Yesterday, James Annan pointed us to a literature (see here and here) suggesting seat belt (or air bag) use does not actually saves lives. Yes, all else equal those wearing seat belts are more likely to survive
Seatbelts can infringe and corrupt the drivers ability to operate the vehicile safely. Safe driving has precedent over the potential of an accident. The driver should have the right of being "Captain of His Ship" when determining if the use of a seatbelt is obstructing and resisting his safe operation of the car. Current seatbelt laws do not differentiate between driver and passenger and is constitutionally invalid. We have the right to protect ourselves from having the accident, and not depend on the after the fact belt.
Certainly true that there was a macho element to it. I can understand the macho motivation, but my real surprise is that it is strong enough to make people take serious risks.
Btw - properly using safety harness means that there is no real risk of death. On my jobs I only ever had one fatality (in many millions of manhours) and that was nothing to do with high rise work.
ChrisA, I have never worked high iron myself and I've talked for less than 50 hours with people who have. But I wonder if your "status" explanation might have another dimension too. Maybe they feel like people who can do the work without the harness are special in ways that people who can't are not. That they are real men who deserve their pay. They could perhaps see it like being forced to put the training wheels back on their bicycles.
It would be hard for them to explain to you, if that was true. A real C programmer who got hired to do scripting with a bunch of script kiddies might feel similarly, but he couldn't possibly get away with sneaking C code into the product without permission.
People care about their sense of identity first, before anything else. When ironworkers have already accepted that they face death every day, it's hard for them to back away from that.
This idea makes sense from what I know, but I don't really have enough direct experience to judge it.
The problem of people acting against their own clear self interest (like not wearing seatbelts) has puzzled me for a long time. I have run big construction projects in the past (thousands of people), and I have dictated that people use safety measures, such as harnesses when working at heights. It was amazing how many people would try not to use them, we even had to make it a firing basis. Now the people involved had a clear incentive to use the safety systems provided (I would fire them if caught them even if they didn't accept the safety argument), and absolutely no benefit to not using them (they got paid the same even if they did their work faster by not using the systems), so why didn't they use them? There were all sorts of rationales given by the people concerned when we did catch them, none of them consistent, just like the arguments of people not wearing seatbelts. I concluded that there was a status signalling thing going on, they saw my dictate that they use safety gear as a status thing by me (or by my subordinates), a way to show who was boss, and their way of challenging this status and improving their relative status was to not do as I was asking. I think this is why a lot people don't wear seatbelts, they are showing the "man".
I managed to get good compliance on my sites by a mixture of incentives (we paid a bonus to everyone on the site if everyone wore their gear, creating lots of policemen and some peer pressures) plus the threat of dismissal. Not sure how to apply this to the seatbelt debate though.
Bla, that's a good idea. Also, make sure your after-accident tool is mounted so that it's easy to get to, protected, and won't become a projectile.
But most people don't plan ahead that far. Most people, instead of planning for what to do after a big accident that leaves them partly helpless, instead depend on the kindness of strangers.
And it's far easier to keep tools securely fastened in the trunk that could be useful to help others, than it is to arrange things so you can use them to help yourself after the unpredictable damage of a car wreck.
Obviously you should get one of those little seatbelt cutting things. They can be mounted in the car and contain and razor inside a sort of safety case so its impossible to cut yourself with it. They also are often flashlights and windowbreakers.
You need to look not just at fatality rates, but the severity of nonfatal injuries. Having spent some years as a EMT and vehicle extrication technician, I'd say there are a lot of collisions that would be fatal with or without seatbelt, but there are many more in which the seatbelt is the difference between minor and major injury.
"my dad also used to drape the seat-belt over his shoulder without locking it. He was afraid of being stuck in the car and have the car go up in flame. In fact, I once was in an accident with him on the highway and we both rushed out of the car as soon as the car stopped. Seeing the oncoming traffic try to slow down was quite scary."
One time a car I was convoying with was involved in a head-on collision. The two people in the back seat were not wearing seatbelts but luckily the front seats stopped them with little injury except a few broken bones. The front seatbelts however suffered the force not only of two bodies but also the impact from two more. They both jammed. The driver was jammed against the steering wheel with barely enough room to breathe, and his chin ws cut on the wheel. Also his head had hit the windshield and crushed the safety glass into a head-shaped pattern. This came from some combination of the steering wheel buckling, and him getting thrown up and over it, and so on. I was glad he didn't wind up impaled on the steering wheel with his head sticking through the windshield. That would have been scary. We got his wife out of there just by cutting the stuck seatbelt and helping her out, but the driver was truly stuck, his door was crushed shut and one broken ankle was caught in the wreckage. It would have been very unfortunate for him if he had been thrown through that windshield since his ankle would definitely not go with him. He breathed easier after I cut his seatbelt, and then he had to wait for the EMTs to get there and cut the car away from him.
