Few car drivers, passengers wear seat belts: Police

Evi Mariani and Novan Iman Santosa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The six-month campaign period for Jakartans to wear seat belts demonstrated how little people care about road safety as only 30 percent of car drivers and front-seat passengers were observed wearing them, Jakarta Police traffic division chief Sr. Comr. Sulistyo Ishak said on Tuesday.

"We collected the data during our seat belt campaign held in November 2003. In the operation, traffic police officers would check stop motorists passing main thoroughfares and advise them to wear seat belts.

"But from May 5, all offenders will be fined. We expect this will boost the percentage of motorists wearing seat belts to 70 percent or even 80 percent," Sulistyo remarked.

Quoting recent police data, Sulistyo said that the police would prefer that motorists wore seat belts out of concern for their own safety and not because they were forced to do so.

"From the total fatalities in road accidents, 33 percent of them were reported to have received head injuries," he said.

"The data suggests that the victims probably banged their heads on the windscreen, or if they were riding motorcycles, they were not wearing a helmet."

Jakarta Police recorded 1,288 vehicular accidents last year, with 482 fatalities, 660 people seriously injured and another 601 with minor injuries.

The numbers suggest that from a total of 1,743 casualties last year, as many as 581 of them sustained head injuries.

However, although the government and the police have long been warning motorists of these facts, enforcing the use of seat belts has not been an easy task.

A plan to make wearing seat belts mandatory in 1998 drew protests from motorists, who largely argued they could not afford to install seat belts in old cars in view of the financial crisis.

The regulation requiring motorists to wear seat belts is stipulated in Articles 23 and 61 of the Law No. 14/1992 on traffic. The maximum punishment for not wearing a seat belt is a Rp 1 million (US$116) fine or a one-month prison term.

However, the articles only enforce drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seat belts although back-seat passengers are also at risk in car accidents.

The May 5 deadline will be implemented only for motorists using cars that are already equipped with seat belts. Users of older vehicles which do not have seat belts as a standard feature, including public minivans, will be given until Nov. 5, 2005 to install them.