaged boy should not take off his seatbelt in the back of a moving car when he decides to stretch out for a nap. A teenaged boy who has the permanent reminder of the exact shape of a Civic's rear window cut into his face (as he was thrown "clear") has a lot of family very happy that it was two inches thataway, and only a flap of skin, rather than two inches that other way, and his brains spewed onto the highway.

(If he'd been wearing his seatbelt, he would have been unharmed, as were the other two people in the car. As it was, he was thrown into a grassy median, and bruised up a bit, and the leaving-the-car injury was the worst that happened to him. But the whole brains spewed onto the highway possibility is the sort of thing that one dwells on, shuddering, for quite some time afterwards.)

And thus are several more people reminded daily, just looking at his face, that seatbelts are our friends.

Brian: is it legal in your country to sell vehicles that don't have collapsible steering columns?

Impalement by steering column should be a non-issue in this day and age.

Pat Greene at #17: I have the same problem with the belt riding up to my neck. It's very uncomfortable, and seems to result from, uh, the difference between a woman's bust and that of a crash test dummy.

You can buy things called 'seatbelt comforts' that wrap around the bit of the belt that touches your chest, so that you're being chafed and/or half strangled by a bit of padding, not the edge of a nylon strap. Sometimes this even helps it stay where it's meant to be. It won't stop the seatbelt from doing its job. It worked for me.

We were driving back to campus after a late-night study break when the other guy ran a red light (2:15AM is a bad time where the bars close at 2AM). Our friend in the back seat was thrown clear--through the back window and onto the curb. He was lucky he didn't hit a tree or get run over by the car.

Best we can tell, he knocked the nice, seat-belted girl in the backseat into the side of the car with his butt on the way out. Causing her some amount of damage. I was in the front, belted in, and I went to the hospital to help and observe my friends.

So that bowling ball? Ig can and should be strapped down if it's your friend's butt.

My hubby was in an accident in our lemon of a Grand Prix years ago. He was wearing his seatbelt, but the thingy that locks the shoulder strap in an impact didn't work, so he was propelled upward a bit and bumped his head on the roof. The belt kept him from moving a lot, though, and the roof wasn't the main thing stopping his upward motion; the belt was.

From that bump on the noggin, which wasn't serious enough to give him a concussion, he ended up with a couple of compressed disks in his neck and has to do a little PT from time to time. If he hadn't been wearing the belt...shudder. And this was from a perfectly standard commuter rear-ender pileup, nobody drunk and all in a nice straight line.

As for being thrown clear...this same hubby was riding a bicycle two summers ago, took a turn a little too sharply, and was thrown off. He caught himself on his hands and ended up with a 7-part radial head fracture in his right elbow. At car speed he would have broken a lot more than that.

So, thanks for this post...I'm a complete bear about seat belts (front and back seat) and don't care how much it annoys people. If they don't like it they can get the hell out of my car.

well the country it happened in was the U.S since Nevada was mentioned, and the time frame was not specified. The day and age was 1989 and the truck was, i think but not sure, a late 70s early 80s truck.

I wonder whether the woman who refused to wear seat belts because she didn't like anyone telling her what to do (#13) would refuse to obey any traffic rule for the same reason... Madeleine's right, she's probably past tense.

Here in Europe we've had laws compelling us to wear belts in the front seats for twenty to thirty years, and in the rear seats for about ten. And if I don't "belt up", my Toyota makes an angry noise until I do.

And we've had enough crashes of coaches (long-distance buses, or tour buses) that they have to have seat belts fitted too.

#33 - I hate it when the bus seatbelts don't work. Last time I got a belt that would only have helped if I was as wide as both the seats.

About a year and a half after we graduated from high school, my best friend Kerri and several other kids were driving home after midnight from a Counting Crowes concert. The sixteen-year-old driver saw a dog in the road, slammed on the brakes and sent the van into the ditch.

Everyone was wearing her seatbelt--except Kerri, who in her inimitable hippie-rebel style, was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the van massaging someone else's feet. Everyone else was shaken but unharmed (including, as far as we know, the dog). Kerri went through the windshield, broke her neck and was killed instantly.

She was a singer, an actress, a very-much-loved fixture of our local community theater who had just been accepted to the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts. There were over five hundred people at her memorial service. And in the thirteen years since then, I've never again made such a good friend.

Wear your damned seatbelt.

Vassilissa #29:

Both of our cars (Toyotas of fairly recent vintage) came with adjustable shoulder belts that you can raise or lower to a more comfortable angle that doesn't collide with your earrings or jawline. The only problem is that my husband is over a foot taller than I am, and he keeps readjusting the thing every time he drives "my" car. (Of course, he also moves around the seat and the driver's side mirror and the rear mirror ...)

