[Shuffles papers, closes briefcase and sits after his closing argument]
Here’s a simple demonstration of a front unbelted occupant in a crash. Glad he didn’t have a kid in that back seat!
Real people in crash tests with belts and airbags.
Do you think someone would volunteer for an unbelted crash test given the same scenarios?
I had a crash, doing about 80kph, car slid out on an oil patch, (unfortunately I was the second car to hit the oil patch, the first guy also crashed but just went off the road) and I went onto the wrong side of the road and hit a Toyota Landcruiser doing about 100kph coming in the opposite direction. I knocked the Landcruiser on its side the impact was so hard.
Well I am glad I had a seat belt on, despite having a crushed nerve in my shoulder from the shoulder strap and deep purple bruises across both front thighs. My seat collapsed back and the waist strap pulled tight and the force of the impact tried to throw me back and I started to slide out of the seat. As it was my left arm got flung from the steering wheel into the crushing metal gashing my forearm and severing the tendons in my left hand, but that could have been all of me in the twisted metal if it wasn’t for the seatbelt…
No airbags back then…
Was that yellow thing something Italian? They look like old Lancia or Seat wheels or something.
That’s a seriously scary looking piece of wreckage. I wouldn’t have thought anything would have come out of that scrap alive. Incredible! 
I once had a very scary situation with a Morris Marina and a huge oil patch. Scared the crap out of me. Came over a crest and then nothing. Not a single input would register, no steering, no brakes. The only thing that reacted was my sphincter. Oh, and the guy rushing to try and put sawdust down on the large spill. A truck’s hydraulic hose had burst and put out a good few gallons all over the road. I don’t know how, but I came to a totally uncontrolled, damn lucky stop about 200 meters down a narrow single lane road. I could’ve easily had a similar picture to yours that day.
Well I’m sure you can wake up each day knowing you’re one of the luckiest buggers alive! If I were you I would have that photo pinned to my backseat for every Taiwanese that jumps in and then starts arguing that the law doesn’t require them to buckle up.
I’ve had so many arguments and have even pulled to the side of the road and lectured some of my best friends about it. They tried to sit me out in the back of the car, thinking that I would just give up and continue. I sat there for a good five minutes, until they just decided I was being anal, made some comments and then begrudgingly put the bloody belts on.
Funny. The only one Taiwanese that has ever got in my car and put his belt straight on when in the back I asked why as he shocked me. He told me that he was in a country where belt use was obligatory, so he put it on in the back so his friends wouldn’t be ticketed and sure enough they put a large four wheel drive straight into a bridge column. He couldn’t believe the force or the damage to the vehicle and swore he was only alive because of the belt as the vehicle was thrown every which way and almost completely crushed from all angles. He described it kind of like how your yellow thing looks in that picture.
He’ll never take his belt off now.
My ex director also put a Subaru through a field and rolled it four times. He kinda thought his belt had something to do with his life continuing too.
I have cared for a taxi driver in the U.K. who I found on the road twenty feet from his vehicle. Two belted kids (not his) in the back on their school trip were fine but he sped through the side window after being struck from 90 degrees and was seriously, amazingly lucky to have not been hit by either car or be crushed, but he almost died from collapsed lungs besides the plethora of broken bones which were minor by comparison that he received once he hit the road. Damn lucky guy and a low speed incident. The car wasn’t seriously damaged.
[quote=“sulavaca”] Was that yellow thing something Italian? They look like old Lancia or Seat wheels or something.[/quote]It was a 1990 Ford Laser, (Australian Car).
[quote=“sulavaca”]That’s a seriously scary looking piece of wreckage. I wouldn’t have thought anything would have come out of that scrap alive. Incredible! [/quote]My passenger, also wearing a seatbelt wasn’t as lucky as me.
[quote=“sulavaca”]Came over a crest and then nothing. Not a single input would register, no steering, no brakes.[/quote]Similar as to what happened in my situation.
[quote=“sulavaca”]Well I’m sure you can wake up each day knowing you’re one of the luckiest buggers alive![/quote]I do…
Sorry to hear about your friend. That’s sad.
