[thebigjewbowski]

I was thinking about something similar the other day — why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not?

You know what vehicle I see all the time that doesn’t require a license or minimum age, doesn’t have any safety features and can go 15-20 mph alongside traffic and often on a city sidewalk amongst pedestrians? A bicycle ;)

[neuronerdgirl]

You not wearing a seatbelt puts other people in the vehicle at risk because your body becomes a massive flying object in the cabin when you are hit that can injure or kill others in the vehicle with you.

[willcipriano]

You the sort of person who will tie down a bag of dog food or bag of soup cans when you load them into a vehicle without a trunk?

[defrost]

Absolutely.

Also the person that ties down loads with multiple ropes | straps truckies hitches and stoppers. Not to mention stopping every few hundred miles to check tensions and reset as required.

Loose loads are a pain in the arse and often dangerous.

A soup can rolling loose and jamming up under a brake or accelerator pedal is something that really happens .. and it's no fun when it does.

[nine_k]

BTW I wonder why space behind a pedal is still a thing. If I were building a car, I would make it impossible to put anything under pedals, much like you cannot jam anything below a piano key.

[mlyle]

Making a really tight seam is its own problem-- ever encounter an old piano with keys that stick?

[ilyt]

I just put them in passenger foot area, good enough.

[Swizec]

Yes. I always put seatbelts on big stuff in the rear seats

[habosa]

I’d really prefer not to kill anybody else I’m sharing the road with, all else equal. It would be quite traumatic for that persons family and for me too.

[renewiltord]

True. Which is why I would like to make it the law that all motor vehicle occupants should wear helmets. This will mean saving billions of life years lost through traumatic brain injuries.

[HWR_14]

What if the helmets were giant (unlike bike helmets, the rider doesn't have to carry the entire weight or air resistance). Then, instead of filling the helmets with hard styrofoam, we could fill them with something even softer, maybe a compressible gas. People could obviously store them in the vehicle. It might be annoying to wear them all the time, so we could mandate that cars detect when you are about to be in a crash and slam a helmet on your head. Although, come to think of it, it doesn't need to surround your whole head. What if we could make it just appear between your head and anything you were going to hit. Hey, we could even have those things hold the micro helmets. Since they are filled with air, we can use air pressure to deploy them fast, these flexible bags of air.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're kind of making their point for them.

It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking.

Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?

[HWR_14]

I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them. They said safety rules infringe on their freedom, and added an example of a more severe safety rule that would infringe on their freedom. I pointed out we also implemented a rule that does the thing they implied was more severe.

Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every possible emergency or every possible rule we would allow an exception to.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them.

They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?

> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.

In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.

And for the same reason the exceptions are typically excessively narrow. Suppose you lose your helmet while camping, so you have plenty of food and water and can make the 3-day walk back to civilization. There is no risk of death. But then you have a three day walk for what would have been a two hour ride, which is going to make you late for work on Monday. Is not being late for work a necessity? And yet, is it reasonable to punish someone who makes that choice?

[ilyt]

Yes. Catering for extreme edge cases is a waste of time, just pay your ticket dumbass, how the fuck you even "lose" a helmet and why the fuck you didn't bring a phone charger?

Given the chance of the story being fabricated close to 100% catering for it is unreasonable.

[Shaanie]

You can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.

[AnthonyMouse]

You're not making the point you think you are. All a driver license proves is that you took a basic class as a teenager and have been paying the government a fee since then. You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.

[renewiltord]

Helmets are still advantageous and will continue to abate TBIs in that tool regimen. In addition, helmets can be used in a backwards compatible way to increase safety in older cars (which make up a very large fraction of vehicles on the street).

[woodruffw]

> why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not?

I care for a basic and selfish reason beyond the "human missile" one: if I'm in a car crash with you and there's only one bed available in the ER, I don't want your lack of a seatbelt to be the source of a hard choice by the doctors operating on us.

[willcipriano]

Don't worry that bed will be occupied by a opioid addict anyway.

[tehwebguy]

Plus nobody should have to scrape you off asphalt

[rhaway84773]

If you opt out of ER visits and are ok with being left to die if you’re in a car accident, sure, don’t wear a seatbelt.

Also, you know who dies in much greater numbers than pedestrians due to vehicle crashes? The pedestrians walking by the bicyclists.

So should pedestrians be forced to wear massive armors of steel when they walk around?

Oh wait, that’s how so many awful American cities are designed. With absolutely no space for pedestrians who have to drive everywhere.

In reality there’s only 1 source of danger on streets. Massive 2 ton vehicles that endanger their own occupants and everyone around them. Take away the 2 tons of metal usually carrying 1 person and everyone is safe.

[ilyt]

MX-5's for everyone!

But yeah, without cars motorcycles and scooters suddenly become much safer way of transport