As a general comment, when I was growing up, there weren't seatbelts. When they first started showing up in used cars we bought, we tended to ignore them. The first time I actually used a seatbelt was in driver's ed. To this day, I don't know if my father ever used one. But I got it drilled into me by my (not then) husband, who refused to take it out of park until I was belted in. So it's been ingrained in me now for about 30 years.

I'm buying a ski helmet this weekend as I've decided I'm serious about skiing.

Keep in mind that you need to buy a specific helmet for each specific sport. A horseback riding helmet has different padding needs from a bike riding helmet. Same's true for a ski helmet.

The only time I plan to ride without a helmet is when I'm showing Western and need to wear the big hat. Otherwise--it's all helmet time, especially when I'm jumping.

And for Pat Greene at 17 and Vassilissa at 29--some cars have seat belt adjustments that allow you to move the points around so you don't experience the seat belt creep up onto your neck. My Subaru has that feature--I didn't realize it until my son pointed it out, and adjusted it for me. Well worth the price for a small, busty female!

The unwillingness of people to wear seat belts, and even defend the practice of doing so never ceases to amaze me. I've always worn mine, ever since they showed us those classic "Red Asphalt" films in driver's ed. They show slo-mo film of what happens to unbelted drivers going out open windows in a rollover accident. How can you not always wear you seatbelt after that?

I won't put my car in gear until my belt is on. It's such a reflex, I don't even notice I'm doing it.

And yet, I can't help but think of my former co-worker, who was driving on the highway in her Jeep and hit a patch of black ice and went into the median, straight at a stand of trees. In reflex she dove to the right, and her seat belt disintegrated at the meeting point of the latch. This allowed her to lean all the way over into the (unoccupied) passenger seat. This way, once the Jeep finished slamming into the tree she was able to open the passenger door, slide out, and then look back at where the steering wheel would have cut her in two. Her only injury was a bruised wrist.

(The seat belt thing is still a reflex, though, and always will be. But nothing is 100% guaranteed.)

Jim, I have the same problem as Pat - shoulderbelt rides up to nestle in my neck. That never stops me from wearing it, but I do tend to move it down to the very top of my upper arm every twenty minutes, until it creeps up again. I know a woman who has a cheap plastic clip that does something similar - changes the location of the top of the shoulder strap so it's closer to the shoulder.

My hunch is that, in an accident, the few inches of positioning won't make much difference, but I've always wondered whether that's correct. Do you know anything about shoulder straps and the very short? (I'm under 5 feet.)

Thanks for this post. I've always been a seatbelt user, but will pay closer attention to my passengers now.

There's one further reason I always wear my seatbelt: I know that if I'm an unsecured victim in an MVA, injured but not killed, I will never, ever hear the end of it from Jim.

I'm always astonished that there are people who *don't* wear seat belts as a matter of course. (They've been mandatory here in Finland since the seventies, and have cut down the deaths by a *lot*.)

Seat belts are effective at reducing the injurious effects of car crashes. No doubt about it.

Trouble is that there's this thing called risk compensation lurking in the corner...

If you believe John Adams (author of Risk) the main effect of seat belts has been to drive vulnerable road users (pedestrians and cyclists) off the roads, in response to the increased risks that drivers (as a group) take when they wear seat belts. Perhaps not the result that the original proponents of seat belts intended.

Reference question: Jim, have you posted one of these about bicycle helmets? My partner is engaged in a running battle with a vociferous bunch of idiots on one of the Usenet bike groups, and could use some professional backup.

I'm extremely insistent and can be rather impolite about having everyone in the car strapped in before the car goes anywhere, including across the parking lot. Stangely, the only time I was injured in a collision, I was thrown out, and it was a very good thing. However, I'm still an almost unbearable nudge about belting in.

About 30 years ago I was driving home early in the morning, nicely belted in, after flying a press all night to help out some friends with their small circulation tabloid. Two blocks from home I fell asleep and kept going straight when the street curved off to the left, and hit a light pole good and square.

At that time I was driving a 1970 Volkswagon minivan, which did not have a collapsable steering column. My advice to others driving that vehicle had always been to drive as if you were strapped to the front like an Aztec sacrifice, for the thin front of the VW was only good for keeping the wind and bugs off. The windshield was better protection that the rest of the front of that car.

The front of the van wrapped itself almost completely around that pole, and the bolts holding the pole to the base were sheared clean off. Somehow (it was never quite clear) the belt popped, the driver side door opened and I flew through it, landing on somebody's front lawn. On the way out, the side of the door struck me right on the bridge of my nose, with the jagged edge of the broken eyeglass frame just missing my right eye and neatly slicing across my face. (It's a nifty scar, but it is almost completely hidden by my glasses and my left eyebrow. So much for Talk Like a Pirate Day.) All I remembered was a great slam, and then looking up from the lawn with a tremendous headache.