My mate Danny Kay was driving back over the Moss once in his mum’s Fiesta, seventeen years old going too fast on a wet road and like so many of my friends age 17, rolled it into a field. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and he was flung into the passenger seat during the roll. When the car stopped, the driver’s side was completely crushed. He would have been screwed if he had the seat belt on. Not wearing it saved his life.
yes, and someone I know was trapped in a car crash by a seat belt buckle that got jammed between the two seats after they got pushed together and died in the resulting fire.
But I still will always wear a seat belt (if possible, and I do hate the taxi rides in Taipei without one available, even though they generally go pretty slowly due to traffic). The occasional person who is better off without one is not enough to outweigh the millions (literally millions) who were better off as a result of wearing one.
My ex service manager was too only alive because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when the Isuzu Trooper he was in went headlong into a tree and then somersaulted and landed on its roof, crushing the entire roof. He had laid across the front seats as it happened. If he was wearing a belt he would have been crushed.
These stories aren’t uncommon, but statistically they just are simply a minority and so shouldn’t be used as a reason for not wearing a seatbelt. You know that saying “Seatbelts save lives.” It’s actually true!
I know, I know. I always wear one when I’m caning it on country lanes, or driving with the window down when there are coppers about. I think about my chances of crashing on each journey and wear one or not accordingly. I’m not an “always wear one regardless of speed and traffic conditions” type of guy though.
Funny thing is though and I have said this many times to many people already, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself. If you think about it, I mean really think about this…Not many people crash on purpose!
What that translates to is this. If people don’t crash and die on purpose, then why do they crash? Could it be perhaps that they didn’t know when they were going to crash? And let’s just say that if perhaps it is remotely possible that most people cannot predict the future, then wouldn’t it perhaps be wise to make the best preparations possible for that unknown future?
When you say you think about the chances of crashing on each journey, do you really take into account all considerations? Do you for example understand exactly how a small component in your steering could fail, how a tyre could blow off a rim, how a road could be covered in invisible oil, how a small child could pop out of a hedge or from behind a parked car, how a rock could come tumbling into your passenger seat or a truck could come careering through an intersection. I could go on of course.
I believe that most people who feel comfortable in traffic are comfortable because nothing out of the ordinary has happened to them before, and perhaps they haven’t felt for themselves what force even minor deceleration has on their bodies or even how they are powerless to do anything about it.
I once asked children at school who was afraid to stand on a scooter or sit in an unbuckled seat in a car at low speed. None of them raised their hands.
I then told them how even at their top running speed, there was no chance they would be faster than the average scooter or car at slow speed and they agreed.
I then asked them to line up facing a wall and try running as fast as they could, head first into it.
The strange thing was that none of them would volunteer! Weird how the mind works I asked myself. In one instance no fear or understanding of consequence can the mind acknowledge, yet in a far less severe instance we are incapable of overpowering our natural instinct to self preserve.
I’m not blaming anyone here for not acknowledging the danger involved in certain driving habits, but I will say that many people, including myself are stupid a lot of the time. We simply cannot always understand chance and statistics and appreciate them always.
It is because I am stupid that I try my best to account for all the things I have no control over. I simply cannot tell you which day I will crash my car, what the weather will be like and who’s stupid fault it will be. I don’t know if it will be me, my car, another driver, a dodgy traffic light, a falling crane from 101 building or anything else. I do know one thing though. I try as much as my capability and my personality will allow to keep my family and other road users as safe as I can when driving, and one of the simplest ways of doing that without tasking my mind at all is by wearing a seatbelt. Wearing a seatbelt needn’t be uncomfortable either. I might even say that wearing a seatbelt is the action of a lazy person. Too lazy to constantly have to think about exactly in what fashion they will exit their cabin and aim for the nearest soft bushel to soften the blow. Too lazy perhaps to tax their own minds on how they will recover their face from the steering wheel or restore their Toyota embossed nose. Perhaps I’m just lazy!
