Evaluation of a County Enforcement Program With a Primary Seat Belt Ordinance: St. Louis County, Missouri. Final Report

摘要

In March 2007, St. Louis County implemented a seat belt ordinance that allowed for traditional enforcement procedures. In order to increase usage on St. Louis County roads, particularly on roadways with fatal or disabling injury crashes, the St. Louis County Police Department conducted an intense high visibility enforcement (HVE) campaign along an 8-mile corridor on State Highway 21 in the southeastern part of the county. This corridor was selected in part because there had been at least 8 fatal or disabling injury crashes along this roadway in recent years. This campaign was characterized by a strong enforcement effort that was accompanied by only modest publicity in the form of roadway signage. Saturation patrols and enforcement zones resulted in about 1,000 citations issued over a two-week period. The results showed significant increases in all awareness indices and a 4.9 percentage point increase in belt use compared to the control corridor. Belt use increased as much among occupants of pickup trucks as passenger cars and increased the most for passengers, reaching nearly 90%. These data suggest that enactment and enforcement of a statewide primary enforcement law would likely result in a significant increase in statewide seat belt usage. If Missouri enacted a statewide primary law upgrade and implemented regular HVE programs, similar to the program implemented in St. Louis County, Missouri would save an estimated 30 to 70 lives, prevent 400 to 900 serious injuries, and save $110 million to $215 million in lower economic costs annually.