However, when a driver is unbuckled, children are restrained only 24 percent of the time. Currently, only 17 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have primary seat belt laws - laws that allow law enforcement to stop and ticket a driver for not wearing a seat belt just like any routine traffic violation. Thirty-two states have weak secondary belt laws. Usage rates are, on average, 10-15 percentage points higher in states with primary seat belt laws. When Louisiana passed a primary belt law, child restraint use increased from 45 percent to 82 percent - with no change to the state's child passenger safety law.
Every state has a child passenger safety law that includes primary enforcement provisions.
The laws vary from state to state, with some laws covering only young children, some covering only the front seat and some exempting pick-up trucks and vans. Currently, only 29 jurisdictions require that all children up to the age of 16 be restrained in every seating position in every passenger vehicle. 2 Child Safety Seats and Seat Belts Make the Difference Child safety seats, when properly installed, reduce the risk of death by 71 percent for infants and 54 percent for toddlers. In 1999, among children under five years old, an estimated 307 lives were saved by child restraint use. 2 Of the children under age five who died in motor vehicle crashes in 1999, more than half were completely unrestrained.