It would be a first, but the next time this column is in
neighboring Skagit county, I may look up Superior Court Judge Susan
Cook and offer to buy her a drink — caffeinated or otherwise.
Why? Because Judge Cook
recently held that Washington’s primary seatbelt law — passed
under the radar last year by the nearly universally reviled
Washington State legislature — is “invalid.” Cops who come to her
court who have pulled people over just to see if they were wearing
their shoulder straps will be lectured back out onto the street,
and any evidence collected of other malfeasance will be deemed
inadmissible for trial.
Though her ruling is not legally binding on other courts,
several defense attorneys in a handful of Washington counties have
introduced the ruling in the hopes of getting their unbuckled
clients off. According to the Skagit Valley Herald, the lack of a
definitive ruling has created countywide confusion. However: “If
you are on city streets in Anacortes, Mount Vernon or
Sedro-Woolley, you won’t be pulled over just for failing to buckle
up.”
Hey, it’s a start: The thing that made Cook’s ruling newsworthy
was its impeccable timing. It came right smack in the middle of the
U.S. Department of Transportation’s massive “Click It Or Ticket”
campaign. Millions of dollars of federal and local government
resources were dedicated to forcing motorists to buckle up. Or
else. There were radio and television ads, billboards, and, for all
I know, sock puppets. Advocacy groups used the occasion to press
more states to enact primary seatbelt laws to “save lives.”
It’s hard to argue against saving lives. But even if we are
willing to discount the massive expansion of police powers that
primary seatbelt laws engender — and we shouldn’t be — it’s hard
to know how seriously the self-appointed experts should be taken.
Economist Sam Peltzman published an (in)famous essay in the
Journal of Political Economy in the '70s which looked at
the early results of the effects of mandatory safety devices (e.g.,
seatbelts, padded dashboards, collapsible steering columns, one
gets the idea) in automobiles. At the time, Peltzman outraged
public safety advocates by finding that there wasn’t a huge
difference in fatalities for commuters, before and after. Drivers
and passengers were both more likely to get in accidents, and more
likely to survive them, but pity the poor pedestrians.
Though Peltzman’s work has been much misused (“See, seatbelts
cause accidents!”) and subject to methodological scrutiny,
the basic insight has held up. Drivers who feel insulated from harm
are more likely to drive recklessly and smash other cars up. Many
safety advocates argue for precisely this point in their ongoing
campaign against SUVs, and then turn around and insist that
it’s ridiculous as applied to seatbelt usage.
It’s far from a ridiculous idea, in theory or practice. As
Bloomberg News national affairs correspondent
Andrew Ferguson recently reported, last year saw both the
highest increase in seatbelt usage in eight years, and traffic
fatalities at their highest level since 1990 (the figures,
respectively, are from the American Automobile Association and the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).
If those results sound too counter-intuitive to wrap your brain
around, think of seatbelt-buckling scenes in movies. When someone
yells “buckle up!” is this more likely to precede (a) a drive in
the park or b) a chase scene? Granted, individually, seat belts can
and do save lives, but the upshot of seatbelt safety campaigns may
be anything but.