I remember the day I first put my wedding ring on, and the day I had braces placed on my teeth. I also remember how I don’t like the feeling of a weighty watch on my wrist. I also know however that all of those things failed to bother me after a short time and how inevitably I didn’t even register them being there. I don’t think a seatbelt is really that much more of an inconvenience either and in fact I quite like them. They sort of give me an extra feeling of security, especially when sitting on a slidy back seat of a taxi travelling at warp nine. I also like the feeling when they lock into place sometimes and keep you more secured in the driver’s seat.
You were here for that. That was terrible how they showed on the news the crushed people in the taxi with the crane still on the car.
Yes, it was rather unfortunate to say the least. Quite a horrific sight. I can’t begin to imagine what that would have been like for them or their families. I think any kind of incident that involves blame is even so much worse than anything else.
Sula, some people understand the concept of risk management and some don’t. Nice anecdote about the kids!
I believe that’s completely true, but I don’t believe we are capable of performing it one hundred percent of the time whilst driving. Even given the enormous processing power of the human mind, I believe we are still fallible because we simply aren’t smart enough to foresee every possibility based on a given and constantly changing scenario.
I also believe that driving style is also based on personality and that our human condition prevents us from constantly performing to what otherwise might be our maximum potential.
I do however believe that the average person can at least accept basic given facts based on statistics, chance, whatever one wants to call these happenings, whether or not they have experienced them themselves. This gives me hope in that I can employ some knowledge and experiences I have gained so that other people may learn from them. There are statistics and experiences I too am unaware of and scenarios I cannot imagine. I am simply not intelligent enough to process information that I don’t have and, or cannot obtain. Perhaps when I use the word stupid to describe myself and others I am exaggerating, but I have always considered human kind to be overstating its level of so called intelligent thinking. Most animals for example, even when arguably have less “intelligence” can find ways to more successfully harmonize with each other and their environment than we do. Of course a separate example may be that of the average Taiwan driver, which is an altogether different subject I find, but never the less another good example of how humans are stupid.
In general in Taiwan culture it might be argued that people are convinced that they know better than others most of the time. So here you have a culture of humans that clearly clash with another each other and another culture of humans because one culture fails to a greater degree to take into account others and given examples of risk management. That one culture of humans is clearly capable of failing to such a degree because of its own stubbornness and lack of intelligence, it makes me question my own belief that I am somehow intelligent enough in regards to risk management, and that perhaps I am not as good at it as I might think.
Is it perhaps that a certain level of pride and blind thinking takes its toll on all of us at times, but that some of us are even more convinced of ourselves because we can compare to the almost consistent failure of certain others? I believe it does. For one, when I give poor statistics based on Taiwan accident rates and the death toll, I often get the response “Well its far worse in China!” or I have even heard from many U.S.Aans that the driving style isn’t that much different from where they come from. So? So some people prefer it seems, to give examples of similar situations or worse cases in order to justify the case and situation at hand. That just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense because of what I know about the human race. I know that humans are supposed to always want to develop and improve their environment for example. That we are constantly struggling with our own given existence and that we are somehow always striving to improve on it. We invented the car for heaven’s sakes. We are perhaps the first species on the planet to travel faster than nature intended. So it would seem logical that we are supposed to then compare our present situation with the highest possible standards and then go beyond them and form a new level. Well if that’s the case, then as humans shouldn’t some of us stop comparing Taiwan driving against a similar culture or poorer standard? That’s like shagging someone who you know has the clap whilst saying “Well at least its not smallpox.”
Erherm… I’m not quite sure where I have talked myself to now. What was I on about again? Oh, yeah. People are stupid and so am I. I think the difference is that some of us don’t mind admitting it as we are trying to do something about it. If I wasn’t stupid, then I would be of a mindset that I would no longer need to know any more or adapt, learn, improve. If I am already at the top of the hill, then you are all below me and you should take my word for everything. Well I don’t believe that to be true, however much I would like it to be. So I might put it this way…
As long as I am convinced that I am nowhere close to being the most intelligent being on earth and that there perhaps is no such thing, then I must be a bit thick by comparison and if I am dim, then perhaps I should do something about it, thus improving myself.
