Editorial: Knuckle down and buckle up

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The news this week that we are, with a compliance rate of 96 per cent, the world's most conscientious wearers of seat belts in motor vehicles raises a couple of questions.

The first is: what is the matter with the other developed countries, all which have some sort of legislative requirement to buckle up? And what is the matter with the other 4 per cent of New Zealanders?

The law made safety-belt use compulsory in the front seat almost 40 years ago and in all seats more than 20 years ago.

After that period of time, and countless publicity campaigns reminding us of the need to "make it click", we might have expected that it had become second nature in the way that, say, not smoking in restaurants has become embedded in less than half the time.

By the standards of law enforcement, a 96 per cent compliance rate is probably a pretty good one. But in terms of common sense, a 4 per cent non-compliance rate seems extraordinarily negligent.

Figures obtained by Radio New Zealand showed that 361,000 seat-belt offences were detected - many more would have been committed and not detected - in the past five years. That's 200 a day.

And there is more to these numbers than naughty drivers putting one over the police.

The Automobile Association crunched the crash analysis numbers and found that, since 2000, failure to wear a seat belt contributed to 996 road deaths. Last year alone, that number was 73 - around 20 per cent of those killed on the road.

The science supporting the use of seat belts is by now as solid as it gets. Even the proponents of a countervailing risk analysis, which argues that drivers unconsciously compensate for the security of seat belts by driving less cautiously, agree that the belts save lives and protect against injury.

And the argument that failure to wear a seat belt is a victimless crime, since only the non-wearer is endangered, is a threadbare one: in a country where hard-pressed health and accident compensation systems protect us from the consequences of our stupidity, it's part of the social contract not to be more stupid than necessary.

Some of those who do not wear belts are presumably just stupid. They may also be driven by carelessness, misplaced macho arrogance or reflexive defiance. It all adds up to the same thing.

The AA responded to the release of the figures by calling for more money to be spent on driver education - an idea quite reasonably rejected by the Transport Agency on the grounds that after 40 years of flouting the law, the recidivist 4 per cent are hardly likely to see the light in a television ad.

But the Government does not have a monopoly on driver education. Just as friends don't let friends drive drunk, car occupants owe it to each other to check that seat belts are fastened before they roll.

The same self-monitoring could and should be brought to bear on drivers using cellphones, who seemed only briefly to notice that a law against such dangerous conduct was passed more than 18 months ago.

Police, a thin blue line stretched thinner each year, will never catch everyone who infringes traffic laws. We need to mature as a driving community, so that we accept responsibilty not just for observing the law, but for keeping each other safe.