Surprise at number of Inverness drivers not wearing seatbelts
NEARLY 300 people in Inverness have been caught not using their car seatbelts over the past nine months.
As the number of crashes caused by driving too fast continues to fall, officers have been focusing on other aspects of bad driving such as using mobile phones at the wheel and not buckling up.
Chief superintendent Julian Innes said: "Road collisions are inevitable in remote and rural areas, but we are still getting folk involved who have not fastened their seatbelts.
"It doesn’t make sense because if has been proved seatbelts save lives.
"I cannot understand why 295 people in the Inverness area didn’t have their seatbelt fastened. It is a real surprise.
"This figure does not include the drivers who have simply been warned about not using their seatbelt."
When taken with Inverness’s 295 seatbelt charges, the figure for the Highlands and Islands is 906.
When it comes to the offence of using mobiles while driving, the north total is 613 for the past nine months, with 258 from the Inverness area.
Ch Supt Innes said he also struggled to understand why drivers continued to ignore the law when there were devices on the market as cheap as £5 that allowed hands-free phone use.
He said he believed car manufacturers would soon design out the need for drivers to pick up their phones while at the controls.
For every fatal collision that occurs in the area, the police automatically examine the mobiles of the drivers
to discover when they have made calls.