Wear Your Seat Belt, And Make Your Passengers Wear Theirs

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was critically injured on Thursday after his SUV was involved in an accident on the Garden Sate Parkway. He broke 12 ribs, his sternum, a vertebra and his femur, which was protruding out of his thigh when paramedics arrived. The revelation that the Governor was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash motivated me to look up some statistics about seat belt use:

Wear Your Seat Belt

• Wearing a safety belt reduces your risk of serious injury by 50 percent (source)
• Wearing a safety belt reduces your risk of death by 60-70 percent. (source)

Make Your Passengers Wear Their Seat Belts

• One out of four serious injuries to passengers is caused by occupants being thrown into each other. (source)
• The driver's risk of death in an accident increases by 20% if a passenger in his car is not wearing a seat belt. (source)