When an onlooker and I checked the car, we discovered that the (non collapsable) steering wheel was buried nicely at chest height in the driver's seat.

That did not change my mind about fanatical use of seat belts though. Attending quite a few accidents as a reporter later just reinforced my prejudices.

Buckle the *** **** ******* belt or get out of my car. Now.

Early in his cop career my brother John crashed his cruiser into a carload of teenagers who had jumped the red light (turning left out of a right-turn-only exit -- geniuses!) and only some very good reflexes let him steer into the rear panel of the car instead of t-boning it.

John was wearing his brand-new bulletproof vest... and he hit his seat belt so hard, he had a vivid diagonal bruise across his chest.

Pulling some likely sounding numbers out of my head, consider that there's a one-in-a-hundred chance you'll end up in an accident where a seat belt will save you some pain and medical bills, versus a one-in-a-million chance that you'll be in the rare kind of accident where being thrown clear would save your life.

I know which odds I'd rather play.

I had seat belt wearing grilled into me when I was a kid. By this point I notice buckling in even less than I notice locking the front door on my way out. There's no arguing that seat belts are the smart odds, but I'm interested to see a debate I've had with my Dad for years played out here. Sure, seatbelts are the smart thing to do, everybody ought to wear them, but should seatbelt laws be on the books?

I'm old enough to remember when cars didn't have seatbelts and the heated controversy about using them. But when I bought my first used car in 1968 I was happy it had lapbelts. I buckled up from then on.

But I still see young people--who grew up with seatbelts and who probably had parents who insisted they use them--driving around without seatbelts buckled. Last week a young couple (ages 25 and 28, driving from Pennsylvania to North Carolina) died instantly when they were ejected from their car after a crash into a guardrail on I-270. The car was a convertible and it ended up flipped over so they may well have died anyway. But still...

Why were these two twentysomethings not buckled up? It's senseless.

I've been in a couple of heavy prangs in my life, and I honestly think that the only reason I walked away completely unscathed was because of seatbelts.

Back in college, a few of my more invincible friends would stubbornly refuse to wear a belt. To counter this I developed a simple technique called the 'Bastard Stop' which would quickly affirm the importance of seatbelts to my passengers... Just after you pull away (doing no more than a walking pace) slam on the anchors. Once they've clambered out of the footwell, they'll generally comply.

The technique got it's name for obvious reasons and makes an excellent demonstration of newtonian physics.

The people I boggle at are the drivers who act like my wearing a seatbelt, as a passenger in their car, means I don't think they're a good driver. Some of them apparently take me wearing a seatbelt as an insult. Seriously, what the hell?

(When I was a year old, my aunt took a header out of her windshield after falling asleep at the wheel. Her body survived. Her brain did not. If she'd been wearing a seatbelt, she'd have walked away from the accident.)

Lee: Nggggg. *Please* don't drag the cycle helmet flame wars here.

No, I haven't posted about bicycle helmets. I might. I do have some funny stories.

Every year the ambulance squad has a bike rodeo and we give away bike helmets.

Nice post. Can we get to the sucking chest wounds, please?

I learned to drive in the early '60s, when seatbelts were becoming standard issue. At the age of 17, even before I actually had a license (was running on a learner's permit), I went round a curve, overcorrected* trying to avoid an oncoming car, ran up the side of a hill, and came back down, rolling over and over. The car ended up sitting on its roof, and my passenger and I were almost completely unhurt, hanging upside down in the seatbelts. The worst injury was my pride, which was especially damaged because the driver of the oncoming car was a high-school classmate, who was very vocally annoyed at me for scaring the living sh*t out of her.

Ever since that day, I will not put my car in gear without have my seatbelt and every other person's seatbelt buckled. I even remember one girl I dated who was impressed by that, as a sign that I cared about her safety.

As anaea points out, there are civil liberties issues that get brought up every time some high-profile accident brings up seatbelt or motorcycle helmet laws. My solution is simple: change the law, so that it is legal to not wear a helmet or buckle your belt, if you are a legal adult. And if you're in an accident, not having a helmet or a seatbelt is the legal equivalent of a Do Not Resuscitate order: the EMT's get to ignore you, or triage you last, and your car insurance doesn't have to pay for your medical bills. That gives civil libertarians the choice they want, while making the cost explicit, and let's Darwin deal with the consequences.

* This was in a Corvair, which was notoriously unstable in the back end when turning. To this day I don't know if I screwed up the turn, or if the back tires broke loose, resulting in a skid. The deputy sheriff who looked over the accident site was of the opinion that it wasn't my fault, for what that's worth.

Can Jim or anyone else speak to the dangers of reclining the front passenger seat so you can sleep on a road trip? When the the belt is attached to the frame it puts several inches of space between the upper part of the shoulder belt and your chest. I've always wondered if this was unsafe.

