Drivers’ Habits Change; Nearly Half Buckle Up : California Seat-Belt Law Begins to Click

The three teen-agers were mightily ticked off. CHP Officer Dave Romero had pulled over their station wagon for making a tires-squealing start at a Rowland Heights intersection. And then, Romero noticed, the three--all in the front seat--were not wearing seat belts.

They grumped audibly as he wrote up three $20 tickets, and Romero remembers watching as they grudgingly rearranged themselves in the car, front and back, to buckle up before they drove off.

Less than half an hour later came the radio call: A truck pulling a horse trailer had collided with a car. As Romero got to the accident, he saw, to his astonishment, the same station wagon he had stopped 25 minutes before, now with “moderate to major damage” from the collision.

And standing nearby were the same three teen-agers, uninjured--and repentant. “They came up to me,” recalled Romero, “and shook my hand and said ‘Thank you.’ ”

In less than a year, California’s mandatory seat-belt law--lenient by comparison to some in the 23 states with such laws and comparably cheap at up to a $20 fine for the first offense--has changed the habits of the state’s drivers, a change that all the billboard warnings and gruesome photos of crumpled cars had not accomplished:

It has made nearly half of them buckle up.

While a medical school’s survey of 1,000 American doctors found that they rank wearing seat belts sixth among 25 good health practices, right behind eating less saturated fats, only one in five were buckling up until state laws began requiring it, starting with New York in December, 1984.

Now, nearly seven Americans in 10 live in places requiring them to wear seat belts. And at least four Americans in 10 are wearing them, according to a Michigan research survey.

And despite recently repealed seat-belt laws in Massachusetts and Nebraska (by 1,183 votes), by next year another 11 states are expected to pass mandatory seat-belt laws, according to the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Assn.

In California, the legislative battle is won, but the street battle is just beginning.

On the average, the CHP estimates, 46% of California drivers and passengers--in cars, pickup trucks and other vehicles covered by the law--are wearing belts, compared to 20% of them last year.

And the number of Californians who died in wrecks has dropped by more than 2%--despite the fact that with cheaper gas prices, Californians drove 10 billion more miles this year than last and the number of traffic crashes is up by about 5%.

‘Lower Than We’d Hoped’

On freeways, the highway seat-belt usage rate hovers around 70%, estimate CHP field officers; on city streets it’s often less than 50% and in rural areas around 30%.

“It’s lower than we’d hoped,” CHP spokesman Cmdr. Kent Milton acknowledged, “but at least we are holding our own.”

Even though a seat-belt violation here is a “secondary stop”--one cannot be pulled over just for not wearing a seat belt, as can happen in nine states--the number of tickets issued by the CHP has doubled, from 10,000 per month early in the year to 20,000 issued in November.

But it is the stories, not the statistics, that stay in the minds of the CHP officers who patrol California’s roads, from the pastoral highways of Northern California to the frantic freeways of Los Angeles.

Head-On Collision

In Marina del Rey, they like to tell the one about the head-on collision between the brand-new Toyota Cressida and the Lincoln Continental--”a boat, a battleship,” said Officer Michael Goins--heading the wrong way on Jefferson Boulevard.

A seat belt changed the big car-little car myth: the Lincoln’s driver died, hurtling into his steering wheel. The Toyota driver, who was wearing his seat belt, “walked away from it.”

At midnight in November near Newhall, “We had a patrol car stop a speeding car,” said CHP Officer Harry Ingold. As the car slowed onto the freeway shoulder, the two men in front furtively latched their seat belts. “The one in the rear placed a pillow over his lap to hide the fact he was not wearing a belt.”

As the officers began writing up the speeding ticket, a truck whose driver had fallen asleep drifted off the shoulder, sending the two officers flying and smashing into the speeder’s car, sending it 150 feet down an embankment.

‘Flew Out the Window’

“The two people who had put their belts on received minor injuries,” Ingold said. “The fellow with the pillow in his lap flew out the window, still clutching his pillow, and was more seriously hurt.”

The two shaken men echoed what the teen-agers had told Romero: “They said later that because of being stopped, they put on their belts, which possibly saved their lives.”

One August afternoon on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, said Officer Craig Klein, two young women driving a Honda smashed head-on into a Toyota truck, the kind of crash common on the blind beach-edge curves.

