Safety belt effectiveness versus crash types

Based on Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) data, safety belt effect- tiveness in preventing fatalities is investigated for the following five types of crashes: frontal, left, rear, right, and rollover. Passenger cars containing two occupants, a driver and a right front passenger, are included in this analysis. For each crash type, these cars containing the two occupants are classified into four categories according to the safety belt usage categories for the two front seat occupants, namely, both belted, both unbelted, and either one was belted but not both. Relative risks of driver and right front passenger fatalities are compared among these four cases. For each crash type, two independent estimates of safety belt effectiveness are obtained for drivers and for right front passengers. The weighted average of the two estimates is calculated for drivers and for right front passengers for the five crash types. Using FARS data starting 1978 throught 1983, safety belts are more effective in rollover accidents than in frontal collisions. In rollover accidents, safety belt effectiveness estimate for drivers is $68%{\pm} 6% $ and that for right front passengers is $71%{\pm}6% $ , in which the error limits indicate one standard error. Sfety belt effectiveness estimates for drivers and right front passengers involved in frontal collisions are $41%{\pm} 9% $ and $37%{\pm} 10% $ , respectively. For left and right sided collisions and for both drivers and right-front-passengers, none of the four estimates are significantly different from 0%, statistically : however, when left and right sided collisions are combined with far sided occupants(drivers involved in right sided collisions and right front passengers involved in left sided collisions) safety belt effectiveness is significant, $38%{\pm} 12% $ . For rear collisions, the estimate for drivers shows statistically significant positive effect, $60%{\pm}23% $ . while for right-front-passengers the estimate is not significantly different from 0%. These results show that a safety belt is an effective restraint system not only in frontal crashes but also in a variety of crashes.