Download Free Guide For Increasing Seat Belt Use Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Guide For Increasing Seat Belt Use and write the review.

It is well documented that seat belts prevent death and reduce serious injury. Today they save an estimated 13,000 lives each year. Because safety belts are highly effective, getting the "unbelted" to use the restraints could save another 7,000 people annually. The easy converts to restraints are already buckling up. Seat belt use in the United States is now approaching 80 percent, with statewide use rates ranging from a low of 55 percent in one northeastern state to 90 percent in some western states. Today's challenge is to increase restraint use among those who have not yet accepted educational or enforcement messages{133}and the reality that seat belts save lives. Data show that 58 percent of people who die in crashes are not belted. The single most effective strategy for improving occupant restraint use rates is enactment of seat belt use primary enforcement laws in all states. Seat belt use laws by themselves are not sufficient, nor are public education efforts without an enforcement component generally successful. Another significant challenge is assuring the proper use of child restraints. Although use rates exceed 90 percent, in 6 out of 10 cases the restraints are improperly secured to the vehicle or the child is improperly secured in the restraint. One study showed 85 percent misuse.
Increasing seat belt use is one of the most effective and least costly ways of reducing the lives lost and injuries incurred on the nation's highways each year, yet about one in four drivers and front-seat passengers continues to ride unbuckled. The Transportation Research Board, in response to a congressional request for a study to examine the potential of in-vehicle technologies to increase belt use, formed a panel of 12 experts having expertise in the areas of automotive engineering, design, and regulation; traffic safety and injury prevention; human factors; survey research methods; economics; and technology education and consumer interest. This panel, named the Committee for the Safety Belt Technology Study, examined the potential benefits of technologies designed to increase belt use, determined how drivers view the acceptability of the technologies, and considered whether legislative or regulatory actions are necessary to enable their installation on passenger vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the study sponsor, funded and conducted interviews and focus groups of samples of different belt user groups to learn more about the potential effectiveness and acceptability of technologies ranging from seat belt reminder systems to more aggressive interlock systems, and provided the information collected to the study committee. The committee also supplemented its expertise by holding its second meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, where it met in proprietary sessions with several of the major automobile manufacturers, a key supplier, and a small business inventor of a shifter interlock system to learn of planned new seat belt use technologies as well as about company data concerning their effectiveness and acceptability. The committee's findings and recommendations are presented in this five-chapter report.