Everybody loves a good April Fool’s prank, but the importance of adopting safe driving practices is no joke. Every year, more than 32,000 Americans lose their lives in violent and largely preventable traffic crashes. By doing your part to be a more responsible, safe, and informed road user, you can help protect yourself, your loved ones, and others who share the road with you. To that end, we’re launching an effort to set the record straight on some common myths about traffic safety, the first of which is presented below. We may not know how these misperceptions came to be, but we do know one thing: hard data show that those who buy into them have been fooled! Myth: “I Don’t Need to Buckle Up If I’m Sitting in the Back”. This myth may be fuelled by a misguided belief that the front seats are high enough to cushion and provide adequate protection to rear-seat passengers in the event of a crash, and perhaps also by the fact that about half of the states only require drivers and front seat passengers to wear seatbelts. Whatever the thinking, this is an extremely problematic myth that flies in the face of safety data, and it appears to have some bearing on the public: 2010 estimates of national seat belt usage found that only 74 percent of rear-seated passengers used a seatbelt, compared with 85 percent of front-seat occupants. It is important to buckle up wherever you are sitting in a vehicle. Research shows that people who buckle up in the backseat of a car or light truck (e.g., pickups, vans, and SUVs) are 60-70 percent less likely to die in a crash than those who don’t. Additionally, being buckled in the backseat may be particularly important in the event of a rollover crash, due to the risk of being ejected from the vehicle. Overall, about 1,000 lives could be saved each year if every backseat occupant buckled up. (Author/publisher)
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