Anaea, 47: Yes, seatbelt laws belong on the books. *I* don't want to pay the bills for an uninsured macho asshole who thinks he's too cool to wear one...nor for the 3yo whose idiot parents think it's OK to skip the booster seat.

I always wear my seatbelt, and I insist that others in my car do. The statistics are even clearer than on smoking; it's the smart thing to do.

I think the "thrown clear" thing dates to the pre-seatbelt era, when if you dissipated all the energy against the dashboard you were a goner; the only survivors of major crashes were the ones that got thrown out of the cars. People remembered this when seatbelts were being introduced (and crumple zones and collapsible steering columns and padded dashboards), and naturally felt it was crazy to belt yourself into the car.

And while road rash is never good, seems like dissipating the force over 100 feet of sliding rather than much smaller amounts of crumple zone has a lot to recommend it (and I'd start wearing leathers in the car or something). But maybe I'm wrong, AND it doesn't matter -- there's no way to ensure you exit the car safely and get to decelarate along the road. So wear your seatbelt!

Oh, and Randolph -- "He started it with a push; he thought he could stop it with a shove" has always bothered me. It should be *true* -- the amount of energy he used to start it should equal the amount of energy needed to stop it.

The line I use to passengers is "You should buckle up, because I'm driving." It always seems to work.

I think I found the answer to my own question: it's very dangerous. Only do it if the belt is integrated into the seat:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/10/earlyshow/main1195540.shtml
http://www.langdonemison.com/CM/Articles/Articles2.asp

My father installed seatbelts in two of our three vehicles in about 1961 (the other wasn't suitable for installation, having front bucket seats). we got trained early to buckle in.

I was in an accident nearly twenty years ago, in a '71 Corona. While I was making a more-or-less oblique left at a signal and more than halfway through the turn, some kid in a classic Mustang came barreling up the street at probably closer to 45 than the posted 35 (I was doing 20 to 25 going out of the turn) and nailed the right front corner (which in that model contained only the battery). The car and I got turned about 45 degrees left and shoved into the curb. I got a broken rib or two (cracked, mostly) and a nasty bruise, probably both from the gear shift knob as (I think) I went sideways onto the passenger seat. Without belt - I don't know, I think I would have gone through glass.

Oh yes: NJ needs to raise their seatbelt law fine to where it hurts. (Speaking as a California resident, where fines are generally on the order of 'and I mean it', even for little stuff like parking on the street on cleaning day).

"He started it with a push; he thought he could stop it with a shove"

-what's that from? Seems familiar but I cannot place it.

Phil Armstrong @ 43--I wonder if the same thing could be said for the scores of SUV drivers who seem to think they are driving armored tanks in which nothing can happen to them, and therefore drive with less care, if not more outright stupidity, than those of us in random sedans?

K @ 40, I always try to remind myself that if I hit anything with sufficient force that the belt running pretty much straight over my neck will be a problem, without the belt there'd be an even larger problem.

I banged my nose hard enough for a nosebleed with those "hold your butt to the seat" belts in a normal breaking maneuver -- not even an accident. Twice. Jackknifed and smashed nose-first in the backrest of the passenger seat. Got to respect the forces of speed and mass...

We here in Germany have to fasten seatbelts on every seat. Espacially if combined with an Airbag it can be dangerous not to wear the belt.....I have seen people who were smashed between the Airbag and the roof of the car...not really a nice picture.
You should also consider that modern security systems as emergency belt fastener do not work if you aren't actually using the belt and many mordern (European) cars offer also "active" seats which alters its position to protect the passenger in a case of emergency.
These security measures will only have an effect while using a belt ;)

drive safe....fasten you seatbelt ;)

your

DooMMasteR

I'm not religious about much of anything except for using seat belts for the last 42 years.

My brother had a "thrown clear" accident when he was sixteen. He wound up being lucky - he was only in a coma for about a day. But he had a lot of his scalp ripped off...

This January, my daughter was crashed into on her way to work. Here's what the car looked like after the crash:

http://www.dpsinfo.com/images/family/mann/car07/070103car2.jpg

Luckily, she was wearing a seatbelt and we had airbags, so she just got a broken wrist and various bumps and bruises.

When I heard the description of Corzine's injuries, I told Jim I thought he was an unrestrained passenger.

Madeleine@63: Very likely. Volvo drivers used to be the poster child for this (anecdotally) in my youth.

My ex-girlfriend died in a car accident AND she WAS wearing a seatbelt. Her new husband wasn't. Side impact, he flew into her, crushing her/killing her. He survived.

Wear them.

