Safety Seat Belts & Car Accidents why you should wear seat belts?

[iGuest 3]

ADMIN NOTE:-

 

Approved because there is really good information despite being non-original, has been put into quote tags

 

Safety Seat Belts & Car Accidents

Wearing seat belts will reduce injuries and save lives. It can also save millions of dollars for American businesses. In 1984, car crashes left about 4,200 workers with lost jobs. It also affects the lost of productivity, insurance, and medical costs to those individuals that do not wear their seat belt. The second leading cause of death is heart attacks. It accounts for twelve percent of death in the U.S. Traffic safety facts for 2001 stated that seventy-two percent of the people are wearing safety seat belts. It is up from sixty-seven percent in December 1999 and up from sixty two percent in May 1998. Each year, the number of people wearing seat belts increases and the rate of fatalities decreases. Those who don't buckle should understand the risks involved. Many people in vehicles, who do not use seat belts, end up in terrible fatalities, but those that have seat belts properly fastened have the improved ability to avoid fatalities. Because of the increasingly amount of drivers and passengers, they should always properly wear the seat belt.

 

Seat belts in automobiles are a very important safety feature. Over the past ten years, highway injuries and fatalities have dropped. The reason for the decline is because more and more people are wearing seat belts. Seat belts hold your body in place while in and stopped motion. When a traffic accident occurs, the car suddenly comes to a stop and the driver and passenger who are sitting in the front and who are not wearing seat belts keep moving forward towards the steering wheel, windshield, or other parts of the interior. It has been proven through many crash tests with dummies crashing into windshields and dashboards to convince people wearing a seat belt is a safe idea. The seat belt will prevent one from getting badly injured or death. Passengers in the back of a car who are unbelted will also endanger their safety, but they will also injury the people in the front seat because the unbelted rear passengers can hit the front seat hard enough to injure the people seated in them. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says, "safety belts, when used, reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat passenger car occupants by forty-five percent. From 1975 through 1999, an estimated 123,213 lives were saved by safety belts." Seat belts also prevent one from being thrown from the car. In 1996 only one percent of restrained passenger car occupants were ejected as opposed to twenty percent of unrestrained passenger's occupants. In total crashes, nearly seventy three percent of the occupants were ejected from cars resulted in death from not being restrained. Imagine hearing your parents had been ejected out of the vehicle and is suffering in critical condition because they didn't have their seat belt on for a short trip to work. That's why seat belts should be worn at all times to prevent injuries or death.

 

The first seat belt law began in 1984, in the state of New York. It proved to have saved more lives from accidents. As of December 1999, forty nine states including the District of Columbia had used the seat belt law in effect. In 1999 thirty three states, police officers were permitted to write citations only after a car was stopped for some other traffic violation. There are currently sixteen states that have the primary enforcement, allowing police officers to write citations whenever they are seen not wearing a seat belt. In 1978, the state of Tennessee was the first state to impose the child safety restraint law. Not only is it important for adults to wear seat belts, but also children who are under the ages of six must have their own safety seat. The first mandatory use of child restrain went into effect in 1978 in the State of Tennessee. Children under the age of twelve must not sit in the front seat due to the air bags. The International Highway Traffic Safety Administration says, "From 1975 through 1999 an estimated 4,500 lives were saved by child restraints."

Adults who do not use seat belts are sending a deadly message to children. Parents are role models to children when growing up. They need to set examples of buckling themselves so children will also do the same. National crash shows it is more likely that if a driver is buckled up children riding in the same vehicle are buckled up ninety four percent of the time. However when the driver is unbuckled, children buckled up only thirty percent of the time. The adults really have to buckle up to make sure their children are buckled up so it would not lead to fatal injures or even lead to death.

 

Whether you are a child or an adult one must always wear safety seat belts while riding in a motor vehicle or on a bus no matter how short or long the ride might be. Many people believe that if they are going to die in a crash, safety seat belts will not affect the crash outcome. Unfortunately, the threat of seriously being injured or dying is not enough to persuade some people to always buckle up. They only proven way to get these high-risk people to use seat belt is to issue tickets and fine to them. We need to let them know that they are not only hurting themselves but they are financially harming everyone else around them. It is important to know that accidents resulting in being unbuckled raise the cost of our health premiums and taxes. However, the risk of getting into an accident on a short trip is just as great if not greater than on a longer drive away from home. I know it is hassle to have to put your safety belt on for a short distance drive like going to a friend's house. We know that at least seventy percent of serious accidents occur within twenty five miles away from home. Some people claim that wearing seat belts are uncomfortable and cause wrinkles in their clothing. It would be worth the trouble to try to adjust the seat belt to one likely and to take the wrinkled clothes to the cleaners than to risk the chance of a severe injury or possible death. Many people don't realize that they are affecting many others such as taxpayers whose taxes that are being raised each year. It also raises the cost of health care. We could save billions of dollars on medical and employment issues. The money saved could have been used for other important issues. So BUCKLE UP, it could be your own life!!!

