States with primary enforcement laws have lower fatality rates.

This Research Note compares the percentage of unrestrained passenger vehicle occupant fatalities and fatality rates between States that have primary safety belt use laws and States that do not have them for the most recent years, 2000–2004. Besides having a smaller percentage of passenger vehicle occupant fatalities that were unrestrained, the fatality rates in primary enforcement States were much lower than for all other States. In primary enforcement States the passenger vehicle occupant fatality rates were 1.03 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 10.69 per 100,000 population. This compares to 1.21 and 13.13 (respectively) for all other States. (Author/publisher)