AUSTIN, TX (GLOB) — From Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT):
TxDOT’s Teen Click It or Ticket campaign is urging all teens to buckle up—every seat, every ride. Texas has seen a rising trend in teens not wearing their seat belt in a crash, jumping up 6% from 2022 to 2023. Out of the 296 teens that died in traffic crashes in Texas in 2023, 49% were not wearing their seat belts at the time of the crash. Buckling up takes just seconds—but those seconds save lives.
"These fatalities serve as a sobering wake-up call," said TxDOT Executive Director Marc D. Williams. "Every time someone gets in a car and skips buckling up, they’re taking a deadly gamble. In the event of a crash, seat belts can give you the best chance to survive, and yet far too many Texas teens are still skipping this critical safety step.” Source
I just kind of thought everyone was wearing their seat belts. Turns out that Texas has a 91% compliance rate, and has primary enforcement laws which permit officers to stop a car just because they see someone not wearing their seat belt.
This practice increases compliance. Until it doesn’t. Texas has seen an increase of 16% in fatalities of unbuckled motorists. Who doesn’t wear seat belts in Texas? Apparently pickup truck drivers and teens. And it appears seat belt wearing is lower on rural roads. Why might that be?
It seems that on rural roads there is less traffic which creates a false impression that the drivers are safer. They drive faster over roads with which they are familiar and especially with pickup drivers they feel “Big Truck, Big Safety. This leads to complacency and the false belief that seat belts are unnecessary.
Add to this teenage impressions of indestructibility and a natural chafing against rules and regulations seen as unnecessary, and well, you get bad decisions.
The reality is that seat belts protect a driver from the inside of their car, and from being ejected from their car. Despite anecdotes to the effect of “Thank goodness I was thrown clear of the crash,” ejection is a worst-case scenario. 75% of the people ejected from a crash do not survive.
What seat belts do is protect you from Sir Isaac Newton. You may recall his laws:
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Meaning when the car stops, you keep moving until you hit the windshield, steering wheel, dashboard, etc.
At 80 miles per hour, death generally is unavoidable as what hits is your head, or your chest.
Force = Mass X Acceleration.
Seat belts reduce the acceleration, reducing the force of contact. Ditto for airbags, which by the way are designed to work with seat belts, not replace them. (Don’t you mean deceleration? Yes, OK. Acceleration is defined as a change in velocity. That means if you are driving down the road at a constant 60 mph, you are not accelerating. Your velocity is constant. Deceleration, or negative acceleration, is when velocity decreases in the direction of motion. Like your head slamming into the windshield.)
Slamming into an explosively inflated airbag without a seat belt is not very different from slamming into a windshield. Same negative acceleration…
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This means that when you hit the steering wheel, it hits you back.
Seat belts distribute this reaction force over a larger area, reducing the risk of a single deadly impact point.
Add to this that rural roads have fewer police and less likelihood of a cop pulling you over for failing to wear a seat belt (source), and the fact that rural areas are remote and emergency response times are longer, you get a perfect storm of calamity. Some accidents survivable with rapid emergency response in urban areas are fatal when the help can’t get there.
So wear your seat belts. Sir Isaac Newton doesn’t care if you think you are invincible.
Add to that Monkey See, Monkey Do. If your parents, grandparents, and Joe from the farm over yonder don't wear a seatbelt...