I also lost a cousin in a car accident where he was the only one not wearing. I think of him everytime I buckle up
-art

In the accident that led me to find out I had mini-epilepsy, my car ran off a curving road into some low-lying area. I guess I came to when people arrived to get me -- all I remember is the starred windshield and a woozy trip to the hospital with a slight concussion. But if I hadn't been wearing a seatbelt, I wouldn't be here to tell you about it.

PS: I hope NO ONE will be inspired to try any of the stunts in the second Grindhouse flick!

Just had to add to the chorus.

My parents trained us so well in seatbelt use that it's just part of the motion of getting into a car, for me. Open door, sit down, close door, buckle seatbelt, turn key, put car in gear, press accelerator and drive away.

My boyfriend often buckles his seatbelt as he's beginning to drive away, and it makes me extremely nervous that he waits that long. It feels the same as if he waited that long to close the door.

I have a friend who was driving from Arizona to Colorado. She doesn't remember how it happened, but somehow she lost control of her car and essentially drove off a mountain, in the wee hours. She was wearing a seatbelt. When another driver happened on the scene, she was still conscious and lucid enough to tell her to call 911, and then to tell her her name, her parents' names and phone numbers, and ask her to call her parents. I don't think she remembers doing that, either, but the other driver did.

She had broken almost every bone in her body and more than one vertebra. She was in the hospital for months, and in a wheelchair for even longer, and in a neckbrace for longer than that. (She said the worst part was that the neckbrace prevented her from reading during all the months she was stuck at home. She couldn't incline her head, and her arms got tired holding the books straight out in front. I sent her a large package of audio books.)

But she was not paralyzed. She made a full recovery.

When I was told that she had been in a serious accident, the world tilted and for five seconds, I was sure the teller was leading up to tell me she was dead. If she hadn't been wearing her seatbelt, she would have been. "Thrown clear," all right -- clear off a mountain.

So, you know. Wear it.

When I was a teen, and already a compulsive seatbelt user, the car door next to me popped open on a turn, and I calmly reached out and closed it. The other members of my church youth group were kinda freaked.

So much for trying to pass as normal.

Madeleine Robins @ 63

Oh, yes, SUV drivers seem convinced they're immortal. They also ignore several of the laws of physics when driving. My favorite is situation is what happens around here every winter when ignorant SUV drivers hit the black ice and/or silver rain we often get. Several times I've gotten to watch some loon sail past me and remark: "You can slide just as easily on 4 wheel drive as you can on 2."

My best friend was in the left lane on the Beltway last year when she swerved to avoid debris in the road. Her anti-lock brakes failed. Her (brand-new) car hit the median and spun, causing three-quarters of it to crumple around her. The car was totaled, but she walked away with whiplash and a small burn from the airbag deploying, because she was wearing her seatbelt. I would probably not have a best friend anymore, otherwise. Wear your seatbelt.

Bryan (1), statistical probability comes down overwhelmingly on the side of "wear your seatbelt." Your friend the driver was improbably lucky.

Carrie (2), I suspect the safety film Jim has noted as "not safe for Teresa" is the one that demonstrates why your friends should wear their belts in the back seat: unsecured passengers don't just get killed, they kill the other passengers.

As a general principle, large unsecured objects are a hazard in cars. Tom Mix Wash isn't all that far from where I grew up. It's named in memory of silent-movie cowboy star Tom Mix, who died there. His car went nose-first into the wash, but what killed him was his suitcase, which had been sitting on the back seat.

Mad (13), is that the same woman who followed a "tour guide" she'd just met into a dark alley in Morocco at night?

Jim (15), I assume that's that Irish safety film with the unsecured teenagers and the slow-motion ballistics? If so, thanks for the warning. It was extremely instructive to see it once, but I haven't forgotten a second of it, so I really don't need to see it again.

Pat (17), seatbelts do the same thing to me. If I'm going on a long driving trip, I take a length of twine (a long shoelace will do), tie it firmly to the seat belt, then tie it to the shoulder belt so that it bends down a bit in the middle. The belt still passes over my shoulder in good safe fashion, but it doesn't creep up and saw at the side of my neck.

Paula (19), something like that happened a few decades back to the first Montreal worldcon bid committee. I used to think about that when I was chauffeuring the Iguanacon committee in the summer of '78.

There's not much you can do about a drunk doing 120 mph late at night, except be somewhere else. At that speed, being drunk seems almost superfluous, except insofar as it contributes to the initial mistake of driving that fast. No one can maintain control of their car at 120 mph unless they're on a racetrack or the Autobahn. American roads just aren't engineered for it. My idea of a truly useful new safety feature would be a governor that kicked in around 90 mph, like the one they have on moving vans that won't let you exceed 55-60 mph. That's still faster than anyone but Nevadans has reason to drive, but it would take the fun out of seeing how fast a car will go.

Pat (20), if you didn't put him in a cargo net every car trip for the next ten years, you're a candidate for sainthood.

