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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

Who cares if you kill yourself through your own negligence? There shouldn't be a fine at all for seatbelts. DUI, OTOH, should be treated even more harshly than it is.

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First, you're welcome to move to New Hampshire if you feel this way and drive around with your seatbelt unbuckled. You're also welcome to ride your motorcycle without a helmet there.

Second, part of the purpose of the seatbelt is to keep you in the driving position for the entire duration of the crash so that you can maintain as much control of your vehicle as possible until it comes to a complete stop. If the first impact of a crash throws you out of the position required to drive the car, you're no longer capable of controlling the vehicle in such a way that reduces the severity of or prevents further impacts. As some of these further impacts stand to involve persons not involved in the initial impact, it follows that wearing a seatbelt stands to protect them as well as you.

Third, We are in absolute agreement that DUI should be treated more seriously.

> Second, part of the purpose of the seatbelt is to keep you in the driving position for the entire duration of the crash so that you can maintain as much control of your vehicle as possible...

I largely agree with this sentiment, however, practically speaking I doubt it matters much. Any impact hard enough to significantly displace you would likely render you useless at operating the vehicle if you are wearing a seatbelt. The forces at work during crashes are stronger that most people realize.

I read hundreds of traffic accident reports every day. If you must traverse the roads, wear your seatbelt, don't ride a motorcycle, and avoid excessive speeds. A large portion of the reports I see with deaths are single vehicle excessive speed loss of control, with a significant portion of those not wearing their seatbelts.

Driving is dangerous. Stay safe.

In the linked article, Strong Towns doesn't say much about the nature of these deaths, but in other articles, (e.g. below) they explore how many of these killings are vehicle-on-pedestrian deaths, and how we've normalized blaming victims.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/14/new-report-ame...

Aside from the fact your own death is always going to impose a cost on society, I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a driver significantly increases your ability to maintain at least some control of a vehicle in a collision, reducing your chance of injuring others (both in and outside said vehicle).

You have a right to be stupid, even if it results in your death.

> I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a driver significantly increases your ability to maintain at least some control of a vehicle in a collision

Not a chance. The g forces are tremendous, and you're just along for the ride in a collision. In my major accident, I had a lap belt on, but my arms and legs and torso flung about totally out of my control.

In my own accident, despite being slammed against the driver's door by the impact, I was able to keep my foot stabbed onto the brake pedal throughout the event thanks to the belt keeping me more or less in the driver's seat.

There's no doubt that the belt played a role in reducing your injuries.

But you'd then argue being able to keep your foot on the brake doesn't help your chances of avoiding causing injury/death to others?

If you're hit from the side, you were already traveling forward.

Er, so? If you're hit hard from the side with no seat belt, your whole body is likely to be thrown around and keeping your foot on the brake is going to be far more difficult. Sorry but this does seem like a pointless discussion - if you were somehow able to prove that seatbelts basically never helped drivers avoid causing injuries/deaths to others then I'd agree a $50 fine is probably sufficient. But given what I've seen in this thread and elsewhere (including direct personal experience), seatbelts most definitely do help with that, and a fine + license suspension seems quite justified if you're caught driving without one (in Australia the fine is $550 plus a loss of 4 "demerit points" - lose 12 and your license is suspended. Seems a bit soft to me - the penalty for driving at 60k/h in a 50 zone is about the same.)

> if you were somehow able to prove that seatbelts basically never helped drivers avoid causing injuries/deaths to others

I'm not arguing it never happened. I'm suggesting it doesn't happen often enough to be a major factor in seatbelt laws. Laws addressing highly unlikely events often don't take into account other effects.

For example, when seatbelt laws were proposed, many people reported that they were saved from certain death by being thrown from their car. For example, if the car caught fire. Or the car went off a steep embankment. I don't recall any anecdotes about thrown people causing other accidents.

"Laws addressing highly unlikely events often don't take into account other effects." Agree 100%, but I'm not convinced you could call such events "highly unlikely". I don't have enough data to say.

I don't have data, either. But I do recall the debates about making seatbelts the law. The talk was always about whether one was safer being thrown from a car than staying in the car. I never heard mention about being thrown from a car causing another accident.

After the law passed, I heard many people say they wouldn't wear the belt out of fear of being trapped in a burning car.

It's just that these discussions have been completely forgotten since, and the assumption is that seatbelts are always better.

