Buckle and save: money, lives

Tens of thousands of people in Nebraska and Iowa wear seat belts.

They won’t have anything to worry about during the nationwide “Click It or Ticket” campaign that starts next week. Law enforcement officers in the two states and elsewhere will be looking for drivers and front-seat passengers who aren’t buckled up.

In Iowa, not wearing a seat belt is a primary violation, meaning that officers can ticket someone for not wearing a seat belt without having observed any other traffic violation. In Nebraska, it’s a secondary violation, meaning that another violation has to be observed before the seat-belt ticket can be issued.

Perhaps as a result of the penalty, Iowa’s rate of seat-belt usage is higher than Nebraska’s: 93 percent for Iowa motorists, compared with 85 percent for those in Nebraska.

Even though Iowa’s rate seems relatively high, “Every single day we still have 180,000 drivers and an additional 70,000 front-seat passengers who don’t buckle up on our roadways,” said Randy Hunefeld with the Iowa governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau.

Of the 412 people killed in motor-vehicle crashes on Iowa roads in 2008, Hunefeld said, 170 were not wearing seat belts. In Nebraska, of the 182 people who died on the roads in ’08, 114 weren’t belted in, the Nebraska State Patrol said.

Hunefeld said he hears all the time from people who say they’re good drivers and they never have had an accident, so they don’t need to wear seat belts. But Hunefeld replies that it’s not about them, it’s about the other guy speeding down the road “who runs into them and causes them to be hurt because they weren’t buckled up.”

Last year, eight people died on Iowa roads over the Thanksgiving weekend; in Nebraska, three people were killed in crashes during that holiday period, from 6 p.m. Wednesday to midnight Sunday.

The special enforcement effort will begin Monday and continue through Nov. 29.

Contact the writer:

444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com

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