If it wasn’t the law would you wear a seat belt

[despairofbadscience]

Now I think the obvious answer to this is yes! However someone asked it a a party last night, and quite a few people so no or not on short journeys, maybe only in the front seat (type answers).

Really surprised me

I wonder if it’s time to bring back the public safety ads.

Yes because I don’t want to die by hurtling through the windscreen or die because a passenger in the back hurtles into the front!

Exactly. I knew someone from school who was in a head on collision in the early seventies and they weren't wearing a belt in the back because they didn't exist then I think. They died from their injuries and I often think if they had been wearing a belt in the back they would have survived. Interestingly the two in the front survived.

Funny you should ask this question today. At lunchtime today I was driving to a town about 20 miles away. DS(16) was in the front passenger seat.

Half way and doing about 50 on a sunny, clear, quiet, dry rural road, a big fallow stag jumped into the road, right under my wheels.

I stood on the brakes, dug the nose of the car into the tarmac and missed the deer by a few inches. Ds was thrown forward hard into his seatbelt and now has a welt across his collar bone. Nothing broken thankfully.

He looked at me and said 'and that's why we need seat belts'. If he hadn't been wearing it, his face would probably have collided with the windscreen.

Yes. I have always worn a seat belt, even before it became law.

A friend of mine at school went through a windscreen and has the facial scars to show for it.

Anyone who doesn't is an idiot.

Clunk click every trip anyone?

Yes, but, I probably do automatically because it's always been the law for my entire life and I've never experienced a "norm" where people don't wear them. It feels risky to me not to wear one, as opposed to feeling extra-safe to wear one.

Is the scenario - "the law gets vanquished tomorrow"? Because I'd stick to my same behaviour, and I think a lot of people would because they probably feel similarly to me in that wearing a seatbelt is normal, not wearing one is risky.

If the scenario is - "they were never made law in the first place" - I don't know if I'd be so sure of my answer, and I don't think everyone else would be either. Before seatbelts were made law in the UK, observed seatbelt use was very low despite safety campaigns, and I don't think people in the 70s were fundamentally different to today. In fact the cars had fewer other safety features and fatal car accidents were much more common, but it didn't seem to make much difference to people's behaviour or beliefs about how useful seatbelts are.

You see the same pattern happen again with children's car seats and you can even go back and see BBC news articles about it in the late 90s where they tried lots of safety campaigns to get people to use booster seats for primary aged children. The norm at that time was for babies and toddlers to be in car seats but older children just used seatbelts. A minority of parents used booster seats, usually to help children see out of the window rather than for safety purposes. Eventually the law was changed in 2003 to say children aged up to 12 or a certain height must continue to use a car seat or booster seat. People thought it was madness and now it's just normal, and you'd be thought shockingly lax to drive a 5 year old around in just a seatbelt (let alone with none!)

I think it's to do with how our brains tend to perceive risk - the reality is, we get into a car thousands of times and travel and nothing bad happens. If you're not wearing a seatbelt, that gets imprinted as the "norm". You have to have some kind of external force like a law in order to change people's behaviour and therefore create social pressure to the point where the majority now see seatbelt use AS the norm.

I think if the law got vanquished tomorrow, you'd see an immediate drop in usage as people who really dislike seatbelts stop using them, but rates would remain higher than they were pre-law for a while, but over time, you'd get people slip from "I must wear it every time" to "Oh this is just a short trip/nobody else is bothering" and because the vast majority of the time nothing bad happens it reinforces that as a norm in your head and the risk starts feeling less serious, so I think you'd see seatbelt use drop over time, but lots of news reports about people dying and whether or not they were wearing seatbelts (which would probably just confuse the average person's understanding of whether or not they matter).

Yes. I knew someone once whose adult child died in a car crash, they were the only one not wearing a seat belt and the only one of the four who died.

I knew a woman who unclipped her baby from its car seat -the baby equivalent of a seat belt , as the baby was crying. They had a crash and the baby went through the windscreen and died moments later.

She was a shell of her former self. Utterly heartbreaking.