Their speed at impact was great enough to shove the little truck back 110 feet and send it rolling a couple of times. “When you first looked at the vehicles and the position, you thought immediately there were major injuries, if not deaths,” Klein said.

‘Life and Death’ Difference

But “we were pretty surprised”: The two women unlatched their seat belts and walked out of their crunched car. The man in the truck had one arm injured but he, too, was basically all right. Seat belts, Klein said, were “the difference between life and death.”

In San Francisco, Officer Gary Loo said, they tell about a Southern Californian who was driving onto a freeway when he saw a CHP car waiting at the end of the ramp. He panicked and reached for his seat belt, and as he clicked it on, lost control and crashed into a utility pole--but the buckled belt got him out unscathed.

“This year I’ve noticed a difference in the accidents,” Loo said. “The cars were all severely damaged, and I expected the people to be carted away in the ambulance, but they were out talking to me, giving statements, because they were wearing belts.”

‘Badge of Courage’

In San Diego, some CHP officers have a name--”badge of courage”--for the seat-belt bruise marks borne by people who can walk away from such horrifying crashes otherwise unmarked.

Some people don’t need persuading--now.

Renee Gooding of Norwalk was driving her husband to work on the Santa Ana Freeway before 6 a.m. last Aug. 5. Her three children, all under 4 years old, were still in their pajamas, latched sleepily into their safety seats in the family’s Dodge wagon, as were Gooding and her husband.

The children had “been using them since they were born.” The adults began wearing belts only since the law demanded it. “It was such an inconvenience,” Gooding said.

On that morning, it was still an inconvenience--up to the moment that a double-trailer gravel truck trying to avoid a merging car jackknifed and hit their station wagon, sending the wagon into the center divider and into the path of a second skidding truck.

‘I’m Going to Die’

“I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to die’--but I didn’t,” Gooding said. That her husband alone was hurt, with back injuries from the top-speed, five-vehicle tangle, astounds her. “It’s just absolutely amazing--incredible,” she said. “I’m sure that’s what saved my children, and I know that’s probably what saved my husband and me.”

Maria Martinez, too, had been a reluctant seat-belt user. But on Jan. 16, it was raining, the new seat-belt law was fresh in her mind and she’d met Catherine Casey at a party--Casey, who doubles as the costumed superheroine “Beltwoman,” talking auto safety to school kids.

So Martinez buckled up to drive to a friend’s to celebrate having her University of San Francisco thesis accepted.

On California 280, her Toyota hatchback began hydroplaning, then swept into a mad 50-m.p.h. spin in a high wind off a reservoir. From behind the wheel, she saw her car swerving toward the steel center guardrail and felt the “crunch.”

‘But I’m Alive’

The next thing she remembers is unsnapping her belt and walking away in the rain. She suffered whiplash and torn chest tissue; “I’m still healing but I’m alive,” she said. “Every now and then I try to get away without wearing a belt, driving a couple of blocks, and then I say, ‘Maria, are you kidding?’

“So often I get down because of my injury and I think, ‘Maria, you could be dead, you could be paralyzed.’ To this day, I call it my life belt, without thinking, instead of my seat belt. It’s unconscious, but that’s what comes up for me--my life was saved, I know it was.”

Backed by the force of law and a traffic fine, Americans’ seat-belt attitudes are changing, said Nils Lofgren, who heads the American Coalition for Traffic Safety.

“It has become a highly accepted public health thing to do,” like stopping smoking, Lofgren said. “It’s related to a growing concept of wellness that extends through our lives.”

Hindrance to Compliance

The biggest hindrance to seat belts compliance--besides the conviction by some that such laws are “Big Brother” intrusions that violate Americans’ personal freedom--is the collection of myths about seat belts, some of them entrenched in American lore.

“A lot of people have the myth that the safest thing is to get thrown away from a car,” Malibu’s Klein said. “That couldn’t be more untrue. We have people go one, two, 300 feet over the side of a mountain, and the majority getting killed get thrown from the car. The safest place you can be in 99.99% of crashes is inside that car, secure.”

