Always wear seat belts, both front and back

No cost at all. It only adds about 2 seconds to every trip.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that seat belts reduce the risk of fatal injury for front-seat occupants of passenger cars by 45%, and for front-seat occupants of light trucks by 60%. Among passenger-vehicle occupants killed in the United States in 2022 whose restraint use was known, 50% were unrestrained. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that seat belts can reduce the risk of death among vehicle occupants by up to 50%. WHO estimates that 248,099 people died in road crashes in China in 2021, equivalent to 17.4 deaths per 100,000 people. The National Bureau of Statistics yearbook reports 62,218 road-traffic deaths in 2021.

NHTSA (2024). Occupant Protection in Passenger Vehicles: 2022 Data (DOT HS 813 573)：「Among killed passenger vehicle occupants with known restraint use, 48 percent of those in the front row and 60 percent of those in the second row were unrestrained.」https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813573 ; WHO (2025). Road traffic injuries fact sheet. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffic-injuries ; WHO GHO RS_196/RS_198 (China, 2021). https://ghoapi.azureedge.net/api/RS_196?$filter=SpatialDim%20eq%20%27CHN%27 ; 国家统计局 (2022). 中国统计年鉴 2022，表 24-5 道路交通事故情况（2021 年）：死亡人数 62218 人. https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/2022/html/C24-05.jpg

Wear a seat belt in the back seat too. In the same report, 60% of second-row occupants killed whose restraint use was known were unrestrained. The 45% and 60% reductions are NHTSA estimates derived from crash-database analysis (citing Kahane 2015), not randomized trials. WHO’s estimated road-death toll for China is about four times the 62,218 deaths reported in the statistical yearbook. The figures cover different reporting scopes; this entry uses WHO’s estimate.