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I was thinking about something similar the other day — why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not? You know what vehicle I see a
by thebigjewbowski 3y ago
I was thinking about something similar the other day — why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not?
You know what vehicle I see all the time that doesn’t require a license or minimum age, doesn’t have any safety features and can go 15-20 mph alongside traffic and often on a city sidewalk amongst pedestrians? A bicycle ;)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- habosa 3y agoI’d really prefer not to kill anybody else I’m sharing the road with, all else equal. It would be quite traumatic for that persons family and for me too.
- renewiltord 3y agoTrue. Which is why I would like to make it the law that all motor vehicle occupants should wear helmets. This will mean saving billions of life years lost through traumatic brain injuries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HWR_14 3y agoWhat if the helmets were giant (unlike bike helmets, the rider doesn't have to carry the entire weight or air resistance). Then, instead of filling the helmets with hard styrofoam, we could fill them with something even softer, maybe a compressible gas. People could obviously store them in the vehicle. It might be annoying to wear them all the time, so we could mandate that cars detect when you are about to be in a crash and slam a helmet on your head. Although, come to think of it, it doesn't need to surround your whole head. What if we could make it just appear between your head and anything you were going to hit. Hey, we could even have those things hold the micro helmets. Since they are filled with air, we can use air pressure to deploy them fast, these flexible bags of air.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoYou're kind of making their point for them. It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking. Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?
- Shaanie 3y agoYou can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoYou're not making the point you think you are. All a driver license proves is that you took a basic class as a teenager and have been paying the government a fee since then. You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.
- defrost 3y ago> You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum. This doesn't contribute to the upkeep of roads in the same manner as a yearly tax on those that use them. So no, not the same benefit at all.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoYou're thinking of car tax and fuel tax. But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
- neuronerdgirl 3y agoYou not wearing a seatbelt puts other people in the vehicle at risk because your body becomes a massive flying object in the cabin when you are hit that can injure or kill others in the vehicle with you.
- willcipriano 3y agoYou the sort of person who will tie down a bag of dog food or bag of soup cans when you load them into a vehicle without a trunk?
- Swizec 3y agoYes. I always put seatbelts on big stuff in the rear seats
- defrost 3y agoAbsolutely. Also the person that ties down loads with multiple ropes | straps truckies hitches and stoppers. Not to mention stopping every few hundred miles to check tensions and reset as required. Loose loads are a pain in the arse and often dangerous. A soup can rolling loose and jamming up under a brake or accelerator pedal is something that really happens .. and it's no fun when it does.
- nine_k 3y agoBTW I wonder why space behind a pedal is still a thing. If I were building a car, I would make it impossible to put anything under pedals, much like you cannot jam anything below a piano key.
- mlyle 3y agoMaking a really tight seam is its own problem-- ever encounter an old piano with keys that stick?
- ilyt 3y agoI just put them in passenger foot area, good enough.
- woodruffw 3y ago> why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not? I care for a basic and selfish reason beyond the "human missile" one: if I'm in a car crash with you and there's only one bed available in the ER, I don't want your lack of a seatbelt to be the source of a hard choice by the doctors operating on us.
- tehwebguy 3y agoPlus nobody should have to scrape you off asphalt
- willcipriano 3y agoDon't worry that bed will be occupied by a opioid addict anyway.
- rhaway84773 3y agoIf you opt out of ER visits and are ok with being left to die if you’re in a car accident, sure, don’t wear a seatbelt. Also, you know who dies in much greater numbers than pedestrians due to vehicle crashes? The pedestrians walking by the bicyclists. So should pedestrians be forced to wear massive armors of steel when they walk around? Oh wait, that’s how so many awful American cities are designed. With absolutely no space for pedestrians who have to drive everywhere. In reality there’s only 1 source of danger on streets. Massive 2 ton vehicles that endanger their own occupants and everyone around them. Take away the 2 tons of metal usually carrying 1 person and everyone is safe.
- ilyt 3y agoMX-5's for everyone! But yeah, without cars motorcycles and scooters suddenly become much safer way of transport