The primary benefit of wearing your seat belt is a lower incidence of injury or death in a motor vehicle crash. According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), 30,521 occupants of passenger vehicles died in wrecks in 2006. For 8 percent of those individuals, restraint use was unknown. Of the 28,141 people for whom restraint was known, 15,523, or 55 percent, were not wearing a seat belt. NHTSA estimates that use of a shoulder/lap belt cuts the risk of fatal injury to front seat car occupants by 45 percent. Moderate-to-critical injury risk drops by 50 percent.
Seat belts save lives--it's more than a hollow cliche. NHTSA notes that seats belts saved 13,250 lives of persons five years of age or older, in 2008. If everybody wore seat belts over the course of that year, NHTSA claims an additional 4,152 lives would have been spared. One key is that seat belts have the effect of keeping you in your vehicle during a crash. In 2006, 75 percent of passenger vehicle occupants who were completely thrown from the vehicle in a fatal crash died.
If you have an air bag in your vehicle, NHTSA believes you should use it in conjunction with your seat belt. NHTSA defines air bags as "supplemental protection" that does not activate in all crashes, only moderate-to-severe front impacts. In 2008, frontal air bags saved the lives of 2,546 people, 13 years of age and older. NHTSA data analysis shows that seat-belt use, along with air bags, reduced fatalities in crashes by 11 percent.
Only one state, New Hampshire, does not have a seat belt law, as of June 2010, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). All others, as well as the District of Columbia has some type of seat belt law in place. Most states require adults and minors not covered by state child passenger safety laws to wear a seat belt when riding in both the front and back seat of a motor vehicle.
The likelihood of you actually getting pulled over--and subsequently fined and hit with a possible, time-consuming court appearance--varies from state to state. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia, as of June 2010, have primary seat belt laws, reports GHSA. This means officers can pull you over and give you a seat belt citation just because you did not buckle up. In the remaining 18 states (remember, New Hampshire has no law), you are somewhat less likely to get a ticket, says GHSA. That's because these places use secondary enforcement, which only permits law enforcement to give you a seat belt ticket after they pull you over for another traffic offense.
