Summary of a workshop sponsored by OECD's Road Research Program.

Accident reports show that most of the 40,000 people killed annually in traffic crashes in the United States were not using safety belts. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that over 16,000 lives could be saved annually if all front seat occupants wore safety belts. To assist ongoing federal and state deliberations on safety belt safety, the Chairman, Subcommittee on Water Resources, Transportation and Infrastructure, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and the Ranking Minority Member, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, asked GAO to evaluate and summarize existing studies on safety belts. This report focuses on the (l) effectiveness of safety belts in reducing deaths and serious injuries, (2) impact of state safety belt use laws on fatality and serious injury rates, and (3) costs that society incurs when unbelted motor vehicle occupants are involved in accidents.

Increasing seat belt use is one of the most effective and least costly ways of reducing the lives lost and injuries incurred on the nation's highways each year, yet about one in four drivers and front-seat passengers continues to ride unbuckled. The Transportation Research Board, in response to a congressional request for a study to examine the potential of in-vehicle technologies to increase belt use, formed a panel of 12 experts having expertise in the areas of automotive engineering, design, and regulation; traffic safety and injury prevention; human factors; survey research methods; economics; and technology education and consumer interest. This panel, named the Committee for the Safety Belt Technology Study, examined the potential benefits of technologies designed to increase belt use, determined how drivers view the acceptability of the technologies, and considered whether legislative or regulatory actions are necessary to enable their installation on passenger vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the study sponsor, funded and conducted interviews and focus groups of samples of different belt user groups to learn more about the potential effectiveness and acceptability of technologies ranging from seat belt reminder systems to more aggressive interlock systems, and provided the information collected to the study committee. The committee also supplemented its expertise by holding its second meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, where it met in proprietary sessions with several of the major automobile manufacturers, a key supplier, and a small business inventor of a shifter interlock system to learn of planned new seat belt use technologies as well as about company data concerning their effectiveness and acceptability. The committee's findings and recommendations are presented in this five-chapter report.