NATIONAL COALITION OF SCHOOL BUS SAFETY NEWS UP TO DEC. 2003

This article from NYTimes.com is sent by Dr A Yeager - May, 21, 2001
Let us not fail to remind those in a position to consider seat belts on school buses that from the time new born babies leave the hospital till they take their first ride on a school bus, they are required by law, to utilize the appropriate safety device in the family car.

The first time they ride unrestrained is on the school bus.  Over the next 12 years they "unlearn" the habit of seat belt safety.

Are we surprised at the result?

Low Seat Belt Use Linked to Teenage Death Rates
By MATTHEW L. WALD
ASHINGTON, May 20. Amid a gradual improvement nationwide in highway safety, experts are focusing on wide variations in death rates and seat belt use among the states, especially for young drivers and passengers.

In a report scheduled for release on Monday, the National Safety Council says that teenagers in Montana are seven times as likely as teenagers in California to die in a crash while not wearing seat belts. The annual rate of such fatal accidents is 33.4 per 100,000 residents in Montana, and 4.7 per 100,000 in California.

The police are not allowed to stop motorists for seat belt violations in Montana, and surveys find that only about three-quarters of all people wear seat belts in that state. In California, 9 out of 10 people wear them, the highest rate in the country.

Other variables, like speed and remote roads, also come into play.

But the correlation between the use of seat belts and the death rate is strong all over the country. Just under half of the drivers in West Virginia use seat belts, and that state's rate at which teenagers die while not wearing seat belts is about five times as high as in California. North Dakota, where just 48 percent of people wear seat belts, has triple California's rate of teenage
deaths among those not wearing seat belts.

The national average for seat belt use is 71 percent, and the national number of unbelted fatalities is about 12 per 100,000 people, or two- and-a-half times as high as California's rate.

Because all states require children to be properly restrained in cars, the death rates for children are just one-tenth as high as for teenagers. Among adults, the rate is just half the rate among
teenagers.

Excerpts from the report, "Mired in Mediocrity: A Nationwide Report Card on Driver and Passenger Safety," appear on the New York Times Web site, www.nytimes.com. The safety council is a nonprofit research and advocacy group.

Law enforcement agencies nationwide will conduct a campaign this week, looking for seat belt violations, drunken driving and other offenses. The effort, coordinated by the Air Bag and Seat Belt Safety Campaign, a nonprofit group, began in 1997, with hundreds of police agencies. Two years ago, 5,000 agencies took part. This year, more than 10,000 are participating.

The federal highway safety agency has also developed seat belt campaigns directed at ethnic groups.

The safety council, however, is focusing on enforcement rather than persuasion, which it calls ineffective.

If the whole country could achieve California's rate of seat belt use, the number of deaths would drop by 5,000 to 7,000 year, and the number of disabling injuries would decrease by 50,000,
according to the safety council. California strictly enforces its seat belt laws.

In many states, the police cannot pull over a car because a driver or passenger is not belted; they can issue a ticket for that violation only if they have stopped the car for some other reason.

Raising rates of compliance will require changing the laws so the police in all states can stop cars with unbelted people, and then making enforcement a priority, said Chuck Hurley, a spokesman for the National Safety Council.

And while there is great concern about highway safety, it is centered on problems like the defects of Firestone tires on Ford's sport utility vehicles, not on the less publicized issue of seat belts. "In 10 years, we had 163 Explorer rollover fatalities, while about 90,000 people died sitting on their seat belts," Mr. Hurley said. In 1999, experts estimate, 9,500 people died who would have lived if they had been wearing seat belts.

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