During one of my first trips to México, in the back of an Uber from the airport into Monterrey, Kass told me a joke (in which the question is also the punchline):
“How many border patrol agents does it take to get a Mexican to wear their seatbelt?”
I wondered how widespread this indifference towards seatbelts might be, and, to quantify it, I’d say about a fifth of the taxis I’ve ridden in haven’t had usable seatbelts in the back.
They’ve been tied up, trapped behind folding seats, or, in a couple of cases, cut out completely and left as frayed stubs.
As people start to buy newer cars with weight-triggered seatbelt alarms, I’ve seen friends get sonically bullied into wearing them, but even then, it’s just to shut the beeping up — not because of some systematic culture of safety.
In the UK, there’s a phrase — “‘elf ‘n’ safety” (basically ‘health and safety’ but pronounced like someone doing the “bottle of water” bit) — which refers to safety rules that are maybe a little too overprotective, to a fault. The enforcers of those rules might be called ‘jobsworths’. British safety culture — both pragmatically and bureaucratically — is very firm, for better or for worse.
Those ‘elf ‘n’ safety jobsworths would probably quit if they saw the seatbelt apathy taken to its extreme: friends chilling in the back of a pickup truck, pulling beers from a cooler as they head outta town to a ranch/quinta/cabin for the weekend.