Belt up
CONSUMING INTEREST LESLIE ADRIAN
For the purposes of this sermon I wish you to apprehend that the major difference be- tween a motor-car and a human being lies in their relative crushability. When a car hits a so-called immovable object, such as the prover- bial brick wall, the car crumples. How far it crumples depends on a variety of factors, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it crumples by about two feet. If we were now to project at an identical brick wall a human being travelling at the same velocity as the car, we should find that the human being crumples only a couple of inches. Since the deceleration of an object being brought to rest from a given velocity depends on the distance over which this happens, it follows that the human being has decelerated approximately ten times as quickly as the car. And since the forces ex- perienced by a given mass when it is de- celerated are proportional to the rate of deceleration, it also follows that the forces ex- perienced by the human being are considerably greater than they would have been had he been part of the car.
Hency safety belts. A safety belt is purely a device for incorporating a person into the struc- ture of a car, so that be can share the advan- tages of the latter's crushability. Someone who
is strapped in will decelerate over a distance approximately equal to the maximum amount the car crumples. Someone who is not strapped in will continue forward with undiminished velocity until he reaches the nearest solid ob- ject—and by the time that happens the car has almost finished crumpling, so the situation becomes that of human being projected against brick wall. From the point of view of the individual involved, the two situations differ rather materially !
This basic theory much simplified and com- pressed, I'd better add, lest pundits think me unaware of the gaps and qualifications—applies mainly to accidents in which a car meets its Waterloo more or less head-on. However, this is the case in about two thirds of motor acci- dents. Such frequency of frontal impacts con- tradicts the conclusion of the learned judge who, after many years' experience on the bench, commented that the vast majority of accidents seemed to occur between vehicles which were stationary and on opposite sides of the road. But it is in accordance with com- mon observation and with collected statistics.
I could wish that in this country there was a better organised system for collecting statis- tics of the part played in accidents by safety belts in general and different types in particu- lar. The Road Research Laboratory still uses an inadequate and awkward method of obtain- ing reports from seat-belt owners via seat-belt manufacturers, while the police accident report forms include no mention of the role played by seat belts. Nevertheless, the theoretical con- clusion that in some two thirds of motor accidents you get maximum protection from a safety belt—and in most others the way the belt holds you down in the seat is likely to give a considerable measure of protection—is borne out by empirical surveys. These show a distinctly lower incidence of death and serious injury for those who were strapped in.
Despite such evidence, the old proverb 'You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make him drink' now has a modern equivalent. This is: `You can put safety belts into every motor-car but you cannot make people wear them.' For practically a month all cars regis- tered after December 1965 have been required by law to have safety belts fitted to drivers' and passengers' front seats. But just stand at the side of any busy road and count the num- ber of seat belts that are flapping, in defiant symbolism of the fact that the cars' occupants are not. Will the £200,000 and more that the Ministry of Transport is spending on publicity this summer and autumn really reverse or modify such lemming-like behaviour? Not, I fancy, unless the objections of the more articu- late lemmings are understood and rebutted.
Let those who grumble about the constrict- ing inconvenience of safety belts be encouraged to switch to automatics with an inertia reel, which give more freedom of movement. Let those who fear they will be trapped by their belts in cars which have burst into flames' be advised that such accidents, whilst common enough in films and on TV, arc a rarity in real life. Let those who argue that safety belts can cause internal injuries be persuaded that it is only if they suffer such injuries while being held in their car seats that they arc likely to be around afterwards to complain. And let those who say, 'If I want to risk killing myself, what right have you to interfere?' reflect that to launch oneself into eternity, albeit by acci- dent, is, in the words of John Churton Collins, the worst form of murder, because it leaves no opportunity for repentance.
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