The topic IIRC is seat belts on slow laboring boats such as ferries. Not personal watercraft......just public vessels,......you know the ones that crawl along? Yet they are capable (according to a couple of you) of throwing people around like rag dolls doing a couple knots.......those ones. Not cars.
Inter-island ferries here are the principal form of transport for many people, and it's not uncommon - usual in fact - for one of these to be travelling, day or night, with over 100 people on board, at 40+ mph. That may not seem fast to you if you're thinking of cars, but I can assure you in a boat it's damned fast.
Change that to from "high speed cruiser" to "commercial water taxi" and you may be close to what the OP had asked about 100 or so posts ago!
Thank you!
Regarding my saying that while I'm sure it's happened, I've never heard of a human projectile causing a secondary accident. I was only thinking of unbelted people being thrown from the car, thus another car had to swerv to miss hitting him. Not unbelted back seat passengers. Regarding that, back to my earlier post: Assuming every unbelted person in the car is a legal adult, and are aware that nobody's buckled-up, it's nobody's business but theirs. Of course, the driver should have the legal right to tell them to buckle up if he so desires--He, like the Airline, Bus Company, is the "owner" you agree to ride with. I'm sure unbuckled back seaters do cause all kinds of damage, but the incidence of someone flying out and causing people in another car (who did not agree to this unbuckling in the offending car) injury and death is probably miniscule--same as the deaths caused by jammed belts.
You keep on about "secondary accidents". That is not the point here. The point is a large open cabin containing a large number of people suddenly decelerating from 40mph to stationary. The people near the back will have nothing to stop them being thrown down the length of the cabin, and whatever they hit (part of the boat or other people) will be at 40mph. Injuries can be, and are, totally catastrophic.
Someone made reference to people being thrown clear in a boat collision, whereas their belted in companions all go down with their sinking boat. I have been in several boats that have sunk, for a variety of reasons, and on each occasion there was ample time to get out. Boats very rarely go straight down. And contrary to what has been implied by some people, modern belt buckles are carefully designed to be releasable under pretty extreme circumstances. The buckles themselves are very solidly made, and if worn and adjusted correctly any collision that would distort a belt buckle would almost certainly be unsurvivable anyway, or would be accompanied by major trauma to the wearer's pelvis. A most unlikely scenario with a boat.
Your attitude to rear seat passengers wearing or not seat belts is unbelievably self-centered. There is a very good reason why throughout the EU it is a legal requirement for rear seat passengers to wear belts. There was on UK TV years back a slow-motion simulation of a woman driving her kids back from school, when something went wrong and she hit another car. This was not a very severe impact, but in slo-mo you see the head of the child behind her, not strapped in, hitting the back of her head and propelling her forwards towards the windshield (which she doesn't hit because she is belted in). Both child and mother die from severe skull fractures, whereas in the front passenger seat her friend has
her child behind her, strapped in, and both mother and child walk away virtually unscathed. That film was said to be a recreation of an actual incident, which so horrified the emergency services that they felt they had to promulgate it. The authorities interviewed the surviving adult who confirmed that both children (aged 14 or 15) had been strapped in at the start of the journey, but the one who died had presumably unbuckled for some reason. Perhaps he felt his civil rights were being infringed.
