China gets serious about seatbelt use_美文_趣味英语-查字典英语网

China gets serious about seatbelt use

Those problems include many long-haul bus drivers having no strong awareness of safety, and many vehicles lack safety equipment such as seatbelts.

Also, "passengers basically have no consciousness that they should wear a seatbelt," he said.

A survey by the Auto Safety Exhibition China Tour 2009, in which 1,081 visitors were polled in major cities, showed that only 21 percent of the surveyed wore seatbelts whenever they were in a moving car, and 24 percent never wore seatbelts.

The other 55 percent used seatbelts at times. Some people would wear seatbelts only when they were driving, when they were on an expressway or when traffic police were around. Of those people, most would not use seatbelts if they were in the back seat.

A long-haul bus driver who works between Beijing and Hebei province said that most passengers decline to wear seatbelts because "it makes them feel constrained and uncomfortable."

Because of that, many passengers on buses that had serious accidents died when they could have survived, experts said.

In China, the number of deaths and of injuries from road accidents are close to the same, while in developed countries the death toll is only 2 percent of the injured, according to official statistics.

Zhang Yu, an analyst at Automotive Foresight (Shanghai) Corp, said that is common in societies such as China, where the automotive culture is not fully developed.