I wear a seatbelt because the odds are better. I'm aware there are cases where it isn't.

That would depend on the collision. The worst I've had, the car I was driving was T-boned by another (their fault). If I'd had no seat belt on I somewhat doubt I would've been able to maintain control of the vehicle and it very likely would have hit other cars.

> You have a right to be stupid, even if it results in your death.

Do you? I’ve not seen hide nor hair of that right defined anywhere.

Certainly you have seen "My body, my choice".

It isn't respected as it should be but I would consider it a natural right to do what you will with your own body. If you don't own that, what do you own? Bodily autonomy is the core of all human rights if you think about it.

jumping off mountains is legal

Except when there are sufficient cases of people seriously injuring or killing themselves, then the area is typically fenced off/given restricted access.

Your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Supreme Court recently ruled if it’s not in the constitution it’s not a real right sooooooo

Seatbelts don't magically stop major accidents from happening. But they definitely keep minor accidents from turning into major accidents.

They don't keep you in control after you slam into something head on or flip the car.

They keep you in control after you clip a deer, or hit a rock, or someone rear-ends you, or you swerve hard to avoid something, and that can be the difference between a good story and killing yourself or others.

Do they? I've been rear-ended, wearing a belt. There was no possible way I could control the car under the g forces.

If you've got enough side forces to pull you out of your seat, you've lost control anyway.

BTW, race car drivers know to take their hands off the wheel just before impact, as the front wheels hit they can jerk the steering wheel hard enough to break your arms.

It's true that if you're going to do performance driving, tightly belting yourself in will enable you to feel the car better, and enable you to concentrate on driving rather than trying to stay seated. But hitting something is a whole 'nuther story. If you haven't been hit hard in a car (I have), you're not in control. Belt or not. You're just along for the ride.

I just saw this on Reddit.

The driver would most likely have regained control had he left his seatbelt on. SFW.

https://reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/w4kyx3/oy/

If he hadn't gotten out of his seat to dig in the back, he wouldn't have had the accident.

I'm sorry, this is not an argument for seatbelts. It's an argument for keeping your eyes on the road.

Seatbelts also protect other car occupants. When your car goes from 80mph to 0mph, if you’re not wearing a seatbelt, you become a 80kg, 80mph meat missile bouncing around the car.

If someone else happens to be in that car with you. Then it very likely you’re gonna kill them. If multiple people are not wearing a seatbelt, then the problems only escalates from there.

Sitting in the back doesn’t changes the dynamics much either. Car seats aren’t designed to withstand a 60+kg mass hitting them from behind at 80mph. They fold flat, and anyone still sitting in them gets folded flat at well, and that’s all before you start worrying about what happens when two skulls collide at 30-100mph.

I'm aware of that, and when I drive I require that all my passengers buckle up.

> You have a right to be stupid

To _be_ stupid, sure.

Curious, is there actually evidence of this? I've been in a few accidents and I can't think of how a seat belt would maintain control. I feel that anything that would throw you out of the seat is basically uncontrollable. My accidents with any significant force all happened in the blink of an eye.

I've been forced to make swerving maneuvers which would have been difficult to stay in my seat and in control without a seatbelt. I was in a low speed rear end collision which would have definitely jarred me out of my seat and had me lose control after the fact, probably would have caused me to roll into a busy intersection.

Because your body tumbling around in your car during a crash can kill passengers, or be catapulted onto the street causing another accident/injury from someone trying to avoid it

Believe it or not, cleaning dead bodies off the road everyday has a cost.

A cost borne by others, in fact.

Forcing manufacturers to put in a seatbelt in cars is a cost born by others for something many of them never wanted, forced on them by people who legislate not only having seat belts in their own car but installed in every car.

Because your death becomes an externality that others have to pay for.

Should we treat all behaviors that are associated with a significantly increased mortality rate the same way, or should we pick and choose depending on the political and social context at the time, like we do with seatbelts?

Few other behaviors associated with increase mortality can also turn you into a missile.

https://youtu.be/bdW_3oQFO0c?t=42

Be that as it may, that wasn't the point I was replying to.

Is not missiling into another person a form of externality?

Perhaps, but that's not what the comment was addressing. If it were, your point would not address living after having become a missile.

