Do YOU Click-It?

48 Million Refuse to Buckle Up

"About 48 million people do not regularly put on seat belts when they are on the road, a figure the government's highway safety agency hopes to lower with an annual public education campaign ahead of the summer driving season.

The "Click It or Ticket" campaign involves checkpoints, patrols and advertisements to help enforce seat belt laws. It runs from May 22 through June 4.

The latest report on seat belt use by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says men account for 65 percent of the more than 31,000 people killed each year in passenger vehicles.

The report being released Monday found:

-58 percent of those killed who were not wearing a seat belt crashed along rural roads.

-in crashes involving pickup trucks, about seven in 10 people who died were unbelted.

-more than six in 10 people age 8-44 who were killed inside a passenger vehicle were not buckled up.

The agency said that lap and shoulder safety belts reduce the risk of death for those in the front seat of passenger cars by 45 percent and the risk of moderate-to-critical injuries by 50 percent.

The fatality risk for front-seat motorists in sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans who wear seat belts is reduced by 60 percent; moderate-to-critical injuries by 65 percent."

____________________________________

So then, is this location specific? Is my personal observation that people living in the sticks are less prone to wearing seat belts valid?

I actually believed that long gone were the days when folks believed shoulder harnesses and the like were dangerous, but since moving to Florida that's pretty much all I hear. Everyone knows of a so and so who was car-killed when a seat belt malfunctioned and trapped them inside a stuck-at-the-RR-tracks/burning/left in the middle of the road to be tractor-trailer crunched, vehicle. And since I began hobbnobbing with city bus drivers I can say for a fact that not a one of them uses seat belts unless parked at a station, or somewhere where supervisory and/or law enforcement might take a peek inside.

Back in the Midwest it was a different story around town. I didn't know of a driver who believed the old lament that seat-belts-kill, but head on out to a more rural area and most of the folks simply refused to wear them. And it never seemed to be age or gender specific but then again I wasn't conducting a survey.