driving UX

[cellio]

When driving to work I pass a couple of those digital highway signs that tend to say things like "est. travel time to downtown: N miles, M minutes" or "stadium parking use exit X" or "accident slow traffic ahead". When they have nothing better to say, they dispense pithy advice.

This morning's message was "click it or ticket". Setting aside the cries of linguistic outrage from unbalanced conjunctive operands, I found myself thinking about why, these days, anybody doesn't use a seat belt. I've lived through the progression from "not always present" to lap belts to those two-part (front-seat) belts where you clicked a lap belt and the shoulder piece slid into place when you turned the car on to today's norm of a single belt with two parts (lap and harness). The current ones are easy to use. I always use a seat belt and expect drivers to wait for me to fasten it when I'm a passenger. And yet, there's a problem.

An article in Consumer Reports not long ago noted that while people say they don't wear them because they're uncomfortable, their testers were able to find comfortable positions "so long as you're not a short woman with a large bust".

Um, yeah.

So how do you address that? I always fasten my seat belt, and a part of me wonders, were I to get into an accident that wouldn't have been fatal, if my seat belt is going to snap my neck or something. The height of the anchor point for that upper part is adjustable -- and there is no setting that gets it low enough to sit on my shoulder rather than alongside my neck. I don't have this problem when I'm a passenger; the seat is usually pushed back farther. (Which you would think would make it worse because the belt goes up, but it's hard to inspect while using it.) But when I'm driving I've got to be able to reach the pedals, so the seat is fairly far forward.

Is there some safe way I can hack this aspect of my car? I wondered about sitting higher (I don't think I can raise the seat, but maybe a cushion?), but if my legs are higher the seat needs to be even farther forward, and we're also trying to not be right on top of the airbag.