Our results suggest that if all states had primary enforcement seatbelt laws then regular youth seatbelt use would be nearly universal and youth fatalities would fall by about 120 per year.
Here is the paper. My question: how many expected saved lives are required for this law to be a good idea? Any comment on this post should suggest a specific numerical answer to that question.
I think the more important number is the reduction in serious injuries. How many people would be saved from a life in a wheelchair by using seatbelts?
So, the answer is 0.
That’s easy; 234.
Among other things, it depends in large part upon the necessary expenditure of law enforcement resources. How many people have to be pulled over and fined (costly transfer) for each life-unit or health-unit saved? Can primary seatbelt enforcement be easily integrated into a cop’s regular duties, or are some going to be specifically looking for it, hence distracted from other things?
Part of me wishes it would be easier to issue fines for traffic behaviors which score high on commonality * danger, like high-speed tailgating, or barely-enough-time passing on two-lanes. Instead, practically harmless cases of speeding (in the fast lane, no traffic) are a huge waste of resources, common simply because proof is easy to come by.
For libertarian nuts, like myself, the answer is basically infinite. No matter how many people make bad choices that end in their own death, you can’t force people to make good choices. The ‘right’ thing to do is to strongly recommend that people use their seatbelt.
The realistic answer (i.e. for economists) is to find how much the government spends on each death (and injury) that could have been avoided with a seatbelt, then figure out how effective a seatbelt law would be (what percentage would begin using a seatbelt because of the law) and enact the law when the cost of the enforcement equals the savings from fewer deaths and injuries.
Jolly Blogger’s first paragraph is the libertarian response I suppose, while his second paragraph is the utilitarian response. I’m much more inclined to agree with the former.
Who was it that said if we want to increase safety on the roads put a dagger in the middle of the steering wheel aimed right at the driver?
For libertarian nuts, like myself, the answer is basically infinite. No matter how many people make bad choices that end in their own death, you can’t force people to make good choices.
I used to believe this, but it turns out that driving without a seatbelt significantly increases the chances not only of you getting injured in an accident, but of other people in or out of your car dying. A driver with seatbelt can evidently exert enough control in an accident to increase the probability of his passengers and any bystanders living through it, if only by not becoming a large blunt object flying through the air at them. The effect is also present for unbelted passengers, to a smaller degree. No, I don’t have a cite.
That moves seatbelt use out of the realm of personal responsibility, and into the realm of negligent endangerment, as far as libertarian analyses go. That makes unbelted driving not merely stupid, but morally wrong and legally sanctionable.
Joe: AFAIK, it was Gordon Tullock who suggested spiked steering wheels as a way to create safer driving.
120 is good enough
Umm…every law saves zero lives, so I’m inclined to agree with talboito that that is a poor way to judge whether a law is warranted.
I’m of the belief that the minimum of civic-mindedness that should be expected of people is that they perform effortless or nearly-effortless acts that improve general well-being. For example, there is almost no cost in throwing trash in the garbage versus littering, so a minimum expectation is that people should not litter. That said, many people are not civic-minded (hence the existence of litter), which is why there are laws to encourage even these simple acts. I’ll throw my vote in for a law requiring seatbelt in order to save one life (although, bloggers and others have suggested to me that seatbelt wearers drive more recklessly, so obviously if such a law were to cause more accidents than it would prevent, then it should not be instituted).
I’m not libertarian and not so good at numbers. I would suggest, therefore, that those who choose not to seatbelt their children be required to make them available for organ donation. It’s just a way, you know, to give back to the community.
How many lives would be saved if we forced all drivers to wear helmets? The answer to the seatbelt question is probably about the same as the answer to the helmet question.
My answer is “infinity” to both questions. Those who have significantly different answers to the two questions have some explaining to do.
120 is nothing. We could save tens of thousands of lives by reducing the national speed limit to 45. And enforcing it at the fuel injectors. And requiring everyone to wear helmets. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives by making tobacco illegal. Not to mention alcohol. And high-cholesterol foods.
Oops. I meant “saving lives.”
There was story a circulation on the web a few years back about a guy being killed by police, who started chasing him because he was not wearing a seat belt.
