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Originally Posted by pjrob
Recently it has dropped to 10.2 Litres/100 Kilometres. This is quite dramatic after trying for so long and not succeeding.
It came as a result of trying to assess the risk-compensatory effect of removing ones seatbelt.
It was a dramatic enough drop for me to say this against all my conditioning.
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It's entirely possible that you drive safer and as a consequence use less gas in the process.
But there's no reason why you couldn't drive the same way with your seat belt on.
On ecomodder, we call it
adjusting the nut behind the wheel.
There's still some play on your nut
Since New Year, my fuel consumption is 20% better than it was 5 years ago - same but older car on essentially the same but busier routes.
Add to that that I started out with about half your fuel consumption ...
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I was only trying to assess the truth of the idea that one drives less safely with a seatbelt and more safely without one primarily because of reports that this occurs with bicycle helmets also.
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It's been like that with the introduction of just about every obvious safety feature.
But the higher accident rate doesn't necessarily mean more deaths.
In the early days of ABS, there were more recorded accidents with ABS-equipped cars as their users apparently got overconfident. But the higher accident rate didn't really kill more drivers and passengers. As ABS spread throughout the fleet, then became mandatory on new cars (at least in the EU), road fatalities have dropped further.
Traction control systems don't seem to have the averse introduction-effect, as they are rather invisible to the driver in most / normal driving conditions.
Politicians like to attribute the reduction in road deaths to their policies, but IMO it's all due to better technology (car and medical care) rather than better politics.
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I welcome any criticism or remarks about this and also refer anyone who is interested in the relative efficacy of seatbelts to read up on the work of English researcher Prof. John Adams.
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I've been reading a bit on
John Adams and I'm not impressed, to say the least.
25-30% of all Belgian car road casualties would have survived if only they had worn their seat belts.
Our national death toll would instantly decrease by some 12% !
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Originally Posted by pjrob
Seatbelt law started right here where I am in 1971. Everybody here believes in it because when the number of road deaths had dropped from over 1000 in 1971 to about 600-700 by 1974 we believed it was due to seatbelt law.
The problem is the same drop was recorded everywhere in the world, even greater in some places.
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A good part of the world also mandated seat belts around that time.
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The death rate turns out to be inversely connected to oil prices and the oil crisis was on.
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That's not a causal correlation.
Despite the rising oil prices, there's been a massive increase in road traffic, yet road casualties have been decreasing for decades as cars have gotten safer and better.
If the oil price could determine anything, it'd be overall road use.
Turns out even that isn't happening !
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In 1975 the Dutch and Swedish put in seatbelt laws and they made no difference
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When something is mandated, it doesn't mean the entire fleet is already equipped with it.
Would you care to substantiate these claims ?
All long term trends I've ever seen regarding road safety show a decrease, with usually a more marked decrease starting around the time when safety belts got in use / got mandated.
In the EU, the dropping number of road fatalities is accompanied by a steady increase in seat-belt use.
The safest countries also show higher seat-belt use.
Looks like we might have a correlation there ...
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I have known about the increase in pedestrian deaths here for years and found it disturbing.
This is a devil of a discovery.
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That'd be a
relative increase in most countries, and it shows because the fatality rate for car drivers and passengers has been dropping for decades due to better / safer cars.
In the EU, the absolute number of deaths amongst pedestrians is dropping despite more traffic.