RCMP hope to rein in seatbelt scofflaws
Drivers have been urged to buckle up for decades but the message still falls on deaf ears for some and with tragic results.
“It’s not higher than it’s been in the past but definitely the trend is that there’s a high percentage of people involved in (fatal) collisions that don’t have a seatbelt on,” said RCMP spokesman Const. Chad Morrison on Thursday.
“In traffic services, we talk about causal factors leading to injuries and leading to deaths and there’s speeding, aggressive driving, there’s distracted driving, there’s impaired driving, and one of ... the linking factors is people not wearing their seatbelts.”
In 27 per cent of fatal collisions in 2018, at least one person wasn’t wearing their seatbelt or was wearing it incorrectly. (As of Dec. 24, 76 people had died on Nova Scotia roads in 2018, up from 48 last year.)
The RCMP laid 3,450 charges in 2018 against people for not wearing a seatbelt or wearing one incorrectly. Given that seatbelts greatly improve your chances of surviving a crash, Morrison said those numbers surprise him.
“There’s no lack of messaging out there,” he said. “You’d expect that over the years through the generations, through just lessons learned and parenting . . . that those types of things would start to stick with people and I don’t know where the gap is or where the miscommunication is but certainly there’s still a gap, there’s still a large population out there that’s just not taking that really easy step that has proven to be a life-saving measure.”
It’s a priority for the RCMP to enforce seatbelt laws but “it’s one of those things unfortunately it requires a little bit of strategy and stealth . ... We can do checkpoints all day and all night, people don’t pull up to our checkpoints with their seatbelts not fastened,” he said.
“It’s more a matter of having to catch people on the go and being strategic, having spotters and those types of things. It’s a little trickier than other types of enforcement we do but it certainly pays in the long run if we can get that message out there.”
Fines start at $180 for a seatbelt infraction and add two points to your licence.
In a news release Thursday, the RCMP noted the driver is responsible for ensuring that passengers under 16 are wearing a seatbelt. Children can use an adult seat belt when they are nine years old or four-foot-nine (145 centimetres). Otherwise, kids must be buckled in using a car seat or booster seat.
Nova Scotia RCMP will be live-tweeting a seatbelt enforcement project @RCMPNS on Twitter. Details will be announced soon.