Why you should wear seatbelts

[JulesMaximus]

Eh, statistics. You can probably tilt even the factual ones to fit your story any way you'd like. Just to quote a couple from that site:

1. Seat belts reduce the risk of death by 45%, and cut the risk of serious injury by 50%.

2. Seat belts save thousands of lives each year, and increasing use would save thousands more. Seat belts saved almost 13,000 lives in 2009. If all drivers and passengers had worn seat belts that year, almost 4,000 more people would be alive today.

The thing is, nobody really knows, because if the roof collapsed, you would probably die anyway. But I'm guessing, statistically, you'd be better off wearing your seatbelt and staying inside the rollcage of your car in a wreck, vs. flying out the window like a bird leaving the nest. It's hard to say because the crashes only happen once and the outcome is the outcome, so it's more of an educated guess than anything. But based on all of the safety technology in cars today, you're typically better off wearing a seatbelt, using the crumple zones, using the rollcage, using the airbags, etc.

No need to guess. It's a fact.

It isn't difficult to look at an accident scene where people have died and figure out if they had done something differently if they would have survived. People make entire careers out of accident investigation to improve automobile safety.

In the early days of auto racing drivers didn't wear seatbelts thinking that if they were thrown clear of a wreck they were less likely to die in a fire. Yet you don't see ANY form of auto racing today in which they don't use safety harnesses to strap the driver to the car.

 

[Topweasel]

I don't think you understand how statistics work. He said 50% of people killed in car accidents were not wearing their seatbelts. That means that if those 50% had bucked up they might still be alive.

I know how statistics works. The poster only said 50% of fatalities in automobile accidents we of people without a seat belt on. Without further information (a phrase I used in the quote above) it means that the other half of accidents where with people wearing a seat belt. Which isn't very helpful information to convince people to wear a seat-belt.

I know that the big disclaimer is that A.)there would be more deaths if more people who had gotten into an accident wearing a seat-belt had not been. B.) That of the accidents that resulted in a fatality of a person not wearing a seat belt some if not a majority of them would not have been fatalities if they had been wearing a seat-belt. But that information isn't given nor is any information on how many of the seat-belt fatalities could have been avoided if they had not been wearing a seat-belt. Sure it's miniscule comparatively but it's information that should be accounted for.

But again there is an assumption made when analyzing the information the previous poster gave us. Without that assumption or knowledge. That information is near useless.

 

[KoolAidKid]

Not to fight one way or another. But if 50% that died weren't wearing a seat-belt and the other 50% were, without any other information given, wouldn't that basically be the same chance of dieing.

If I understand you correctly, you are confusing two conditional probabilities. If p(death given that you weren't wearing a seatbelt) = p(death given that you were wearing a seatbelt), then yes, that would indicate that wearing a seatbelt isn't particularly useful.

The statistic you cite, though, is the opposite conditional probability: p(you were wearing a seatbelt given that you died) = 0.47, and p(you weren't wearing a seatbelt given that you died) = 0.53.

 

[KoolAidKid]

In fact, from these two statistics:

p(wearing seatbelt given that you died) = 0.47
and
p(wearing a seatbelt) = 0.85

you can determine that you have a roughly 6.4X higher chance of death if you don't wear a seatbelt.

 

[Topweasel]

If I understand you correctly, you are confusing two conditional probabilities. If p(death given that you weren't wearing a seatbelt) = p(death given that you were wearing a seatbelt), then yes, that would indicate that wearing a seatbelt isn't particularly useful.

The statistic you cite, though, is the opposite conditional probability: p(you were wearing a seatbelt given that you died) = 0.47, and p(you weren't wearing a seatbelt given that you died) = 0.53.

No that was Jules's statistic not Kaido's. Kaido's was

It'd be interesting to see something like an airbag version of a Hans device. People like convenience; the government had to make it a law in order to get people to wear seatbelts. Sure, there are always exceptions to the rule and everyone always quotes the "but I know this guy who was saved by not wearing a seatbelt" story, but statistics are statistics: more than 50% of the people killed in car accidents in the US every year were not wearing seatbelts. That's over 15,000 people:

http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbeltbrief/

Based on the video footage in the OP, wearing a seatbelt sure looks like a better option than testing out ragdoll physics IRL 😀

Which without knowledge of survival rates of car accidents. Survival rates of particular types of accidents. Survival rates based on wearing a seat-belt, survival rates based on not wearing a seatbelt and about another 10 different values can you really get anything out of that quote.

Just saying 50% of people that die in an accident weren't wearing a seat-belt doesn't mean much. It's the worst quote in the world because without any more info it implies that wearing a seat belt wasn't any more helpful.

I know what it really means that if 85% of the public is wearing seat-belts and accidents where there is fatality where a seat-belt is worn resulted in 15k deaths and the accident rates (and their intensity) are the same between the two groups. Assuming that not wearing a seatbelt wasn't any more dangerous than wearing one. Than there should have been only 2500 deaths. That meant that 12500 people roughly died needlessly. Or basically we could almost cut fatalities in half if everyone wore their seat-belts.

But that isn't how the data was presented.