Want to stay alive on Texas roads? This data makes the case for wearing seat belts
It has been 35 years since Texas enacted a law requiring motorists to wear seat belts.
Yet even to this day, nearly half of all crashes in North Texas involve a motorist not strapping into a safety belt, according to a just-released report from CoPilot, an automobile sales listing site.
The report, which uses data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, shows that 44.3% of fatal crashes in Texas involve an unrestrained motorist. The report looked at crashes that occurred from 2016-18.
In the Dallas-Plano-Irving area, 45.8% of fatalities involved a lack of seat belt use during that three-year period. The report didn’t break out data specifically for Fort Worth.
Those figures are especially surprising considering that nearly 95 of every 100 motorists in the Lone Star State are regular seat belt users.
So, those who refuse to strap themselves in are far more likely to be killed on the highways and city streets of Texas than those who comply with the law.
“In Texas, 5.1% of commuters don’t wear seat belts, the 15th lowest share of commuters of all U.S. states,” the CoPilot report states. “Shockingly, these unrestrained commuters still comprise 44.3% of those killed in Texas car accidents.”
In 2018, 36,560 people were killed on U.S. roads, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. That’s about a 16.5% decrease from 43,825 people killed in 1985, the year by which Texas and most other states had declared safety belt use mandatory.
Another reason that fatalities have dropped two straight years may be that many cities are focusing on making design improvements to stretches of road that are known to be potentially deadly, according to the National Safety Council said.
“Thirty-eight thousand deaths is still unacceptable, even if it is fewer than in years past,” Lorraine M. Martin, the council’s president and chief executive, said in a news release. “We are encouraged by the actions so many organizations are taking to reduce deaths, and we applaud legislation that curtails common crash causes such as impairment, distraction and speed.”
