Seat belt legislation requires the fitting of seat belts to motor vehicles and/or the wearing of seat belts by motor vehicle occupants.
History
The legal requirement to fit seat belts began in the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia in 1964, with the compulsory fitting of seat belt anchorages at front outboard positions in new cars. In 1965 cars built in Europe were required to be fitted with front seat belts. This was followed in 1967, by the requirement in the United Kingdom to fit three-point belts in the front outboard positions, and by the requirement in South Australia to fit belts (two- or three-point) to the front outboard positions, in all new cars.
Predicted effects
The move towards seat belt wearing legislation started in Australia in the late 1960s, although it was echoed elsewhere.
Experiments using both crash test dummies and human cadavers also indicated that wearing seat belts should lead to reduced risk of death and injury in certain types of car crash.
As a result of such predictions the use of seat belts by vehicle occupants was made compulsory in Victoria, Australia, in 1970, followed by the rest of Australia and some other countries during the 1970s and 1980s.
Successive UK Governments proposed, but failed to deliver, seat belt wearing legislation throughout the 1970s. In one such attempt in 1979 similar claims for potential lives and injuries saved were advanced. William Rodgers, then Secretary of State for Transport in the Callaghan Labour Government (1976–1979), stated that: .
On the best available evidence of accidents in this country - evidence which has not been seriously contested - compulsion could save up to 1000 lives and 10,000 injuries a year.
Professor John Adams of University College London was sceptical of such claims and set out to analyse the effect of seat belt laws as then in force and assess how well they matched predictions. His findings were published in 1982 and can be found in the Society of Automotive Engineers transactions of that year. His conclusion was that in the 18 countries surveyed, accounting for approximately 80% of the world's motoring, those countries with seat belt laws had fared no better, and in some cases (e.g. Sweden, Ireland and New Zealand) significantly worse than those without.
In summarising the paradox, Adams agreed that :
The evidence that the use of a seat belt improves a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash is convincing. That a person travelling 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.
In order to explain the disparity between the agreed improvement in a crash and the observed results, Adams advanced the hypothesis that Protecting car occupants from the consequences of bad driving encourages bad driving .
He has suggested that a number of mechanisms are in play:
- Better protected drivers take less care (risk compensation or risk homeostasis).
- Case-control studies based on voluntary use of safety aids can attribute to the aid benefits that actually come from the risk-averse nature of those likely to use them voluntarily (confounding), particularly early adopters.
- Fatality rates are subject to considerable stochastic noise and comparison of single years or short periods can be misleading.
Studies and experiments have been carried out to examine the risk compensation theory. In one experiment subjects were asked to drive go-karts around a track under various conditions. It was found that subjects who started driving belted did not drive any slower when subsequently unbelted, but those who started driving unbelted did drive consistently faster when subsequently belted. A study of habitual non-seatbelt wearers driving in freeway conditions found evidence that they had adapted to seatbelt use by adopting higher driving speeds and closer following distances In another study, taxi drivers who were habitual non-wearers were timed over a route with passengers who did, and others who did not, insist on the driver wearing a belt. They completed the route faster when belted.
In response the UK's Department of Transport commissioned a study on the effects of seat belt laws in Sweden, West Germany, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Norway. This study, known as "the Isles report" after its author, and which used the United Kingdom and Italy as controls for no-law countries, compared casualty trends for both those inside and outside cars between law and no-law states. The report predicted that, based on the experiences of the eight countries studied, a UK seat belt law would be followed by a 2.3% increase in fatalities among car occupants .
Measured effects
Some reports from Australia indicated that the laws had been effective: a rising trend in fatalities pre-1970 had been arrested and reversed, and this was attributed to the effect of seat belt legislation. This attribution did not meet with universal acceptance: introduction of early seat belt laws coincided with the world oil crisis, and other national road safety initiatives. The United Kingdom experienced a reduction in casualties at the same time (British seat belt legislation was not introduced until a decade later), which also coincided with the acclaimed Clunk Click Every Trip campaign to encourage voluntary wearing of seat belts. Claims of the number of lives saved, based on the extrapolation of trends pre-law, could not therefore be reliably associated solely with seat belt compulsion because so many other factors were also involved.
Side-effects of seat belts
Over the years numerous cases were documented of various fatalities and injuries caused by wearing seat-belts. Potentially lethal injuries such as crushed sternum and paralyzing neck injuries are common in high-speed collisions. Chest injury may cause cardiac arrest, lung bruises are amongst the most common causes of death by seat-belts especially for people of weak heart such as the elderly who can also suffer a heart attack and not be able to free from the seatbelt in order to get to help. In neck injury cases, the immense pressure from a high-speed impact can cause a seat-belt wearer's head to accelerate forward suddenly while the body is restrained, potentially causing paralyzing injuries.
Non-car road users
From the beginning in Australia, and subsequently New Zealand, there had been indications that seat belt laws might increase deaths and injury among those outside cars, such as motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians. Isles found that in Europe the predominant effect of seat belt legislation was of increased numbers of injuries to non-car users. He predicted that in the UK deaths to other road users would rise by approximately 150 per year in the event of compulsory seat belt wearing legislation. In terms of injuries to other road users the prediction was for an 11% increase in pedestrian injuries, with injuries to other road users climbing by 12 to 13% (numerically 7,000 and 36,000 respectively).
The British law
The Isles report was written by a civil servant in the Department of Transport. It did not back the pre-existing and still current position of Government, and it was never published. It is known mainly because it was leaked to The Spectator magazine after the law was passed.
Owners of cars registered in Britain on or after 1 January 1965, were required by a law that came into effect on 31 December 1968 to have front seat belts fitted. Subsequently the requirement was extended to the back seats.
The law mandating the compulsory wearing of seat belts for front seat occupiers came into effect on January 31, 1983, in the UK. Evidential breath testing was introduced at the same time.
There was a reduction in driver fatalities and an increase in fatalities of rear passengers (not covered by the law). A subsequent study of 19,000 cyclist and 72,000 pedestrian casualties at the time suggests that seat belt wearing drivers were 11-13% more likely to injure pedestrians and 7-8% more likely to injure cyclists . In January 1986 an editorial in The Lancet noted the shortfall in predicted life-saving and "the unexplained and worrying increase in deaths of other road users". Shortly after this, legal compulsion was extended indefinitely.
Rodgers claimed in 1978, prior to his unsuccessful attempt to introduce seat belt compulsion, that " the best evidence " indicated a likely saving of a thousand lives and ten thousand injuries per year. On January 30, 2003, 20 years after the introduction of compulsory front seat belt wearing, the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) published their Seat Belts Factsheet which states:
"Seat belts are a proven way of reducing the severity of injuries. The government has estimated that since seat belt wearing was made compulsory in 1983 it has reduced casualties by at least 370 deaths and 7000 serious injuries per year for front seat belts and 70 deaths and 1000 serious injuries for rear seat belts" (DETR 1997).
Adams concludes that there is no evidence of the seat belt law having reduced overall fatality numbers, and that there is evidence of fatalities having migrated from drivers to vulnerable road users. Although the Government argued at the time that the law had sa