Presumably the same decrease in deaths can be achieved by keeping the non-wearing of a seat belt a secondary offense and increasing the fine — an approach I prefer to making seat belt non-use a primary offense. But I think that it probably would make even more sense to offer two different kinds of driver’s licenses, those in which the driver is entitled to drive without a seatbelt, and those which require a seatbelt. The ‘unbelted’ license should cost more but not tons more, say, $100 extra per year. In the event of an accident or a primary offense in which the driver is found not to be belted, the license would be checked. Someone driving unbelted, who did not have an ‘unbelted’ license, would then have to pay a significant fine, reflecting the relatively low probability that he would be caught.
If you put your seatbelt on as you’re pulling out of the parking space, the marginal time cost approaches zero, no matter what your wage rate is.
We all die sooner or later. Death has both positive and negative externalities — for example, the siblings of the dead people may actually benefit in the long run whereas the parents and the businesses they manage are likely to suffer(re: the CEO paper discussed a few days ago.) The value of life is so intractable that whether to enforce a law like this becomes a matter of the subjective preference of a decision maker. There is no point arguing, simply toss a coin and decide.
Re: my last post.
Darnit, I forgot to factor in economic growth! I’m not sure we can accurately predict that over such long periods though…
In health care the usual cost point in treating a QALY (quality-adjusted-life-year) is around $40,000-$50,000. If a treatment expected to prolong someone’s life two years in perfect health costs more than $100,000, it is often not done. Years spent in less than perfect health are adjusted downwards. So if you figure that these 120 teens (average age 15) will live to an average age of 75 in perfect health (some more, some less, just an average) then each life “saved” is really saving 60 QALYs. 60 x 120 = 7,200 QALYs. At $40,000 per QALY, the cost we should be willing to spend to prevent these 120 tragedies is 7,200 x 40,000 = $288 million. So if the cost of enforcement is less than this figure, the cost is worth it.
42, of course. I’m amazing that nobody has named it yet.
If car manufacturers weren’t forced to actually install safety equipment due to government regulation, bitterly fought by such well run and high quality companies as Chrysler and GM, then we would not have to worry about such niggling questions.
Oh, by the way – according to a former GM manager in a Washington Post series, the quantifiable but ‘minimal’ chance of you being burned alive in a crash due to using a gasoline tank which cost $25 less was profitable for GM, even after factoring in the lawsuits and medical expenses due to their design decision.
Personally, I feel much more confident driving a vehicle shaped mainly by relatively straightforward engineering, instead of safety regulations. But then, I ride a motorcycle, and thus don’t worry about being trapped in my vehicle while being burned alive. And yes, I do actually know people who have died that way – and ones who have survived the experience.
But I do like answer no. 1, as that fits my way of thinking – we will all die, but life in a wheelchair is certainly an undesirable outcome, both personally and socially. And to add to this – my opinion about helmet laws is simple – if the rescue crew doesn’t see a rider’s helmet, they should just drive away. Avoiding paying for their decisions is what so many people turn to government for, and I, for one, who always wears a helmet, see no need to waste my money interfering in natural selection. And if the image of leaving a bleeding, broken human being by the side of the road bothers you, and you complain about the nanny state abstractly, maybe it is time to think about what your cheap rhetoric means.
Is this just really about “revenue enhancement”?
Recently here in Columbus OH, the police department actually bragged about their recent purchase of new police cruisers being the result of revenue from newly-installed red light cameras.
You’d think that if The State was actually interested in forcing people to make “good choices”, seat-belt laws would result in jail time, not fines. Fines are a Gov’t profit center.
If I have chocolate biscuits in the house I always put them somewhere I won’t see them if I happen to open the cupboard.
This is because I know that if I do see them I know there is a good chance I will eat them all despite rationally knowing
that eating chocolate buscuits isn’t good for me. It’s almost as if I’m some kind of monkey rather than a 100% rational
human being. Perhaps it’s because my mother dropped me on my head when I was young? Anyway, I like the seat belt and speed limit laws we have here in Australia as they keep me from doing things when I’m less than 100% rational that I wouldn’t do in my more rational moments. However I do see how such laws could be inconvenient to people who are always 100% rational.