If you use seatbelts it's good to have a sharp blade in a handy spot so you can cut the seatbelts after an accident if they are stuck. The safest place to keep the sharp blade is in another vehicles, but you need to make do however you can.
If you don't use seatbelts then after the same accident that would jam a seatbelt you are likely to require no assistance at all.
sorry, my dad never watched Hollywood movies. And of course I buckle up because it's the current norm, but in fact I should probably also wear a full football uniform, that would really work.
Here is a different rationale for seat belts resulting in reckless driving.
Maybe one of the main things tha discourages reckless driving is traffic fatalities. When somebody you know dies in an auto accident that's sobering and cause for extra caution. But the longer you go when no one you know has died that way, the more it wears off.
There are various things that work like that. I've heard that once upon a time, the year after a big hurricane it was impossible to get hurricane insurance on the coast. But then in later years it would be available but expensive, and each year the price would drop until another hurricane did big damage.
As a rule of thumb, most people "know" about ten thousand people, and they "know well" about a thousand. There are around a thousand people like your dentist and your barber, your son's 2nd grade teacher, people you might not exchange christmas cards with every year but that you think of as knowing. There are ten times that number that you "know", that you'd recognise their names etc. When a year goes by and you don't hear about any of them dying in an auto accident, it's lulling.
By this theory it isn't seat belts that cause reckless driving. It's auto safety that causes reckless driving. The immediate benefits of reckless driving balance out against the risks, and the risks seem lower when nobody you know is dead or maimed.
Things that get a lot of publicity about strangers are like friend-of-a-friend stories or soap operas etc -- they're even less real that TV characters or politicians because you've never identified with them before, they're just stories. People you know are real.
I don't know how true this is but it's more plausible to me than the one that goes reckless people don't believe in seatbelts and don't wear them but they're more reckless because they wear them.
It's worth bearing in mind that the USA is not the world: countries with a higher proportion of cyclists and pedestrians may find that the cost to these road users is higher. IME many of the "anti-seatbelt lobby" are actually the pro-cycling (maybe also pro-pedestrian) lobby.
unit, I think you're describing a textbook case of Too Many Movies syndrome...
I continue to be dumbfounded by the anti-seatbelt lobby. It really seems to me that much seatbelt defiance is based on a principled objection that All Paternalism* Is Evil, regardless of the actual degree of constraint and the actual societal impacts thereof. I find such ideological absolutism pretty weird in a distinctly fuzzy world.
Seatbelts can infringe and corrupt the drivers ability to operate the vehicile safely. Safe driving has precedent over the potential of an accident. The driver should have the right of being "Captain of His Ship" when determining if the use of a seatbelt is obstructing and resisting his safe operation of the car. Current seatbelt laws do not differentiate between driver and passenger and is constitutionally invalid. We have the right to protect ourselves from having the accident, and not depend on the after the fact belt.
ChrisA, if a man talks like he's macho but he refuses to take serious risks, doesn't that mean he's really a wimp who's just pretending?
Chris, status and dominance signaling can plausibly explain a lot of paternalism behavior, and can plausibly be very strong.
J Thomas
Certainly true that there was a macho element to it. I can understand the macho motivation, but my real surprise is that it is strong enough to make people take serious risks.
Btw - properly using safety harness means that there is no real risk of death. On my jobs I only ever had one fatality (in many millions of manhours) and that was nothing to do with high rise work.
ChrisA, I have never worked high iron myself and I've talked for less than 50 hours with people who have. But I wonder if your "status" explanation might have another dimension too. Maybe they feel like people who can do the work without the harness are special in ways that people who can't are not. That they are real men who deserve their pay. They could perhaps see it like being forced to put the training wheels back on their bicycles.
It would be hard for them to explain to you, if that was true. A real C programmer who got hired to do scripting with a bunch of script kiddies might feel similarly, but he couldn't possibly get away with sneaking C code into the product without permission.
People care about their sense of identity first, before anything else. When ironworkers have already accepted that they face death every day, it's hard for them to back away from that.
This idea makes sense from what I know, but I don't really have enough direct experience to judge it.
The problem of people acting against their own clear self interest (like not wearing seatbelts) has puzzled me for a long time. I have run big construction projects in the past (thousands of people), and I have dictated that people use safety measures, such as harnesses when working at heights. It was amazing how many people would try not to use them, we even had to make it a firing basis. Now the people involved had a clear incentive to use the safety systems provided (I would fire them if caught them even if they didn't accept the safety argument), and absolutely no benefit to not using them (they got paid the same even if they did their work faster by not using the systems), so why didn't they use them? There were all sorts of rationales given by the people concerned when we did catch them, none of them consistent, just like the arguments of people not wearing seatbelts. I concluded that there was a status signalling thing going on, they saw my dictate that they use safety gear as a status thing by me (or by my subordinates), a way to show who was boss, and their way of challenging this status and improving their relative status was to not do as I was asking. I think this is why a lot people don't wear seatbelts, they are showing the "man".
