GENEVA-ON-THE-LAKE – Ashtabula County’s drivers don’t have the best record when it comes to wearing their seatbelts.
Through the Click It or Ticket campaign, Ashtabula County Safe Communities and the Ohio State Highway Patrol hope to change that fact.
“(The Click It or Ticket campaign is) to promote seatbelt usage,” Sandy Pulsifer, Ashtabula County Safe Communities coordinator, said. “Unfortunately, in our county, we’re at only about 62-percent compliance. We’ve been fortunate over the last year, year and a half. We’ve only had one fatal. They have a ceiling of 18 before the lieutenant will get called down to Columbus to explain why we have more fatals than what they think we should.”
The Click It or Ticket Campaign kicked off at Allison’s Mini Golf in Geneva-on-the-Lake on Saturday, May 16.
“(The Click It or Ticket campaign is) very important, especially with the younger generation,” Ohio State Highway Patrolman Eric Pentek said. “They just need more of that enforcement over and over again to realize that seatbelts can save your life in any kind of crash, whether it’s a single-vehicle or multiple-vehicle crash. Even a slow-moving crash can cause serious injuries if you’re not wearing your seatbelt. It’s just super important that you wear a seatbelt while you’re on the roadway, even if you’re off the roadway. If you’re in motion in a vehicle, you should have your seatbelt on.”
The Click It or Ticket campaign gets law-enforcement involved in the attempt to save more lives.
“They’re going to start their actual enforcement of the seatbelts,” Pulsifer said. “They’re not going to let anybody off during this time frame. If they see somebody unbuckled, they have to have cause to stop them, but once they do, they’re not going to let them go.”
It’s important for people to understand why they should wear that seatbelt.
“I worked as paramedic for 32 years,” Pulsifer said. “You see a number of injuries that you wouldn’t normally see (had the victim worn a seatbelt). I had a woman during one of my first years on the ambulance. She was unbelted. She opened up her car door to stop or something and didn’t realize her sweater had gotten caught up somehow with the tire, and she got pulled out and ran herself over. Had she been wearing her seat belt, she still would have been in the car. She probably wouldn’t have been hurt. There wasn’t even a real crash with it. Her husband was sitting in a passenger seat. He was a blind man. That was a very difficult call for us.”
There are reasons the Ohio State Highway Patrol is enforcing seatbelt laws.
“We’re keeping an eye on it, just for one of the reasons, obviously,” Pentek said. “When we arrive on a crash scene, our first priority is to make sure that the scene’s safe and everyone’s safe on-scene. When people aren’t wearing their seatbelts, if something happens to them, we’re going to have to inform their family, whether it’s a serious injury or not. It’s just important to wear a seatbelt at all times.”
Pulsifer said that parents should start impressing upon their children that wearing a seatbelt is important.
“They absolutely should,” Pulsifer said. “I think one of the most important things is, when they’re little, you don’t start the car until everybody’s buckled in. You start from the time they’re little and they’ll carry it through to the time they get to be teenagers or adults. It’s hard for us to change their attitude (once they’re adults).”
While raising awareness is important when it comes to young children riding in cars or teenagers driving for the first time, enforcement is the best way to change the habits of adults.
“We’re raising awareness just by doing events like this and just trying to talk to them as much as we can, encouraging them,” Pulsifer said. “When they get to be adults, it’s probably more the enforcement that’s going to affect them.”
There’s a drastic difference in outcomes between crash victims who wear seatbelts and those who don’t.
“When we come on scene, you can see the headmarks in the windshield if someone isn’t wearing their seatbelt or you can see a major dent in the steering wheel from someone’s head coming off it,” Pentek said. “I had a single-vehicle crash, I believe it was last year. A guy drove into a tree. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. There was blood all over the floorboard, an imprint on the front windshield glass, and he ended up passing away due to that fact. If he would have been wearing a seatbelt, then obviously the head injury wouldn’t have been caused from that crash.”
Pulsifer has heard the common refrain that people have a right to not wear their seatbelt, but she disagrees.
“It’s not really your right not to, you’re going against the law,” Pulsifer said. “The law says you have to wear your belt.”
Another argument, that people die in crashes because they were wearing a seatbelt, is more myth than fact.
“That is so very rare, so very, very rare,” Pulsifer said. “Chances are they would die anyway if it’s that much to where the seatbelt caused them (to die). There’s going into a pond or something like that, but even those people, I’ve gone to many a call where cars got in ponds, and the people got out safely and they were wearing their belt.”
Pentek agreed wholeheartedly with Pulsifer.
“There’s a lot of people that believe that seatbelts will cause more harm than good, but, just going number-wise and percentages, the seatbelt’s going to save your life rather than take it,” Pentek said. “It’s important for the parents to also stress upon their kids to wear their seatbelt while they’re driving and for their parents to set an example for what to do for the kids when they start driving.”
