Today marks the start of National Road Safety Week, and the NSW Government is using the week to announce that from July 1, mobile phone detection cameras will also detect people not wearing seatbelts.
Road Safety Week is an annual initiative of the Safer Australian Roads and Highways (SARAH) Group, which aims to highlight the impact of road trauma and ways to reduce it. The theme for 2024 is All road safety is local – Drive So Others Survive.
As of midnight Thursday 2 May 2024, 124 have been lost on NSW roads, which is 16 more than the same time last in 2023.
“Seatbelts save lives, it’s as simple as that,” Minister for Roads John Graham said.
“Wearing a seatbelt doubles a person’s chance of survival in a car crash and the NSW Government is doing everything we can to make sure the simplest safety feature in a car is being used by everyone.
“It has been a legal requirement to wear a seatbelt in NSW since 1971 and it is frankly disturbing that a small minority of people are still not heeding the message.
“If camera enforcement can convince those people to buckle up we can reduce the 15 per cent of deaths that involve a belt not being worn.”
Minister for Regional Transport and Roads Jenny Aitchison said most of the accidents where people are hurt because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt happened in a rural area.
“In the last five years, about 85 per cent of the deaths and 76 per cent of the serious injuries that occurred in crashes where someone wasn’t wearing a seatbelt happened in country NSW.
“Driving in the country brings with it different challenges to city driving – longer distances are often covered on higher speed roads and we know that although country residents make up about a third of the NSW population they sadly make up around two thirds of deaths on NSW roads.
“This National Road Safety Week I’m urging all regional road users to make safer choices.”
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