Use It or Lose It

After yet another horrific minibus crash, in which a collision with a taxi sent the minibus plunging upside down into a pedestrian subway and ejecting one passenger to his death, the question is now why all of Hong Kong's public light buses are not yet fitted with seat belts.

Thanks to the wishy-washy law enacted in 2004, which required seat belts in all minibuses registered after August 2004 (instead of all of them), many operators simply continued running old buses without seat belts rather than spending to retrofit them. Others that purchased new minibuses found they had engine stalls owing to the pollution-control systems, forcing them to run older models.

But the blame does not rest solely with the operators; the law states that passengers must use the seat belts when available, and from what I've observed most do not. On any given day that I take a minibus, I can see that fewer than 20 per cent of passengers buckle up (a full minibus holds 16 people; perhaps three use their seat belts, myself included). Those not strapping in are deluding themselves about their ability to hold on to the plastic seat handle in an accident, to say nothing of not being catapulted out a window if the minibus, with its high center of gravity, rolls on impact.

It doesn't make much sense to jump up and down about the lack of safety equipment when idiotic passengers refuse to use it when it's there.

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