I managed to get good compliance on my sites by a mixture of incentives (we paid a bonus to everyone on the site if everyone wore their gear, creating lots of policemen and some peer pressures) plus the threat of dismissal. Not sure how to apply this to the seatbelt debate though.
Bla, that's a good idea. Also, make sure your after-accident tool is mounted so that it's easy to get to, protected, and won't become a projectile.
But most people don't plan ahead that far. Most people, instead of planning for what to do after a big accident that leaves them partly helpless, instead depend on the kindness of strangers.
And it's far easier to keep tools securely fastened in the trunk that could be useful to help others, than it is to arrange things so you can use them to help yourself after the unpredictable damage of a car wreck.
Obviously you should get one of those little seatbelt cutting things. They can be mounted in the car and contain and razor inside a sort of safety case so its impossible to cut yourself with it. They also are often flashlights and windowbreakers.
Robin,
Nevertheless, the Isles report surveyed results obtained in 8 different countries and came to quite different conclusions.
You need to look not just at fatality rates, but the severity of nonfatal injuries. Having spent some years as a EMT and vehicle extrication technician, I'd say there are a lot of collisions that would be fatal with or without seatbelt, but there are many more in which the seatbelt is the difference between minor and major injury.
"my dad also used to drape the seat-belt over his shoulder without locking it. He was afraid of being stuck in the car and have the car go up in flame. In fact, I once was in an accident with him on the highway and we both rushed out of the car as soon as the car stopped. Seeing the oncoming traffic try to slow down was quite scary."
One time a car I was convoying with was involved in a head-on collision. The two people in the back seat were not wearing seatbelts but luckily the front seats stopped them with little injury except a few broken bones. The front seatbelts however suffered the force not only of two bodies but also the impact from two more. They both jammed. The driver was jammed against the steering wheel with barely enough room to breathe, and his chin ws cut on the wheel. Also his head had hit the windshield and crushed the safety glass into a head-shaped pattern. This came from some combination of the steering wheel buckling, and him getting thrown up and over it, and so on. I was glad he didn't wind up impaled on the steering wheel with his head sticking through the windshield. That would have been scary. We got his wife out of there just by cutting the stuck seatbelt and helping her out, but the driver was truly stuck, his door was crushed shut and one broken ankle was caught in the wreckage. It would have been very unfortunate for him if he had been thrown through that windshield since his ankle would definitely not go with him. He breathed easier after I cut his seatbelt, and then he had to wait for the EMTs to get there and cut the car away from him.
If you use seatbelts it's good to have a sharp blade in a handy spot so you can cut the seatbelts after an accident if they are stuck. The safest place to keep the sharp blade is in another vehicles, but you need to make do however you can.
If you don't use seatbelts then after the same accident that would jam a seatbelt you are likely to require no assistance at all.
outeast,
sorry, my dad never watched Hollywood movies. And of course I buckle up because it's the current norm, but in fact I should probably also wear a full football uniform, that would really work.
Here is a different rationale for seat belts resulting in reckless driving.
Maybe one of the main things tha discourages reckless driving is traffic fatalities. When somebody you know dies in an auto accident that's sobering and cause for extra caution. But the longer you go when no one you know has died that way, the more it wears off.
There are various things that work like that. I've heard that once upon a time, the year after a big hurricane it was impossible to get hurricane insurance on the coast. But then in later years it would be available but expensive, and each year the price would drop until another hurricane did big damage.
As a rule of thumb, most people "know" about ten thousand people, and they "know well" about a thousand. There are around a thousand people like your dentist and your barber, your son's 2nd grade teacher, people you might not exchange christmas cards with every year but that you think of as knowing. There are ten times that number that you "know", that you'd recognise their names etc. When a year goes by and you don't hear about any of them dying in an auto accident, it's lulling.
By this theory it isn't seat belts that cause reckless driving. It's auto safety that causes reckless driving. The immediate benefits of reckless driving balance out against the risks, and the risks seem lower when nobody you know is dead or maimed.
Things that get a lot of publicity about strangers are like friend-of-a-friend stories or soap operas etc -- they're even less real that TV characters or politicians because you've never identified with them before, they're just stories. People you know are real.
I don't know how true this is but it's more plausible to me than the one that goes reckless people don't believe in seatbelts and don't wear them but they're more reckless because they wear them.
James, note the study I'm citing suggests seat belts do not in fact hurt cyclists and pedestrians.
It's worth bearing in mind that the USA is not the world: countries with a higher proportion of cyclists and pedestrians may find that the cost to these road users is higher. IME many of the "anti-seatbelt lobby" are actually the pro-cycling (maybe also pro-pedestrian) lobby.
unit, I think you're describing a textbook case of Too Many Movies syndrome...
I continue to be dumbfounded by the anti-seatbelt lobby. It really seems to me that much seatbelt defiance is based on a principled objection that All Paternalism* Is Evil, regardless of the actual degree of constraint and the actual societal impacts thereof. I find such ideological absolutism pretty weird in a distinctly fuzzy world.