Han Ximin

    ximhan @126.com

    AN 8-month-old child was thrown out of the window and seriously injured in an accident on Nonglin Road in Futian District in Shenzhen on Sunday.

    Instead of being fixed in a safety basket or on a child chair in the back seat, the baby, who is receiving treatment at Shenzhen Children’s Hospital, was being held in the arms of an aunt.

    The accident happened at about 10:05 a.m. when the driver, Huang, was turning from Nonglin Road to Fengtian Road and was hit by a car running southward along Nonglin Road. The baby was thrown out of the back-seat window after impact.

    The accident occurred one day before local police began yesterday to enforce a rule requiring back-seat passengers to buckle up.

    Three people were sitting in the back seats and the car wasn’t equipped with a child chair.

    “The baby wouldn’t have been so seriously injured if the car had things like that installed,” police said yesterday, the first day fines for back-seat passengers not buckling up came into force. For the previous week, drivers received a warning without a fine.

    In a citywide check yesterday, mainly focusing on school buses, regular cabs, app-based cabs and other vehicles involved in passenger or cargo services, police found 405 safety belt violations, among them 94 involving back-seat passengers.

    According to the rule, drivers will be fined 500 yuan (US$79) if violations are found on expressways or fast urban roads. Drivers will be warned or fined 200 yuan if violations are found on the city’s main roads and other ordinary roads. If the driver fails to buckle up, two penalty points will be added to the driver’s license.

    During the grace period, police found 2,310 safety belt violations and 773 back-seat passengers were warned.

    The violations included 197 on expressways and fast urban roads, and 2,113 on the city’s trunk roads and ordinary roads. Most of the violations, 1,982 in total, were committed by private cars and 2,142 violations were committed by locally registered vehicles.

    At around 11 a.m. yesterday, police intercepted a Zhuhai-registered bus at Hezhou Tollgate of the Shenzhen airport. All the passengers had fastened their safety belts.

    “I require all passengers to fasten their safety belts when they board the bus and check them all before I start to drive,” the bus driver said yesterday.

    A female passenger, Xu, who often commutes between Shenzhen and Zhuhai, supports the rule, saying it is dangerous to not fasten safety belts, especially on expressways.

    Yet a truck driver even refused to sign the ticket issued by police when he was caught for the second time on Nanping Expressway on July 2. According to a police officer Liu Liu, the driver was fined July 1 and was caught for the second time in two days.

    Statistics showed 11 people were killed and 60 were injured in car accidents in the city by June 28 this year, a drop of 15.38 percent in fatalities and an decrease of 17.81 percent in injuries.

    On May 16, a female passenger was killed in a car accident on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Riverside Expressway after failing to fasten her safety belt.