Janet (21), it's that second photo that got me. You don't often see a car where the side panels have been pulled apart like the chocolate coating on the side of a candy bar. It looks to me like the left rear side got wedged under the front end of the semi and was ground off against the pavement.

Kathryn (26), did you all jump on her, wrestle her driver's license away from her, and tear it to tiny bits? While phoning the police, and offering to testify, and taking down the contact information for her insurance company? In short, is this woman, who should never again be allowed behind the wheel of a car, still out there on the road?

John Stanning (33), we don't have laws requiring us to use seatbelts in buses. In fact, I have yet to ride in a bus that has seatbelts at all. It makes me extremely uncomfortable, every time, to have to do without them.

Phil Armstrong (43), I'm convinced that the additional safety features have led to an increase in aggressive driving. That was obvious the minute the SUVs hit the highways. But the statistics say fatalities have gone down; so in this one instance, at least, technology has temporarily outstripped stupidity.

I'd happily tack an extra $5 on my taxes if the money went for beefed-up enforcement of the highway code.

Speaking of which, some years ago, I saw a catalog ad for what I thought was a brilliant little device. Basically, you pointed it at a speeding car, pressed the button, and it emitted enough radar signals to set off a radar detector. It came with a set of rules for a game called Trolling for Tail Lights. I haven't seen it advertised since then, but I think its inventors gave up on it far too quickly (probably because SUVs hadn't yet become popular).

I've never needed a radar detector. If a semi-random assortment of cars around me suddenly start to slow down, I do too. Funny how often there's a speed trap around the next curve.

Anaea (47): Yes, seatbelt laws should be on the books. Tell your father I said:

(1.) A belted-in driver is a safer driver. In an accident, critical decisions can occur after the initial impact. Being belted in greatly increases the chances that the driver will be be awake and alive, and thus able to do what's needed.

(2.) In an accident, an unsecured passenger is a potentially lethal projectile that can kill other, smarter passengers.

(3.) Some people think their survival in auto accidents is nobody's business but their own. They're wrong. The chances are very low that a given driver has enough assets and insurance to cover the cost of lifetime care in the event that they survive a catastrophic cranial or spinal injury. If they have dependents, the odds are even lower that they'll have enough assets and coverage to pay the support the driver would otherwise have provided for them. We all pay for stupid accidents. And by the way, the same goes for people who want to ride without helmets.

(4.) Even hardened old EMTs and ER personnel will count it a Very Bad Day if they have to pick pieces of your face out of your windshield, or the smashed remains of your teeth out of the smashed remains of your sinuses. They'll get queasy if, when they cut down your pants leg, a section of femur falls out onto the ground. People who actually know and love you will take the whole thing even harder. Don't insist on your right to be an asshole. Buckle your seatbelt.

Finally, if you're not going to wear a seatbelt or helmet, make sure you've signed an organ donor card.

Phil (51), if the bicycle flamewarriors show up here, Jim will eat them alive.

Bruce (54), EMTs in the field can't exercise DNRs. Also, see my comments to Anaea. It's not a bleeping civil liberties issue. It's money, ballistics, and public safety.

John Houghton (71), I've been in more than one car where that's happened. Without seatbelts, way too exciting.

Marie Brennan (12):
What have we all learned from this, children?
Don't leave bowling balls on the rear deck of your car.

What scares me is that in a rollover, you become one with the entire contents of your car, and I frequently have a LOT of stuff (inside the cab, and in the pickup bed). I travel many miles in winter conditions (ski instructors don't get to call in sane on snow days). I've broken into the ski school to stay overnight rather than drive on one memorable occasion.

In a sudden stop, I'm not sure that being impaled by skis is any different that being hit by the bowling ball, survivability wise. I try to remember to lock the skis on the passenger side of the truck.

John (75), go with the impalement by skis. They make a big puncture wound, but they don't pulverize everything they hit.

Oh, and just to add to the pile of proof that you shouldn't be unbuckled in a car for any reason, consider my cousin, who was about 8 years younger then me. On a car trip with some friends he took a nap in the back, unbuckled. The car was in a bad accident, and my cousin sustained head injuries that put him in a coma for more than five years, before he finally died. Nor was it a Persistent Vegetative State; he was still there most of the time; if you put a guitar in his hands he would try to play it, though he never regained sufficient consciousness to speak or to signal that he'd heard anyone else.

The rest of the family were even worse victims; I don't think his mother ever recovered from the emotional devastation of watching him lie there for 5 years.

The only time I skipped wearing by bike helmet in the last 10 years was the day I got doored by a Miata. And I landed on my head (and my back). True, i didn't get hurt too bad (road rash), but it could have been worse. Luckily, No ill effects. True I dodn't get hurt too bad, but it could have been much worse. Luckily no appearent damage. True, I could....hey wait a minute.....

