Ashland Police - Click it or Ticket

Click It or Ticket is a high visibility enforcement program designed to raise safety belt usage and save people from death and serious injury on the streets and highways.

The Click It or Ticket campaign is currently used in 18 other states and the District of Columbia. In other Click It or Ticket campaigns, the occupant restraint usage rate increased by more than 10 percent, meaning that thousands of previously unbuckled drivers and passengers began using safety belts and child safety seats.

The campaign consists of strict enforcement, strong educational messages in the form of ads on most radio stations in the area, and numerous public appearances by officers on behalf of the program.

Virginia's statewide safety belt compliance rate is currently 80.6 percent. The goal of 2009 Click It or Ticket is to raise the rate to at least 82 percent.

According to preliminary numbers from The Virginia Highway Safety Office at DMV, in 2008, there were a total of 821 crash related fatalities, of those, 631 fatalities occurred in vehicles that were equipped with safety restraints. 352 or 54 percent of the fatalities were not wearing restraints.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), of the passenger vehicle occupants involved in fatal crashes in Virginia, the 55 percent that were restrained survived. When worn correctly, seat belts have proven to reduce the risk of fatal injury to front-seat passenger car occupants by 45 percent – and by 60 percent in pickup trucks, SUVs and mini-vans.
Nearly one in four Virginians still fail to regularly wear their seat belts when driving or riding in a motor vehicle.
Men – especially younger men – are much less likely to buckle up. In Virginia in 2006, 78 percent of male drivers and 77 percent of male passengers between the ages of 18 and 34 who were killed in crashes for which restraint use was known, were NOT wearing their seat belts.
Nationally, in 2006, only 78 percent of rural drivers and their passengers were observed wearing their seat belts compared to 79 percent for urban motorists and 84 percent among suburban motorists.
While only about 27 percent of Virginians live in rural areas (based on 2000 Census data), rural traffic fatalities accounted for 59 percent of Virginia’s total in 2006.
Motorists can increase the odds of survival in a rollover crash in a light truck by nearly 80 percent by wearing their seat belt.
In fact, 75 percent of passenger vehicle occupants who were totally ejected from their vehicle in 2007 were killed in Virginia. But only 5 out of 100 drivers or passengers involved in fatal crashes were wearing their seat belts were totally ejected in Virginia.
In Virginia, 22 percent of the occupants of light trucks involved in fatal crashes are ejected compared to 15 percent of passenger car occupants. Pickup trucks rollover twice as often as passenger cars.

For more information, please visit Click it or Ticket's website.