Especially in a nominally libertarian discussion, it is important to remember the history of primary seatbelt enforcement. The notion suddenly burst upon the scene, dripping with concern about safety, just after the Supreme Court ruled certain traffic stop searches unconstitutional. Primary seatbelt enforcement gives the police a new legitimate excuse for pulling over the driver that fits their target profile.
“Is this just really about “revenue enhancement”?”
Yes it is! Let’s see what the number turn out to be if the ticketing agency has to donate all revenue received to a local children’s hospital. I bet the gov’t loses interest pretty fast.
The number is 301 million.
No, Russell Nelson, the appropriate number is 9 x 6.
And if it turned out that requiring all auto passengers to wear crash helmets saved N lives, how big would N have to be before seatbelt law enthusiasts would support that also? Because in a country of 300 million, N is certainly not zero. And most states require helmets for motorcyclists, so there is precedent.
The question at issue has little to do with the wisdom of mandatory seatbelt laws. Rather, it assumes a mandatory seatbelt law and questions only whether more effective enforcement tools should be available.
If one can reduce the cost of enforcing a law, or enforce it more effectively for the same amount of money, then one should take the step *regardless of whether lives are saved*. Saved lives are simply an added benefit.
Making failure to buckle a primary offense lowers enforcement costs in two ways–first, drivers are more likely to self-comply because there is a greater chance of a penalty (i.e., can’t avoid simply by driving legally). Second, cops can ticket the offense directly, rather than only after finding some other reason to do so.
I think value of lives saved by mandatory should be 301 million. Seatbelt laws as primary enforcement mechanism are simply a ruse by law enforcement to extort more money from you. I had a recent experience with a law enforcement officer who accused me on no factual basis at all that I was not wearing my seat belt. I was adjusting my radio when I drove past him and he pulled me over and tried to get me to “admit” to not wearing my seat belt. Being that as soon as I “admitted” to this this, it would be admissible in court and I would have made my own noose. Needless to say, I politely countered his bullying assertion.
In Mass, there is a seatbelt law, but it isn’t heavily enforced. If you are pulled over for something else, you can be fined ($50 per unbelted person), but you can’t be pulled over for lack of a belt.
Despite this lack of enforcement, nearly everyone who learned to drive after the law was passed uses a seatbelt nearly 100% of the time. Putting on a seatbelt is how they were taught to enter a car when they were learning to drive…if you didn’t put your belt on, you couldn’t pass the driver’s test.
This seems like an easy thing to me. It will save the taxpayers money in the long run (fewer severe injuries/deaths in accidents, so fewer rescue/police costs) without any enforcement costs. And it saves lives, without really inconveniencing anyone.
Sorry, I forgot to put a number on my post. Zero, because seatbelts reduce the number of crippling injuries. Sometimes they achieve this by causing the wearer’s heart to burst but I consider this to be a plus. I’ll gladly trade a small chance of a quick death for a large chance of permentally crippling injuries including a high chance of brain damage.
As I see it, this has no cost in real liberty for the people “forced” to wear seatbelts. You already need a government license to drive a car, what difference does it make that they add one more requirement to get it? Especially such a common-sense one, which have pretty universal support after having been tried for a while?
We’re still waiting for somebody to explain why, if the government is justified in requiring seat belts, it would not be justified in requiring helmets. Head injuries from auto accidents are often highly debilitating. Motorcyclists, bicyclists, skate-boarders, and skiers wear helmets. So do race-car drivers. Why not drivers (and passengers) driving down the interstate at 70mph?
The “dagger on steering wheel” thinking would be a good parody of libertarian/armchair economist thinking, except there are actually people who believe it.
The ‘dagger’ was a thought experiment to point out that the existence of safety equipment causes people to drive more aggressively than they would otherwise and that this compensating behavior not only offsets part of the benefit of the safety improvement, but makes the world more dangerous for people outside the car. Seat-belts make those in the car safer, but pedestrians less safe (and a dagger in the center of the wheel would make pedestrians safer still — which obviously doesn’t make it a good idea).
I have a friend who got into an accident on an icy road. He was wearing a seatbelt. He wound up banging his head on the side window and went to the hospital to have it checked out.
A helmet would have been quite beneficial. In any case, aaron m (or others), even if we accept that helmets save fewer lives than seatbelts, HOW MANY lives would need to be saved by helmets to justify making them mandatory?
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