Make everyone always wear their safety gear, be it in the car, on the bike, at the workplace. Make them. Always. Do not allow anyone to omit anytime, never ever.
Anon could be fucking his happy girlfriend of five years right now if he had followed this simple rule.
I dated someone a long time ago and when they first got into my car, I waited for them to put their seatvrlt on. They refused. I told them the car isn’t moving until their seatbelt is on, and if they take it off, the car stops.
I used basically the same strategy when my dad first lit a cigarette in my car.
This thing isn't moving an inch if you smoke and I'll stop if you light it again.
Times have changed. They thankfully don't even smoke in their own car anymore.
I vividly remember the hell of road trips with both my parents smoking with the windows up and I'm not dealing with this in my own car or home.
In my country the driver is liable for passengers not wearing their seatbelt. The fine is around €60 per passenger. Most people just pay this back to the driver, but if somebody decides not to, the driver can't do anything about that.
In my country, the driver is fined either way, and the passenger is also fined if they have a license (and thus should know better). Seems to work well enough
in my country the passenger is responsible for their own seatbelt if they are over 15. for passengers under 15 it's their parent. if the parent is not present, only then it's the driver.
I honestly don't know who's liable in my country because it's a situation I will not accept to happen. If I'm driving, everyone is buckled or the car doesn't move. I don't do it because of the law, I do it because I refuse to have that guilt on my conscience if there is an accident.
Well I don't understand why people don't wear seat belts. Isn't that even illegal? In Germany the driver can be hold accountable for people not wearing the seat belts.
Child mentality. They claim the seatbelt is annoying on the neck or big government things. Perhaps, but being an adult is also about doing what is nessesary for you and your family.
I've even seen people try to say it's somehow more dangerous because of ridiculous anecdotal experience like "Well I knew this guy who got into a massive roll over accident while drunk and he couldn't escape because of his seatbelt". Yeah man the seatbelt was the problem here...
If the seatbelt is bothering your neck, you're not wearing it properly. Most seatbelts are adjustable or are designed to bit over the shoulder by even short passengers.
In the US, the specifics depend on the state. It's often not "primary enforcement", which means you can't be pulled over specifically for that, but it can be added on when pulled over for something else. In some states, yes, the driver can be held responsible for passengers not having seatbelts on. It may also matter if the passenger is a minor.
In the US, it's usually a misdemeanor even for passengers (depends on state though). Considering what's at stake above and beyond a ticket, I chalk it up to garbage risk assessment skills.
Possible case : me.
I often forget my seat belt. Fortunately, most people remind me about it and then I immediately fasten it.
The reason is simple. I think I use a car, always as a passenger, like 3 times a year. When I used to drive, it was such an automatic gesture I'd never forget it. But it's so easy to forget when it becomes very rare. Everything is hypnotizing when you enter a car. I'm glad the driver reminds me, but I could be OP's lost one.
It took me years of yelling at my Mother-In-Law, who I don't even like in the slightest, to get her to wear a seatbelt, but my kids still have their grandmother and learned not to argue against wearing one themselves.
Yup. Even without a passenger fatality, or driver injury for that matter, an accident like that can still screw your brain up. Anon needs all the therapy.
No he didn't, you irresponsible fuck. Your reckless killed her. If you had been watching the road and driving at a safe speed, she'd be alive right now. A stalled car on a straight road shouldn't present an unavoidable obstacle for a car driving at or under the posted speed limit. Take some ownership of your own mistakes before you start trying to blame the almighty for your fuckups.
The song doesn't mention the circumstances, but there are a lot of situations where this isn't reckless driving, such as:
winding roads, like in the mountains - visibility is reduced and stopping distance is lengthened
rainy conditions - stopping and steering are significantly impacted
distracted by your date - reduces reaction time
It's quite understandable for a young driver to not properly compensate for the above. The fact that the girl asks the driver to hold her tells me that this likely wasn't reckless driving. Here's the origin of the song:
Cochran said he first had the idea for "Last Kiss" when he was living in Thomaston, Ga., near a treacherous stretch of two-lane rural highway. "There were two or three accidents a year there and people were always getting killed," he said. "It was horrible. ... So I said, 'I'm gonna write a song about a car wreck.' "
It could probably have been avoided, but that doesn't mean the driver was reckless. It seems the infrastructure was likely the main culprit here.
I have seen multiple accidents but the ones that stick with me is the truck that hit a sign and ejected the driver and passenger onto the highway were they were run over multiple times.
And one where a convertible hit a curb for a light rail flipped and smashed into a pole ejecting the passenger who lived but decapitated the driver still in the car.
Man I would agree that you should always wear your seatbelt because it's probably safer in the heavy metal box but cars are just absolutely death traps waiting for a bad or distracted moment to kill you.
Pick a safe car. Tell people you love them and drive safe.
There's no such thing as a safe car. Sure, you can have large crumple zones, but in a full on crash, it's still a toss of the dice if you make it out alive. You probably didn't mean it that way, but I despise the car industry selling ever-larger monstrosities under the pentence of safety, when all they do is put other people in danger