:) :) :) :) :) :) :)

[k_nitin_r 8]

Seat belts can increase or decrease the damage that an accident can cause. Perhaps seat belts are not as crucial for the driver as it is for the passengers because the driver can prepare himself or herself for an accident but a passenger may be unaware that an accident is going to occur and therefore would hit the windshield or the glass on the side.Seat belts are quite narrow and this could cause some of the injury. Perhaps if cars were fitted with a harness-like seat belt like the racing vehicles do, the force would be distributed across a wider area than regular seat belts and would exert less pressure.If we were to stop using seat belts entirely, we would be relying a great deal on air bags and those are just as dangerous. Airbags have caused fractures in the past and are meant to prevent the occupants of a vehicle from hitting anything in the interiors of the vehicle. Seat belts and air bags serve the same purpose and are meant to protect the passengers of the vehicle in the same manner but they do so differently. An airbag deployment can be hazardous if there are any interior fittings within the vehicle that can obstruct the inflation of the air bag. Any such object placed close to an airbag deployment point would turn into a projectile weapon and would seriously main or kill the passenger in the event of an accident. The accident itself may not affect the occupants but airbags most certainly can.When a vehicle catches fire and the driver and his or her passengers are wearing seat belts, they have to get out as quickly as they can. Taking off their seat belts adds to the time they are within the vehicle and if they take too long, the seat belts can melt and fuse to their clothes and skin, trapping them within the vehicle. If you have tried going at a seat belt with a pair of scissors or with a swiss army knife, you probably know how long it takes to get out of the seat belts if the release mechanism fails to function. When the release mechanism of the seat belt does not operate, the driver and his or her passenger are essentially tied to their seats and cannot get out. Seat belts also tighten or loosen so if the seat belts neither loosen nor do their release mechanisms function after an accident that causes the fuel tank to rupture and the leaking fuel to ignite, the results would be very catastrophic.I doubt people would fly out of their seats if their vehicle was rear ended. On the contrary, they would be pushed further into their seats and if they were not using the head rests of the seats, they would even suffer from whiplash or injuries to their shoulders and back. If there was a full frontal collision when both vehicles are moving at high speeds, the driver and passengers would definitely fly out of their seats if they were not wearing seat belts and the front passengers do stand a real danger of going through the windshield.

[sheepdog 10]

When a vehicle catches fire and the driver and his or her passengers are wearing seat belts, they have to get out as quickly as they can. Taking off their seat belts adds to the time they are within the vehicle and if they take too long, the seat belts can melt and fuse to their clothes and skin, trapping them within the vehicle.

Great time to try the quote thing.
We got pulled over the other night coming home from a meeting. Some A-hole with a cell phone called the cops on us, (who by the way was tailgating us with his bright lights on) we had passed a police car on the side of the highway, and moved over like your supposed to, however, it was a windy night and we moved over too far and hit the rumble strip on the edge which jerked our car over even farther, and he called the cops thinking we were drunk. Wish he had that cell up his @$$. We had to sit there for 30 minutes to be harrassed. Cop asked why we weren't wearing seat belts and I just flat told him I didn't and wouldn't wear one because I was scared to death of burning up in a car. The old man has medical problems so he can get away with not wearing one. Amazingly enough we didn't get any kind of ticket.

[k_nitin_r 8]

Good to hear that you did not get a traffic ticket for not wearing a seat belt. I can't imagine a traffic cop not handing out a ticket for not wearing a seat belt. I believe traffic cops have a quota that they need to meet, just like salesmen have sales quotas to meet, so you do see a large number of traffic fines being issues at sometime but at other times, the enforcement of traffic fines is not as stringent. Or, perhaps, the traffic cop who stopped you did think you had a valid point. At times, the traffic cops will let you go if they think that you will not be a repeat-offender. Most traffic cops only enforce the seatbelt rule for drivers of the vehicles and do not necessarily issue traffic fines when the passengers do not wear seat belts.BTW, I know what it feels like while having someone tailgating you with bright lights. In India, the problem on the roads is with oncoming traffic with bright lights because the road dividers are not very common. Also, you can have pedestrians jump across from anywhere even when there is a divider because there are no laws against jaywalking. There are even some drunk and some insane people who stand right in the middle of the road and there is no support or charity agency that does anything about it. You can even find drunk people along the side of the road or standing in one of the lanes. At times, you can find people having seizures right on the road and nobody bothers to even call an ambulance, even though am ambulance is now provided as a free service (though I am not sure if the phone call is to a toll-free number).There are a lot of drivers on the streets who simply like being jerks because they get their pleasure from it. Sounds sadistic, but it is true. I once met this sadistic lady who took pleasure in taking my seat saying, "I'm a lady. He should be standing," and using abusive language against the ticket collector. Road rage and sadistic behavior are just something that you have to live with because people don't need moral/ethics education, etiquette, or a heart to walk about on the street or drive a vehicle.