time by road safety campaigner and National Liberal Party leader Charles Jeffers.

He has received some support from Road Safety Council chairman Delcina Bean-Burrows, who personally backs the move, although the council has not yet discussed the proposal.

She also says that she believes that an effort to encourage voluntary use of seatbelts should happen before it is made mandatory. And she has called for a register of road accidents to be kept to give Government a statistical basis for making policy.

In June, this newspaper said in an editorial that we did not believe that seatbelts were necessarily the answer to improving road safety. We said: "The truth is that if drivers stayed anywhere near the speed limit, then seatbelts would not be necessary. We agree with those people who say that using seatbelts is a small price to pay if it saves lives, but in a Country where such a large number of people ride motor cycles, sticking to sensible speeds would also be a small price to pay to save lives.'' This is still our stand. Seatbelts should reduce the severity of injuries to people involved in accidents, provided they are in cars or trucks -- bike riders will remain the most at risk of injury. Only better and more careful driving will do anything about that.

Ms Bean-Burrows' call for a register is a good one -- it is very hard to make any kind of good decision without information and up-to-date figures on the frequency and cause of accidents are hard to come by.

The recently released Police annual report goes some way to giving good information on accidents, but for 1997, not for 1998.

However it is our understanding that the 1998 accident rate was roughly the same as 1997's, when there were 2,929 reported accidents involving 4,887 local residents and 693 visitors.

In 1998, 18 people had died as a result of accidents compared to seven a year earlier. That focused the minds of the populace on the problem to a far great degree than the still unacceptably high rate of accidents did in 1997.

But it is reasonable to assume that the proportions of vehicles involved in accidents and their causes have remained roughly equivalent in 1997 and 1998.

In 1997, private cars were involved in 46 percent of all accidents, while motorcycles of all kinds accounted for 36 percent. But cycles, especially livery cycles, accounted for the vast majority of single vehicle accidents.

The main causes of accidents in 1997 were inattention -- which jumped dramatically from 1996 -- and inexperience.

This suggests that the solutions to the road safety problem are better driver education and a greater level of care and attention on the roads by all drivers. Car drivers and passengers should voluntarily use seat belts -- this is common sense -- but a mandatory seatbelt law will not solve the real problem.