The same applies for adults. Why wouldn't you wear one?

My car would be like my fridge freezer if I didn't put a seat belt on. Sometimes when I give friends lifts they don't have their belts on. Made the motion but didn't belt up. There's no rhyme or reason 😞

Funnily enough, on a recent TV prog about Greece, Simon Reeve (presenter) showed a gadget available locally that you can fit into a seat belt slot, , without using the actual seat belt- so it stops the car beeping at you to tell you to buckle up!
He said it’s because Greeks don’t like being told what to do!
A fairly old prog I think, so maybe not the case now.

Unless someone is extremely vertically challenged or pregnant I don't understand why anyone would find a seatbelt uncomfortable.

I would now and automatically put it on, as do the DC, however I remember going through a phase of not wanting to wear one as a child, after riding in a relitives old car that didn't have them fitted in the back (that ages it somewhat) and my mum just shrugging and leaving me to get on with it (sounds awful now, but she was generally not that irresponsible in other areas). I'm alway amazed how lax people can be with safety.

Google " if you're not wearing a safety belt, what's holding you back"? YouTube

Yes definitely! I’m also always shocked how many cyclists I see without helmets as to me that’s as important as seatbelts

Yes, I would. It makes me feel safe and secure.

Not wearing one turns you into a meat missile if you have a crash. You can crush and kill your fellow passengers.

Yes of course I would.

Pretty sure you can buy them right now on amazon.

They are popular in some US states apparently. Or people will do the seatbelt up behind them. You can buy t-shirts which have a diagonal stripe on them so if the police drive past it looks like you're wearing a seatbelt

As a child, seat belts weren’t mandatory, they weren’t even in every car. I remember the clunk-click campaigns of the 70s, some quite graphic TV adverts, and the introduction of mandatory use - I think front seat use was mandated first, and rear seats later.

Regardless of that, I would always wear a seatbelt, even if it wasn’t mandatory, and would always ask someone sitting behind me to use theirs, as not doing so can be incredibly dangerous for the driver.

Surely it should be illegal to sell these things

Our dog car harness clips into the seat belt thingy so I think people would always get round it one way or another but I agree I'm not sure how people are allowed to sell things specifically for the purpose of making the beeping stop.

2 cars colliding at 30mph, coming towards each other, is no different in the amount of momentum and force than going into the back of someone who's slammed their breaks on whilst you're still doing 60mph on a motorway. All it takes is for someone on the other side of the road to have a seizure or react badly to a wasp and you've got the equivilent of a 60mph head on collision.

The amount of blind overtaking and close calls I've seen on country roads to get past cyclists and tractors makes my hair stand on end.

I was alive long before they were mandatory.

I remember my dad having to pay extra to have his new car fitted with them. He thought it was a very necessary expense. And that was only front seat belts.

I always thought they were an important invention and have always, always worn one. I've also refused to take passengers who won't wear them. Usually, my children's friends, years ago, who would say that their parents didn't make them wear seat belts. Unbelievable.

My DGM got rear seat belts fitted to her car that was produced without them a few years before it became mandatory. People thought she was overly protective and the garage were slightly baffled having never done it before A few months later one of the people who had mocked her lost their twin toddlers in a fairly low speed crash it was really tragic

Yes, I would. My parents always did, long before they were mandatory and had rest seat belts fitted to their cars when I was younger, before they became mandatory in the rear too.

Im in my 60s - easily old enough to remember before it was mandatory to wear seat belts. I have fond memories of childhood of kneeling up on the back seat whilst travelling and watching the cars behind, or of kneeling in the footwell and using the back seat as a table for games. I was a bit reluctant initially to wear a seat belt in the back seat when it first became mandatory (even before it became law, my parents always used the seat belts in the front so there was no question of not doing this in my mind, but back seats did not have seatbelts when I was a child.)
But despite all this, now? Yes of course I would wear a seatbelt in every seat at all times, and I would demand my passengers did too. The same as I would look both ways before crossing a road. I can't imagine not caring about my safety now.