Area McDonald’s restaurants participating in buckle up campaign

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, highway safety leaders and the Governor’s Highway Safety Programs of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio will present the 16th annual Buckle Up America/ Click it or Ticket Campaign at more than 100 McDonald’s restaurants.

Each customer entering the drive thru and properly wearing their seat belt will be rewarded with free prizes, including breakfast coupons. Officers also will be on scene, but they won’t be issuing citations. Instead, they’ll hand out cards with crash statistics from each state to encourage seat belt use.

The “Seat Belts Pay Off” project began 16 years ago as a simple seat belt reward’s campaign at a single McDonald’s in Huntington. This year’s campaign has grown to include the entire McDonald’s Tri-State Co-op, encompassing Central West Virginia, Southeast Ohio and Eastern Kentucky.  

In addition to local restaurants, restaurants in the Lexington Metro/Central Kentucky have joined the campaign, raising the number of restaurants to more than 100.  

Seat belt use in 2006 in Kentucky was 67%, Ohio was 82% and West Virginia was 89%.  If seat belt use had been 100% in those three states, an estimated 1,707 lives would have been saved by the belt. In 2006, there were 286,978 motor vehicle crashes in the three states. In those crashes, 2,524 people died and an additional 81,542 people were injured.