Teresa@74

Fatalaties have gone down because traffic density has gone up, reducing average traffic speeds.

And I'm not dragging the cycle helmet war here :)

Only one car accident; I was in the rear seat behind the driver, and the car (going to a first aid competition) spun into a large pileup at the bottom of a long slope covered in black ice. When I sat back up, my head came into contact with the wing mirror of the small pickup truck we'd wound up side by each with.

Seatbelts are good; so is ducking, if you get the chance.

One broken bone so far in my whole life, due to an arrested front bicycle wheel -- picked up tar from the freshly-patched crack in the road, and the first time I used the front brakes they hit the tar and locked the wheel. Another near-broken elbow twenty-odd years previously due to an arrested front bicycle wheel. My current bicycle has disk brakes, and I replace my bike helmet every time I drop it or walk into the top of a doorframe with it (or the ceiling over stairs...)

The cognitive-immunity-to-Newtonian-mechanics thing that I especially and particularly just don't get is the number of people who cut off streetcars ("trolleys") in Toronto. The little ones are not quite thirty tons, the big articulated ones fifty plus, and all that mass is down low. (Never mind that a good third of it is the bridge girder connecting the front and back trucks, and that the thing you hit, right behind the entirely disposable airshell, is the one inch thick square steel plate welded to the front or back of the girder.)

Low speed -- streetcar less than 20 feet from a dead stop -- collisions crumple cars into utter junk. (When the tow truck picked up the wreck, one of the front wheels fell off, McPherson strut and all.)

High speed, well, the story I heard was that the long set of concrete curbs and heavy steel posts got put in on Spadina, warding the streetcar lines completely off from the driving lanes, at the cost of some millions of dollars, after the second time some goof managed to run a red light/make an illegal left turn and get his car hit from the side by north and southbound streetcars at the same time.

And people still try to beat the streetcar away from the light so they can make a left turn in front of it. It's bizarre.

When I was in junior high, I audited a college intro 'Physics for Poets' kind of class. The teacher used auto collisions to illustrate principles of physics. After running through one of the 'Red Asphalt' type films, plus some slide shows of accident scenes and victims from the Michigan State Police, he did some chalk diagrams to illustrate how physics applies in a head-on crash, and had the class work it out on some problem sheets.

If you're strapped to the seat, you experience the stopping distance and therefore the associated deceleration G-force of the car as a whole; the stopping distance will be 2 or 3 feet due to the front crumpling. If you're free falling until you hit the dashboard or windshield, you get your own stopping distance of something under 1 inch, divided between the dashboard's crumple and your skull's crumple. By simple physics the force on your body without the seatbelt is therefore 24-36 times more, even without considering the difference in which parts of you it gets applied to.

I have always worn my seatbelt since, and have brought up my kids to do it automatically. As a friend of mine once said, "You pick that bet, you want to ride it all the way."

Oh, plus the aforsaid vulnerable road users have been driven (ahem) off the roads by the increasingly aggressive attitude displayed by car drivers.

Teresa @ 74

I'm not arguing against seatbelt laws; it's just that I've lived in several states where they couldn't get passed, and in one state where the bikers got pissed at the helmet law, rode en masse to the state capital, and scared the legislature into repealing the law. If we can't enforce the wearing of helmets and the buckling of belts, then we need to find a faster way to reduce the population of the idiots who won't use them.

And yes, I know what cleaning up after the idiots does to people. I've had a number of friends who were EMTs or ER personnel, and I've worked in a medical school with ER surgeons. Although probably the nastiest stories came from a TV news cameraman I used to see almost daily when we walked our dogs. He had to see the wreckage and the bodies, and didn't get to be of any help to the victims. It's not something I'd wish on an enemy.

Phil (79), I can't imagine you're arguing that roll cages, crumple zones, airbags, and improved belt design has had no positive effect on the rate of casualties and fatalities stemming from MVAs.

The idea that our measurable reduction in injuries is wholly the result of slower driving due to congestion seems to contradict the thesis that safety measures have only made drivers more aggressive.

Also, the amount of data that you'd have to collect to back up those assertions is huge, some of it would require measuring fine differences in behavior over time, and a lot of it would have to be collected in the wild. I don't believe I've heard of that happening.

Bad driving didn't come in with the SUV. There've always been insanely aggressive drivers. All it requires is the belief that driving on public roads is not a cooperative activity, and a complete disregard of the potential consequences. You can do that in any car that'll run. Maybe aggressiveness has increased in some drivers under some circumstances, but I just can't believe it's increased so much that it swamps all other inputs.

