Seat Belts Save Lives?

Recently, I had occasion to patronize a school bus. (No, I didn’t enroll in kindergarten. if you must know, I do competitive race walking, and the buses were needed to get us from the parking lot to the starting point of the race, and back). I’m not really overweight (I keep telling myself), but the seats were a really tight fit for ordinary people. No mystery here: these vehicles are used primarily to ferry around school children, and they are lots easier to squeeze into limited spaces than adults.

But the shockeroo was that there were no seat belts available anywhere; not a single one. I would have thought that if seat belts actually save lives, young children would have them most certainly, and first to boot, since they are smaller, weaker, and more vulnerable than grown-ups.

Shows how much I know.

So I did a bit of research, to try to find out how the all and ever-loving state apparatus could have missed this seemingly splendid paternalistic opportunity. What I came up with was not comforting at all.

One theory is that of “compartmentalization.” According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA – the group that is responsible for some 40,000 annual highway deaths) “…(t)his requires that the interior of large buses protect children without them needing to buckle up. Through compartmentalization, children are protected from crashes by strong, closely-spaced seats that have energy-absorbing seat backs.”

I don’t know about those “energy-absorbing seat backs.” During my brief trip, I touched the one in front of me. It might have “absorbed energy,” whatever that means, but it seemed pretty solid to me. I’d sure hate to collide with one if them in an accident. I’m not too confident that a seven-year-old child would do very well at all in impacting them. And, if they were so great, why not require that all transportation vehicles employ them? It simply makes no sense to bifurcate matters in this manner; we are all frail human beings – children and adults alike — when one vehicle rams into another at speed.

Here is another justification: “School buses are most often used to transport children, and the only adult in the vehicle is there to drive. In the instance where there was an accident, the driver would likely have to unbuckle the passengers, a time-consuming process that could prove dangerous for others.” But this is just plain silly. Ten-year-olds, and even younger children, are perfectly capable of unbuckling their seat belts, and buckling them too. They do so every day in their family automobiles. This hardly explains why so called “public transportation”, street buses, subway trains, Amtrak, etc., are also lacking seat belts.

Here is yet another justification: “A seatbelt is of most use where a collision causes rapid deceleration. Trains carry so much momentum that they do not stop rapidly, even in very severe collisions.” This a good competitor with the previous excuses in the silliness sweepstakes. You can’t tell me that when two trains, or buses, meet in a head-on collision, that they don’t both stop rapidly, and on the dime, despite massive previous momentum. Ditto for when a bus impacts a really thick brick wall, no matter has fast it was going beforehand.

Here is an alternative explanation: it is easier to compel other people to do things, when you have the power to ride roughshod over them, then to subject yourself to the same regulations you impose on others. It is thus no accident that the government makes an exception for its own vehicles while imposing all sorts of rules on the mulcted citizenry.

So, should we have seatbelts or should we not?

This is not the sort of question that can or should be asked in the free society? It is akin to querying, should we have peas or carrots, and if both in what proportion? Or, should we have vanilla or chocolate ice cream, and if both in what proportion? The answer emanating from the disciples of Adam Smith is, let the market decide on all these questions, certainly including seatbelts.

Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and is co-author of the 2015 book Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers. New York City, N.Y.: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield (with Peter Lothian Nelson ).

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