It's all about reasonable safety balanced with freedom. Wearing a seatbelt keeps people a lot safer and has a really low cost in terms of impinging on freedom.<p>There's no equivalent on a motorcycle that checks both those boxes other than the helmet laws we already have in many places.<p>There's no inconsistency here, it's the same philosophy but the outcomes are different because the situations are different.
<i>can’t we agree that the law should at least strive to be consistent with itself when possible?</i><p>No, because putting consistency over correctness means instead of some right and some wrong, you've either got 100% right (not possible in our world) or 100% wrong.<p>Besides that, consider that a state's laws are supposed to be an expression of the values of their people, and it's entirely reasonable that a state might tax cigarettes and alcohol differently, or have different laws for cars and motorcycles. Depends on what the people want.
There's a lot of extremely biased assumptions going on here.<p>All of the numbers here are correlations only.<p>No definition is given for what "consistency" means. Taxing cigarettes but not alcohol because of health is not, in my opinion, even remotely inconsistent.<p>Lastly, the article starts out asking a number of interesting questions and answers none of them, including the one in the title.<p>If you go digging for statistical confirmation of your biases, you will find it.
The argument that I've heard is that seat belts keep the driver in the seat, making it more likely that he or she will have some control of the vehicle after an abrupt maneuver, lowering the chances that the car just becomes an unguided missile, which is more likely to hit something or someone else without a driver.<p>Motorcycles don't really have the same issue, as they generally do a lot less damage than a car since they weigh only a fraction as much. So helmet laws are more a question of personal choice and how much influence the state government wants to have over those decisions.
The author here seems to be making the assumption that all these laws are considered purely from a 'public health/safety' standpoint, without ever being weighed against something else. If we wanted to evaluate laws purely under a 'health/safety' aspect we'd be scrutinizing the 2nd Amendment a lot more too, or even car ownership in general. Luckily legislatures weigh these things against other interests. People weigh gun ownership, motorcycles, and smoking against their public health, because despite the risks these activities are fun to do, make you feel good, etc.<p>Additionally, these issues aren't evaluated in isolation, there's lots of competing interests. Auto manufacturers and consumer interest groups have influence over seatbelt laws. For motorcycles there are ABATE groups in many states that tend to lobby against motorcycle helmet laws. How much influence these groups have may not necessarily be related to how safety conscious the state is in other areas.
"its hard to argue that society as a whole bears a significant cost as a result of people not wearing seat belts. "<p>Its easy to argue. Society spends 10's of thousands of dollars trying to rescue and heal those that don't wear seat belts.
Every time I see an article like this, it advances the "principle" that your own death has no effect on anybody else in the world.<p>Never have I seen this justified in any plausible sense.
> <i>If the repercussions of not wearing seat belts only affect the decision maker, its hard to argue that society as a whole bears a significant cost as a result of people not wearing seat belts.</i><p>So... occupants of cars aren't mothers? Or fathers? Or run businesses? Or manage church bake sales? They aren't students with promising careers in medicine ahead of them? They aren't passionate lovers or mentors or good friends or musicians or even civil liberties lawyers?<p>When someone dies or is badly hurt, it doesn't affect just them. The author has a pretty disturbed view on human interaction to make this assertion in the first place. The argument that 'harm due to speed also hurt other people' and 'harm due to lack of seat belts only hurts the non-wearer' is specious.
I am surprised that higher speed limits are so strongly correlated with higher mortality rates. I thought the trend was to increase speed limits, and I remember reading that at least for one of the states where they increased the speed limit, people were still pretty much driving at the same speed.<p>It seems that the general consensus is the speed limit should be at the 85th percentile to minimize accidents. However, this just considers minimizing accidents, and I suppose I can see how we can lower the number of accidents but also increase the mortality rate.<p>Also, I suppose it's not completely fair to compare different states, as what works in one might not work in another and vice versa.
The big thing that a lot of these articles overlook, is that seatbelts keep the driver in front of the steering wheel and potentially in better control of a car during an accident -- whereas without one, it is possible to be thrown to a different part of the car, and it keep going in a random direction (thereby affecting others).
What I find is that people tend to vastly underestimate the role that path dependence has on explaining history and then work to come up with just-so stories that explain the result, absent path dependency.<p>Nobody ever sat down and rationally assessed the relative risk of motorcycles vs seat belts and crafted a law to take the two into account. Instead, what happened was at one point in time, a group of people lobbied and succeeded in changing one status quo and at another point in time, some other group of people lobbied and failed to change another status quo.
This submission raises an interesting question about HN submission policy with regard to titles.<p>The actual title of the article is "Drive In A Red State? You’re More Likely To Die. Here’s Why" (and there is an earlier submission using that title [1]).<p>However, it appears that the submitter may be the <i>author</i> of the article.<p>Does the rule about not changing titles apply when it is the author of the article doing the submission?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9532196</a>
Seatbelt law without helmet law is a bit inconsistent as far as driver safety goes.<p>Banning motorcycle riding outright is a much more invasive law than requiring a seat belt. Costs vs benefits.
Comparing wearing a seat belt to driving a motorcycle is not really a fair comparison. One is used for safety and the other is a transportation device. If the comparison is between cars and motorcycles then clearly cars are safer. If the comparison is between safety devices then seat belts are better than helmets if you are in a car but worse if you are on a motorcycle.
You'll still have to wear seatbelts in a driverless car.<p>In fact it probably will refuse to go anywhere unless you do.<p>I think the seatbelt laws are to get federal funding, while motorcycles have little political persuasion.
What about public transport? We don't have seat belts, we can even travel <i>standing</i> on a crowded bus. It doesn't seem to bother anyone apparently.
Well, there is an <i>incredibly</i> easy and obvious answer to this.<p>Mothers.<p>Mothers of dead children have been a <i>huge</i> force is traffic policy in the US.
Can't imagine how author pulls out of his ass the notion that speed limits are less impinging on liberty than seat belts.<p>I also find it hard to believe author is not being disingenuous stating "repercussions of not wearing seat belts only affect the decision maker".<p>The last couple paragraphs are opinions stated as facts and very much want the reader to agree with them I can't help but feel the whole article/data was just a means for author to push his opinion.