Buckling Up:  Part of the Strategy to Reduce Deaths from Impaired Driving

North Carolina’s Impaired Driving Task Force held its first quarterly meeting of 2020 a few weeks ago. Bill Naff, program manager for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), spoke at the meeting about strategies to reduce impaired driving fatalities. You might be surprised to hear about one strategy that was near the top of the list: Get every vehicle occupant to buckle up. NHTSA reports that nearly half of the passenger vehicle occupants who were killed in crashes in 2017 (47 percent) were not wearing a seat belt. Had those people been buckled up, a significant number of them might have survived. NHTSA cites research findings that wearing a seat belt reduces the risk of fatal injury to front seat passenger car occupants by 45 percent and the risk of moderate to critical injury by 50 percent. The risk reductions for buckling up in a light truck may be even higher. Put simply, NHTSA says that “[b]uckling up is the single most effective thing you can do to protect yourself in a crash.” The impact of increasing seat belt use. In a 2019 report, NHTSA estimated that 14,955 lives were saved nationally in 2017 (and 633 in North Carolina) by seat belt use among vehicle occupants. The agency further estimated that if every vehicle occupant had been restrained by a safety belt, an additional 2,549 lives would have been saved, 18 of those in North Carolina. The good news. Most front seat passengers do buckle up. NHTSA estimated seat belt [...]