Washington Drivers Know the Value of Seat Belts…Mostly

Posted & filed under Auto Safety, insurance news, Washington Car Insurance.

Every year, industry authorities publish a list of the safest new cars on the market, because advanced safety features help reduce insurance risk, and therefore make premiums lower. Even if your car isn’t on the list however, you can make it much safer just by wearing your seat belt.

Apparently, drivers who live in Washington state know this, because the Traffic Safety Commissioner there says that roughly 98% of them are buckling up, giving Washington one of the highest rates of seat belt use in the entire country. This percentage of safety belt wearers, 97.6% if you want to be exact, reflects a 1.2% improvement over last year’s numbers, but even so, the usage rate has been around 96.4% for several years.

Lowell Porter director of the Washington Traffic Safety Commission explains, “The closer we get to 100 percent seat belt use, the more difficult it becomes to realize higher use rates. To jump from 96.4 to 97.6 percent is truly a significant improvement that moves Washington closer to its goal of zero traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030.”

State law in Washington law requires that all passengers wear seat belts, and allows police to write tickets for lack of use, even if no other infraction occurs.

Every year, observers in each state conduct a survey of safety belt use and report the data to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Dick Doane, one of the research investigators tracking seat belt use told the press, “The increase of 1.2 percent in the past year means that one third of nonusers in 2009 became seat belt users in 2010, truly an amazing accomplishment given that Washington has maintained one of the highest seat belt use rates in the nation for so many years.”

Despite this, says Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste, state troopers are still writing almost 47,000 tickets a year to those not using their seat belts. “These last few percentage points represent people who have simply not gotten the message about the value of seat belts,” he elaborated. “It appears that enforcement is the only way to win their compliance, and we will not hesitate to use that tool.”

According to the most recent available numbers, 84 percent of drivers across the country used seat belts in 2009. Washington was in fourth place, with Michigan first at 98 percent, followed by Hawaii and Oregon.