In Redding, where the CHP office covers 13 rural counties and compliance is one of the state’s lowest, Officer Jack Burniston said people resist belts with arguments such as: “‘My great-grandma is 97, drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney.’ But statistics are that 98 out of 100 are going to die of cancer or alcoholism by that time.”

Catapulted to Her Death

“If people would just ride around with us and go to these accidents one after another”--heartbreaking ones such as the unbelted San Diego woman catapulted to her death like “a cannonball” through her sports car T-top, or the Los Angeles woman who was killed, half-ejected from her sunroof as her car overturned, as her son sat safely belted in beside her--”it wouldn’t take long for them to become a believer,” said Fred Miller, a 19-year CHP veteran.

Stroll through any tow yard, said Officer Goins, and the cars tell their own stories. “You can tell who wore seat belts and who didn’t.” A hole may be punched in the windshield glass where someone’s head went through it. Old pads of surgical gauze lie on the floorboards, where paramedics were working to save someone.

Hospital Admissions Cut 25%

Indeed, a study by California emergency physicians found that both medical costs and the chances of being hospitalized are doubled by not wearing a seat belt in an accident. In Britain, two years of nearly 90% seat-belt usage have reduced all hospital admissions by 25%. “I don’t know of any other public health measure that could have that kind of a payoff,” said Elaine Petrucelli of the American Assn. for Automotive Medicine.

Andrew Tate of the Baldwin Park CHP office--who last month noted a collision in which a woman stopped at a red light was rear-ended, thrown from her car and suffered critical head injuries, but her husband, who was buckled in, did not--said few people reckon with the wider impact of individual choice. “Say you are seriously injured--what about everyone you love? It’s not a personal decision.”

“People think, ‘If I want to die in my car it’s my problem,’ ” said Teri Smith, deputy director of the group Traffic Safety Now, California, which lobbied for the law. “They don’t think about the cost. They don’t just affect themselves; they affect every person they know.”

No one is more aware of that than Dr. Ronald Clark, director of emergency services at Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center and a state director of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Crossed Center Line

In March, 1985, as Clark, wearing his seat belt, was driving home on twisting Sunset Boulevard with his wife asleep and buckled in beside him, a speeding Capri crossed the center line and hit the Clarks’ BMW head-on, killing two young men in the Capri.

Between them, Clark and his wife, Rita, suffered broken ribs, leg, arm and kneecap fractures, concussion and other injuries that kept him off work for six months.

Once he got back, he launched his campaign, distributing thousands of red and white “Buckle Up--Let’s Not Meet By Accident” bumper stickers from the emergency room, hobbling on crutches into a California Assembly committee to testify for seat belts.

“They work. It’s just insanity to think that anybody would not want to have that kind of protection,” Clark said. “It was my contention that your rights end where society’s responsibilities begin. I don’t want to burden society with another brain-damaged child lying in a nursing home for 50 years.”

Less Severe Injuries

What he’s seen since the state law leads him to think people are finally listening.

“My practice in the emergency department (has) changed palpably.” He and fellow emergency room doctors find that “the wrecks seem to keep happening, but the severity of injuries really seems to be going down.”

Perhaps the biggest new partisan for seat-belt compliance is corporate America.

In Texas, where police can make a “primary stop” for seat-belt violations, compliance is an astonishing 70%-plus. But in business-minded Texas, Department of Public Safety spokesman David Wells said, campaigning from the business community has made a difference: Texas’ traffic-death rate has dropped 8%.

Buckle Up 100 Club

And thousands of private companies are following suit. Petrucelli said “a number of corporations are increasingly requiring on-the-job use just as a matter of policy.” Southwestern Bell’s on-the-job seat-belt rule saved half a million dollars last year in lost employee time, officials said.

In Los Angeles, Joseph Kaplan, president of the National Safety Council chapter, said its Buckle Up 100 Club has enlisted more than 100 companies, representing a quarter of a million Los Angeles-area workers. The council donates films, literature and guidelines to set up company programs that require on-the-job belt use.

But all that is advice, and may go no farther than the employees’ exit.

Over the holidays, the CHP is hoping the seat-belt law will prove itself: Although Thanksgiving showed no significant decline in the death rate, 90% of the people who did die were unbelted.

“It’s proving what we knew,” CHP spokesman Milton said. “The people who are killed are people who don’t wear belts.”