Effects Of Converted Primary Enforcement Seat Belt Laws On Traffic Fatalities

Download or read book Effects of Converted Primary Enforcement Seat Belt Laws on Traffic Fatalities written by Christopher McCall and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As states continue to strive for safer roadways, seat belt laws remain a major policy issue in state legislatures across the country. The effectiveness of seat belt usage in saving lives during motor vehicle accidents is well-documented, but the methods used to enforce mandates vary across state lines. Resistance to tougher seat belt laws continues to exist on the grounds that they are either ineffective or a violation of personal freedoms. As of 2011 though, twenty-four states and the District of Colombia have upgraded from secondary to primary enforcement of existing seat belt laws. In this thesis, I analyze the impact that tougher enforcement laws have for states with regard to reducing roadway fatality rates. This research updates previous works by considering an additional ten states which have converted to primary enforcement since the last known study. Using state-level panel data collected from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the United States Census Bureau, I create a series of fixed effect regression models to determine if there are significant benefits observed in states which adopt stricter seat belt enforcement laws. I find that, in terms of both lives and money saved, states experience significant benefits after upgrading existing secondary laws to primary enforcement. Closer examination reveals that this impact is not homogenous across states and that adopting primary laws may have outsized benefits for highly-populous states and specific geographic regions such as the Southeast and Pacific Coast.