Buckle up in the back to keep youngsters safe, police urge
▶ Statistics show there is a greater chance of surviving a car accident when wearing a belt
Parents must ensure their children are not jumping around in moving cars and are in the back seat, a road safety expert said.
Dubai Police tweeted on Friday that “the back seat is the safest place for children to sit”.
Thomas Edelmann, managing director of Road Safety UAE, said that while it might seem obvious it was not always followed.
“I fully agree that back seats are the safest place for children in cars but they must have the appropriate seats depending on their age as well,” Mr Edelmann said.
He said the UAE had a serious problem with children going wild in moving cars.
“This was something I had never encountered anywhere else in the world but it was because the UAE did not have a law on people in the back seat wearing seat belts until 2017,” Mr Edelmann said.
He said the introduction of the law last year has gone some way to increasing safety – but old habits die hard.
Road Safety UAE research found that some drivers were still happy to drive with their children unrestrained.
“Some of the reasons we heard were, ‘My kids don’t like buckling up’, ‘I am a safe driver so my children don’t need to wear seat belts in the back seat’, or ‘I am only driving a short distance so they don’t have to put a seat belt on’,” Mr Edelmann said.
“Before the law was introduced, it was difficult for Dubai Police to make people ensure their children wear seat belts but now there is no excuse for it.”
Under the law, car owners can be fined Dh400 and receive four black points on their licence if someone is not wearing a seat belt in the back seat.
Most drivers who have negotiated the UAE’s roads will be familiar with one particularly troubling sight: children bouncing around on the back seat of the car in front, nestled in the lap of the front seat passenger or even, in some cases, sitting on the lap of the person behind the wheel. Spotting an unrestrained child is not the rarity it should be – so much so that Dubai Police felt compelled to send out a warning that “the back seat is the safest place for children to sit”. It is an indictment of the behaviour of some car owners that this even needs to be stated.
Sixty per cent of all deaths of children in Abu Dhabi are related to road accidents, recent figures have shown. Many were not wearing seatbelts when they were involved in collisions. Shockingly, a separate study carried out by UAE University in Al Ain in 2013 found only two per cent of passengers involved in accidents over a 17-month period were wearing seatbelts and not a single child restraint was used in any of the cars. The number of misdemeanours has dropped drastically since a law was introduced in July last year making it mandatory for passengers in the back to wear belts but there are still too many parents flouting the law and risking their children’s lives. At 120 kilometres per hour, a parent’s loving embrace is not going to be enough to stop a child from being flung through a windscreen or out of a vehicle. The risk of dying in a car accident is slashed by 60 per cent for those who buckle up in the back – yet last year, more than 7,600 drivers and passengers were caught without seatbelts in Abu Dhabi in the first two months of the law being introduced. Those parents who think they are showing their children affection by cuddling them in the front seat are putting their lives at risk. There can surely be no greater sign of love than taking a few extra seconds to buckle them up in the back and reducing the risk of them becoming just another statistic.