I have just found an anonymous, one sentence comment on my blog. It reads: Your campaign against seat belt wearing has already borne fruit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4411639a6479.html .
The link takes you to an interesting story from New Zealand with the headline Seatbelt subterfuge kills driver. The driver who was killed, according to the story, was opposed to the law requiring him to wear a seat belt. He had been fined 32 times for not wearing one. At the time of his fatal accident
he was wearing something over his shoulder to create the illusion of a seat belt to fool passing police. The verdict of the coroner was less conclusive than that asserted in the headline: he may well have survived had he worn one.
Indeed he might have. A seat belt greatly increases a car occupants chances of surviving a crash. This is how I put it in Risk and Freedom: the record of road safety legislation (p50) 23 years ago: The evidence that the use of a seat belt greatly improves a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash appears to be overwhelming. That a person traveling at speed inside a hard metal shell will stand a better chance of surviving a crash if he is restrained from rattling about inside the shell is both intuitively obvious and supported by an impressive body of empirical evidence.
I quote myself from 23 years ago because for the whole of the intervening period I have been accused, by people like our anonymous commentator, of having blood on my hands for questioning the efficacy of seat belt laws. The fruit of my campaign according to my accusers is fatally toxic: to raise doubts about the life-saving efficacy of seat belt laws is to encourage people not to wear seat belts leaving me responsible for the deaths of vehicle occupants who die unbelted.
Mr Segedin, the fatally injured driver was, according to the report, driving a car full of rust with an expired warrant, and an autopsy blood test showed he had taken methamphetamine and cannabis all factors that an insurance company would consider identifiers of a high-risk driver. Yet the story, as reported, identifies the non-wearing of a seat belt as the sole cause of death.
Because seat belts are undeniably effective at reducing death and injury in crashes there is, or was, a mystery. Why in country after country that mandated seat belts was it impossible to see the promised reduction in road accident fatalities? The most plausible explanation is risk compensation. It appears that measures that protect drivers from the consequences of bad driving encourage bad driving. The principal effect of seat belt legislation has been a shift in the burden of risk from those already best protected in cars, to the most vulnerable, pedestrians and cyclists, outside cars.