This is Australian design regulation
for the full bla bla bla the link is down the bottom.
3.2.1 Seat Belts
The first seat belt arrangement was patented by a Frenchman in 1903 (8). However it was in 1954 that researchers at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in the US identified the danger of ejection from motor vehicles, and in September 1960 a Select Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament recommended that
“The motor trade should install seat belts of an approved standard in all motor vehicles. Road safety authorities should give publicity to the advantages of wearing seat belts” (8).
In the early 1960s the Standards Association of Australia began to develop standards for seat belts and anchorages, and these were eventually incorporated in Australian Design Rules 4 and 5 and approved in 1967 as two of the first five Australian Design Rules. They came into effect on 1 January 1969.
Seat belts had been on sale and available for fitting in cars from the 1950s (8), but there was little understanding of the need for restraint and almost all fitting in cars was voluntary and after market. In many cases it was government and private fleets that took the lead and fitted belts to their vehicles. One of the earliest and certainly the best known example is the Snowy Mountains Authority, which not only fitted belts in heavy machinery as well as road vehicles, but required its staff to wear them and provided educational and publicity material to encourage them to do so. A report on this experience and a study based on police reports of 40,000 casualty crashes in Victoria in 1963 provided the first hard Australian evidence of the benefits of seat belt wearing. These two studies provided a strong foundation for policy and legislative action.
Even if fitted, belts must be worn to be effective. Milne reports that in 1964 the South Australian Road Traffic Board reported a 64% wearing rate for drivers, where belts were fitted, and in the same year in Victoria 64% of drivers of passenger cars and derivatives involved in casualty crashes were wearing belts, where fitted. Oddly, the wearing rate declined over the rest of the decade to as low as 27% in South Australia in 1970.
That year was the watershed. It will be recalled that 1970 was Australia’s worst year for road deaths. Following recommendations of a Parliamentary Committee, Victoria made seat belt wearing compulsory from the beginning of 1971. Similar legislation in New South Wales came into effect in October of that year. Other States followed and by 1972 compulsory wearing followed throughout Australia.
There was an immediate effect. Milne reports that the reduction in occupant fatalities from the expected trend was of the order of 15-20%; Heiman (9) reports a reduction in Victoria of 18% over the expected trend by the end of 1971 and 26% by 1975. Milne mentions a flow-on in belt wearing rates in Sydney and South Australia following Victoria’s compulsory wearing legislation.
Further improvements followed. Compulsory fitting of belts in back seats came in 1971, but mandatory locking retractors, although required in front seats from 1976 (but fitted in many vehicles before that) were not required in rear seats before 1984 (although again, some manufacturers were fitting them from the late 1970s). Child restraint anchorages in the rear seats were mandatory from 1976.
Recent improvements have included seat belt pretensioners and webbing clamps to further improve restraint effectiveness in a crash. A logical development, these devices overcome one deficiency of the locking retractor belt: the propensity of this belt to allow ‘spool out’ and some forward movement before the retractor locks, and hence some head or upper body impact with the front of the passenger compartment.
Heiman reports seat belt wearing rates up to 90% by the mid 1980s. Makeham (10) reported rates of 95% and up to 98% in some regions of Australia in the front seat, and up to 80% in the rear. These rates are now as high as anywhere in the world. If ever there were a ‘silver bullet’ in road safety, seat belts would have to be one of them.
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[Edited on 19-9-2004 by vw0064]