See! Dressing oneself down can be not just enlightening, but a down right advantage then. Perhaps it is the one realisation that can push us all that little bit closer to reaching enlightenment?
And all that typing just goes to show what having no day job can produce.
I think this is far simpler a means of transporting them.
Doesn’t leave nearly as much hair on the seats either.
You’re evil!!!
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications has proposed making rear seat belt use mandatory. Now it has to get past the Executive Yuan and then the legislature. I realize this is just a proposal at this point but hopefully it will give added weight to the push to inspect taxis for rear seat belts. Fines will be $1500-6000.
taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/ … 2003493973
[quote]According to Chen, the ministry will execute the regulation in two stages once the amendment is passed. Adults will first be required to wear seatbelts when sitting in the back once the ministry has spent one to three months informing the public about the change.
Since 2004, the ministry has required parents to install child safety seats when traveling with children under the age of four. The new amendment sets regulations on children who are above the age of four.
Chen said that parents with children who are between four and 12 years of age or between 18kg and 36kg will need to install booster seats as well. They are only exempt from following this rule if regular seatbelts fit the children perfectly.
“If seatbelts are placed too close to the children’s necks or heads, then parents will need booster [seats] in their cars,” he said.
Booster seat specifications must follow CNS11497 standards issued by the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection, he said.
Chen said the ministry will spend six months to one year promoting the requirements for child passengers in cars.
The issue of backseat seatbelts has been under the media spotlight since Nora Sun (孫穗芬), a granddaughter of Republic of China (ROC) founding father Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), was severely injured in a car accident earlier this month.
[/quote]
[quote=“Dragonbones”]The Ministry of Transportation and Communications has proposed making rear seat belt use mandatory. Now it has to get past the Executive Yuan and then the legislature. I realize this is just a proposal at this point but hopefully it will give added weight to the push to inspect taxis for rear seat belts. Fines will be $1500-6000.
taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/ … 2003493973
[quote]According to Chen, the ministry will execute the regulation in two stages once the amendment is passed. Adults will first be required to wear seatbelts when sitting in the back once the ministry has spent one to three months informing the public about the change.
Since 2004, the ministry has required parents to install child safety seats when traveling with children under the age of four. The new amendment sets regulations on children who are above the age of four.
Chen said that parents with children who are between four and 12 years of age or between 18kg and 36kg will need to install booster seats as well. They are only exempt from following this rule if regular seatbelts fit the children perfectly.
“If seatbelts are placed too close to the children’s necks or heads, then parents will need booster [seats] in their cars,” he said.
Booster seat specifications must follow CNS11497 standards issued by the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection, he said.
Chen said the ministry will spend six months to one year promoting the requirements for child passengers in cars.
The issue of backseat seatbelts has been under the media spotlight since Nora Sun (孫穗芬), a granddaughter of Republic of China (ROC) founding father Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙), was severely injured in a car accident earlier this month.
[/quote][/quote]
About 15 years late on this one. It’s amazing how slow the govt is to realize that occupants in a car, whether front or rear, are all vulnerable in the event of an accident. Common thinking here is that the front and rear seating areas of a vehicle are two separate environments that are affected differently in a crash. :loco:
This makes no sense at all. How will any cop be able to determine whether a seat belt ‘perfectly’ fits a child passenger? ‘Perfectly’ can be defined and interpreted in many ways, especially when it’s open to interpretation of what’s too close to a child’s neck and head.
What’s not mentioned/overlooked by the crack team of government safety regulators, is also the fact that many kids under 7 years of age ride in the front passenger seat. Car manufacturers often have placards on the front passenger sun visor that clearly prohibit the use of front seats for children under 7 years of age because of airbag deployment and the risks of injury. This would be another area of safety that needs regulation.
I like the policy of letting one’s kids balance on the top of the front seats with most of their bodies out the sunroof! Most Darwinian!
