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Seat belts: safety on the road

Volvo has the honor of being the first to implement seat belts in 1849. The first US patent for automobile seat belts was issued to Edward J. Claghorn of New York, New York on February 10, 1885.

This patent was described as a tourist safety belt that was “designed to be applied to a person and provided with hooks and other accessories to secure the person to a fixed object”.

Failure to wear seat belts is responsible for more deaths than any other traffic behavior. In all traffic accidents reported for 1999, 63% of deaths occurred without seat belts.

Seat belt use remains the single most effective thing we can do to prevent unnecessary traffic deaths and injuries on America’s highways.

Traffic data suggests that education alone is not enough to convince young people, especially men ages 16-25, of the dangers of not wearing seat belts. This age group is trapped in the belief of their immortality due to their young age.

It is this age group that also exhibits the highest violation of drunk driving laws. They are also the most prone to speeding and other traffic-related law violations.

Because of this, it has been suggested that stricter seatbelt laws and increased visibility enforcement campaigns for them to buckle up have been suggested.

Seat belts are the most effective safety devices in vehicles today, saving an estimated 9,500 lives each year. If 90 percent of Americans buckled up, more than 5,500 deaths and 132,000 injuries a year could be prevented.

The cost of unbuckled drivers and passengers goes beyond those killed and the losses to their families. Everyone pays for this negligence. It can be in the form of higher taxes, higher health insurance rates, and higher medical costs.

Imagine running as fast as you can, towards a wall. You’d expect to get pretty banged up. What if while running at full speed suddenly a wall appears in front of you? Would you be able to stop instantly?

This is exactly the situation one faces when the front end of their car hits something at only 15 miles per hour. The car stops in the first tenth of a second, but you continue at the same pace as you were in the car until something stops you, the steering wheel, the dashboard or the windshield, if you are not wearing a seat belt.

If this could happen at 15 miles per hour, imagine what a 30-mile-per-hour collision would result in? It would be the same as hitting the pavement after a 3-story fall.

A properly worn seat belt prevents the second collision, the human collision, from happening.

“Worn properly” means with both straps positioned securely to transfer the impact of the collision to the parts of your body that can bear it, the hipbones and shoulders.

With just the shoulder strap on, one can slip under and be strangled. The lap belt alone does not prevent your face from hitting the steering wheel or other parts of the car.

The use of seat belts is the law in most countries. There really is no reason not to use them other than simple laziness. But imagine, that investment of a couple of seconds before continuing to drive could save your life. Why not make that commitment to invest now?

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