OTOH, my wife is alive solely because she WASN'T wearing her seat belt, and she got this information from the paramedics who rescued her, broken pelvis and all. The driver fell asleep in a car which had been altered with a sunroof that fell short of safety specifications. When the car went off the road, the car rolled over. She was thrown out and broke her pelvis on landing. The car itself was squashed so badly that there was room for exactly ONE body, repeat ONE body, in the interior. Both she and the driver would have been very messily dead (think squashed tomatoes) if she had been restrained in place.

So don't try to sell me that seatbelts always save lives.

Graydon @ 80

There was an accident just yesterday in Long Beach (CA) where an SUV made an illegal left across the Blue Line trolley tracks (onto a one way street) and got turned into scrap. Both driver and passenger survived, but I don't know how. It tied up traffic nicely for a couple of hours.

I took a one-day driving course for the company a couple of weeks ago. The instructor said one time they went out in the van for the practical check, and one student-employee took the wheel and drove around a railroad crossing gate. Said employee was unemployed before 5 pm that day.
(We are required to wear seatbelts, period.)

To those who have trouble with the seatbelts riding too high up or down on your shoulder: You should know that in most cars they are adjustable. You can slide where the shoulder belt is attached to the B-pillar up and down.

It's obvious when you look at it, but many people don't.

(If this post saves only one life, then it was almost worth it.)

Sandy@62 -- it's from The Rolling Stones (Heinlein).

My mother's sister was killed by a DUI in 1977. Her car only had lapbelts, and she was wearing hers, but upon impact she rammed into the steering wheel, which essentially cut her in half on the inside. My mum maintains that if the car had had a shoulderbelt (and an airbag), I'd have an aunt today.

In my family, the car does not go into gear until the driver confirms that everyone has belted up.

As for helmets ... I've tumbled from bikes and horses enough times to wonder why anyone would not want to wear one.

The next time you drive with somebody who won't wear seatbelts, remember that an unrestrained person in an accident is essentially a 150-250 lb projectile. It's not just about their safety. If they say, "No thanks. I don't wear seatbelts. I'll take my chances," you can say, "Thanks, but I don't want to take MY chances with you slamming into me at 60 mph as you're on your way to being 'thrown clear'." It's not just a safety issue for the person wearing the seatbelt, it's a safety issue for everyone in the cabin.

Graydon @ 80

Yes, what is it with stupid drivers and large masses of metal? I see people cutting off semi-trailer rigs all the time (and triple-trailers are legal on the freeways here, fully loaded that's got to be over 50 tons, and they jackknife at a hostile glare).

But even worse is that every year in Portland several cars get crushed because the drivers stopped them on the light-rail tracks (usually right near a station, so the trains aren't going full speed). And every three or four times that happens the driver of the car is either seriously injured or killed. These are two-car trains, so it's not like getting hit by a freight train, but you can bet that the inertia of those two cars is a lot higher than even your best-armored SUV.

I think what bothers me the most is that the horns on those trains are LOUD; I wouldn't fail to notice that horn, and I have a serious hearing loss. So what's clouding the minds of these people that they don't notice?

There are examples of people not wearing seatbelts and therefore surviving.

Seatbelts kill people, airbags kill people, smoke detectors kill people, doctors kill a lot of people, antibiotics kill people, amublances kill people, vitamins kill people, exercise kills people, emergency exits kill people, those oxygen generators that deploy when the passenger compartment depressurizes kill people, child-proof caps kill people, hand-rails kill people.

You're still stupid if you use that fact to justify not using them.

Teresa: Greater traffic density is an externality that affects all drivers & no individual driver can change it. The driving habits of individual drivers however are under their control.

Risk compensation affects individual behaviour choices.

Geoffrey@#85: So don't try to sell me that seatbelts always save lives.

As Damon Runyon said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."

Bruce: added fun, here in the UK, is the complete fsckwits who think they can argue the toss at an unattended automatic level crossing. We don't have many of them, but when the lights are flashing and the barriers go down you've got about thirty seconds before a train comes through. Even if it's a local commuter service, that'll be about 100 tons traveling at up to 100 miles per hour.

Geoffrey --

I don't think anyone is talking absolutes; they're talking odds.

And, playing the odds like a rational creature, the seatbelt is always the right bet. It isn't always going to work, in the sense of saving life or preventing injury, but everything is tradeoffs and the tradeoffs available in a violent and chaotic situation such as a car accent are generally pretty sucky.

P J Evans --

My very favorite streetcar accident was the one where a somewhat befuddled driver backed up at what was certainly high speed for travelling in reverse and rammed their Miata under the front of a stopped streetcar.

Miata driver was fine; it looked like the streetcar had decided to eat the sportscar and was chewing a bit before the second bite. Streetcar driver nearly had a fit before the constable on the corner managed to stop laughing long enough to reassure him that the constable had seen the whole thing. (The TTC's policy is that if a TTC vehicle has an accident, it's the TTC driver's fault, absent a choir of angels claiming otherwise.)

Graydon (8