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Comment by jbandela1 | Hacker News Reader

The article left out the single most important advice: wear a seatbelt.

I did my neurosurgery training at a fairly busy Level 1 Trauma Center (which treats the most severe trauma) and treated a lot of people involved in car crashes.

Seatbelt use made a huge difference. There could be two people in the same car, and the person wearing the seatbelt was evaluated and released and the person not wearing the seatbelt was taken to the operating room or intensive care unit.

Seatbelts keep you in position to allow the car to take the brunt of the forces instead of your body.

Please, always wear a seatbelt and make sure everyone riding with you wears a seatbelt.

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I knew someone who killed his friend because he was not wearing a seatbelt.

The guy who was wearing the seatbelt was well-restrained in the back seat. But the guy sitting next to him was unbuckled. The unbuckled man flew into the buckled man, and it is only a matter of luck which of the two skulls will crack. As luck had it that day, it was the buckled man's skull which cracked, leading to his death a few hours later.

  > Please, always wear a seatbelt and make sure everyone riding with you wears a seatbelt.

Not only for their safety, but for your own safety as well!

Likewise, secure heavy items in the cabin when possible.

> As luck had it that day, it was the buckled man's skull which cracked, leading to his death a few hours later.

Situations like this make me wonder if some kind of helmet would be advisable for use in cars, and not only in bikes and motorcycles.

Helmets can come with their own issues like added weight and neck injuries, but the inconvenience means no one outside of Motorsport will use them.

I'm aware of the neck injuries, so the "some kind of helmet". When people hear about helmet usage in cars, people automatically picture in their heads drivers wearing F1-like helmets, or motorcycle-like helmets. But just like bike helmets are different from motorcycle helmets, car helmets would also be different, possibly lighter, to avoid neck injuries. Most law-abiding citizens aren't crashing over 200km/h to need massive helmets coupled to HANS devices like F1 racers.

My physics professor in college would wear a bicycle helmet when driving around in his minivan. The rumor spread in class pretty quickly the first time a student saw him doing that. The general sense of the rumor was, "Our prof is some kind of a freak."

His wife also left him in the middle of the semester. Another rumor was that she just couldn't stand his eccentricities any longer.

Personally, as a cyclist, I have had my helmeted noggin slam against the pavement on more than one occasion. I have come to greatly respect the potential injury that you could get from a collision at high speed. In hindsight, I can fully respect my physics professor's decision to wear a bicycle helmet when driving his minivan around town. In fact in the future if I find myself needing to drive in inclement weather, I may very well start wearing my bicycle helmet in my car. Hope my wife doesn't leave me.

I remember reading something to the effect that mandatory motorcycle-style helmets for all car passengers would significantly reduce the road toll but the inconvenience made it too difficult to implement.

No, just make sure that everybody is properly buckled.

The idea is not replace seatbelts or airbags with helmets, but to have an additional safety layer.

I don’t think a helmet would be all that helpful. For a person wearing a seatbelt in a modern car with airbags, there really isn’t a lot of hard things to hit your head against.

In these situations, the biggest damage to the brain is something called diffuse axonal injury where rotational forces from the sudden acceleration and deceleration cause injury to the neurons. A helmet would not protect you from that.

Really? I would have thought that heads smacking into side windows would be pretty common.

Modern vehicles have side curtain airbags to mitigate exactly that.

Not everywhere in the world. In poorer countries car manufacturers and regulators have perverse incentives to cut costs on safety devices, to be able to sell for a poorer clientele. For example, in Brazil up to 2009 airbags were not even mandatory, and when the regulations finally required it, they were under fire for several years. Today airbags other than the frontal ones for driver and passenger riding shotgun are still uncommon here. See https://apnews.com/article/ac0ec2592da24f2bb6386b58d0db074f

I know someone who was killed by this exact situation. No other injuries (that I'm aware of) for anyone else in the car. Their skull was broken

Since the pandemic began, I've been riding a significant amount in ride-shares and taxis. One universal trait of all drivers is that they will immediately punch it as soon as you close your door. Therefore, it's incumbent on me to work on figuring out my seatbelt and attaching it before closing my door, otherwise I will be struggling with it under pressure. Of course, I'm still under pressure, because the driver is extremely eager for me to close that door already, what the hell is taking me so long?

In the taxi service I use, all cars are of the same fleet, so it's not difficult to figure out the seat belt, as long as it's in working order. The ride-share drivers, since these are personal cars, often have some sort of stupid obstruction that lies across the seatbelt buckles and prevents riders from finding them.

I don't know why it's so unimportant for ride services that they don't care whether riders are safely strapped in. My parents had a strict policy: "the brakes can't come off until everyone's buckled in." This, to me, is pragmatic and caring advice.

I think the article assumes you're following the law. No drunk driving, speeding, mobile phone usage or not wearing your seat belts.

I don’t think wearing a seatbelt is law everywhere.

Where is it not? I know helmet usage on motorcycles varies, but except for busses and antiques, seat belts are requited, if just to keep the driver in the seat and in control of the car.

E.g. in Arizona, only front seat passengers are required by law

Amazing. I wonder what’s the rationale.

“My freedom™”

Are there really still places that doubt the safety of seatbelts and haven’t made it law?

Two words: New Hampshire.

And if you occasionally cruise a old Sunday show car, there is not shame upgrading that 2 point belt to a 3 point ( if that same car model eventually got 3 points in them)

And if possible wear seatbelts in busses as well.

I live in Australia (a country where wearing a seatbelt is instilled in us pretty much since birth, with very harsh penalties for non-compliance) however seatbelts are relatively non-existent in buses, and I have this vague memory that there was a reason for this?

The primary reason (as far as I'm aware) is because buses are (relatively) more massive and structurally different from cars, so they exhibit different collision physics in the event of a crash. In the event of a crash, the greater mass means any forces can distribute across a greater load and lead to less acceleration for those inside.

I think there are more details related to types of crashes (e.g. head-on vs on the side) that are taken into account through a bus's structure and how it's internally designed too, but I'm less familiar with how and why it works.

My understanding is that buses generally reach lower speeds and, because of their mass, a collision is less likely to produce the kind of abrupt stop that throws people through windshields. If a typical car collides head-on with a bus at speed, the car will be thrown back and its occupants whipped around; the bus will keep moving forward with an unpleasant but not devastating jolt.

There are exceptions, I'm sure.

Exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Broncos_bus_crash

That is a "coach bus" (as Canada presumably calls it, a long distance bus or coach). Those do reach highway speeds etc, and at least in most of Europe they are fitted with seatbelts.

I note the article says some parents campaigned for seat belts on buses transporting sports teams, so presumably this bus didn't have them.

I think the only explanation I've heard for this is that seatbelts are too expensive to put on every seat in a bus. Interestingly, on mine sites the buses all have seatbelts and you're firmly instructed to put them on every time the bus starts moving.

High mass, they don't slow down quickly. There are a few papers out there. There are very few things that can decelerate the mass of a buss quickly

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