I would say we generally do exactly that, when the threshold is significant enough and it's a behavior that has no beneficial/ safe level (we tax and restrict cigarettes heavily, but not so much overconsumption of food etc. Arguably we should/could have penalties for failing to get enough exercise, though there are almost certainly better ways to reduce dangerously sedentary lifestyles).

>Arguably we should/could have penalties for failing to get enough exercise, though there are almost certainly better ways to reduce dangerously sedentary lifestyles

This is my point: we pick and choose, and we're subject to the whims of society, when it comes to what we deem unacceptable. Citing a collective norm that potentially could have been influenced by societal ebbs and flows is not an objective argument, ever.

Absolutely - regulation is hard. I wonder if there are successful instances of government using big-data/ML to determine where, when and in what manner it makes sense to apply it. And would people vote for governments that relied solely on that for what legislation to enact...

Generally yes. That’s why sugar taxes are needed and popular with economists.

What would you say should be the threshold for increased mortality that would subject a given behavior to heavy taxation and regulation?

Cyclists take note.

Riding a bicycle is incredibly safe. It’s cars that are dangerous, around bicyclists and pedestrians alike (and even other car drivers).

Bicycle deaths per mi is like 6x of cars. Maybe bicycling around cars is a big reason for that, but we're measuring against the reality there is not the world we want to move towards.

I'd say bicycling should be outlawed before driving without a seatbelt is (although I'd prefer both be legal).

https://www.ntsb.gov/safety/safety-studies/Documents/SS1901....

I think that alternatively, considering how approximately every death of a bicyclist or pedestrian, or car driver, is all caused by someone driving an enormous 5,000lb machine irresponsibly, we should redesign our cities in such a way that most people don’t need to drive those cars in the first place for most trips. And if you do need to drive a car, you have much less congested and smaller streets for those trips.

That also allows us to repurpose some of that road space that’s not needed anymore, for separate bike and bus infrastructure that will also be more convenient and safer for everyone.

I don’t want to live in a world where you have to own a giant dangerous $20k machine just to move around, when there are cheaper, safer, healthier, and better-for-the-environment ways to accomplish the same thing.

And I drive too, a lot! I just don’t want to be forced to anymore, but we’ve kinda built society so that you only have one option, and it creates all sorts of problems.

That sounds pretty nice to me. There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation here IMO. We should privatize all the roads and let the free market dictate what people like, and I think a lot of people would fall back to bicycles and walking more if they actually had to pay private tolls wherever they drove.

I like your thoughts… I don’t agree about privatization (since the private companies would be a guaranteed monopoly and we see how well that works with internet…), but maybe something similar could also be accomplished by making car registration fees proportional to number of miles driven and size of vehicle, to pay for road damage. Charge 2¢ per mile per ton of vehicle weight or something. Exempt mass transit (busses).

Average 2 ton car pays 4¢ per mile, or $400/year at 10k miles.

Drive a big unnecessary truck, might be 10¢ per mile in road maintenance.

Since road damage is exponential relative to vehicle weight, bikes and pedestrians are basically negligible and we could just round that to $0. Motorcycles under 300 lbs could be small flat rate.

What are you insinuating precisely?

Everybody is entitled to one free death.

Because if you don't kill yourself, insurance will care footing the bill to send you to the hospital. Maybe insurances shouldn't cover people without seatbelts and have the ambulance let them be injured at the scene.

Frankly, if the injured person wasn't wearing a belt, I wouldn't award him medical damages regardless of who was at fault in the collision.

I would imagine that most auto insurance policies require seatbelts (under some general safety baseline provision) for coverage to be valid.

If your accident involves more than one vehicle, the other driver shouldn't need to live with your death on their conscience (as it would for most people, regardless of whether or not they were at fault).

Who cares? Loads of people. My wife lost a coworker from an auto accident, one that they probably would have survived had they been wearing their seatbelt. She was a single parent to a small child. Losing his mom at such a young age probably made a big difference to him. It probably had significant impact on her mom, who now has a complicated custody battle with an abusive deadbeat dad and massively different life having to try and take care of her grandson.

She had a lot of friends, I'm sure they cared about her. My wife cared about her. My wife's other coworkers also cared.

Its incredible how selfish so many people are on this site. Is there nobody you care about?

Won't someone think of the children?

your body yeeted out of the car makes an even bigger mess and could hurt/kill sb.

so wear your damn seatbelt

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