I (and the enraged Yehuda Segal) have written elsewhere against seatbelt laws, blindly amplified by various poskim. As it turns out, they likely do not kill more Jews in absolute numbers, but they do still redistribute risk unto innocent pedestrians. This is otherwise known as Moral Hazard.
A fine example of moral hazard, funnily-painfully enough, is this very act of paskening, complete with Da’as Torah papacy (our rabbis are never wrong), social conformity enforced in the name of pseudo-halacha, vapid intuition, as opposed to Talmudic proof, on the part of modern decisors, כי רבים חללים הפילה — and in Nefashos, to boot, the mind-rotting negation of ואל תאמר קבלו דעתי, שהן רשאין ולא אתה and Chulin 6b מקום הניחו לי אבותי וכולי, and contempt of hard data in halacha (exceptions notwithstanding).
In short, we have ourselves the perverse multiplication of moral hazard by (1) third-party rabbis (2) relying on the interventionist state, father of manifold moral hazards, which, in turn, (3) ignores drivers’ moral hazard…
Here is Wikipedia’s update of the research (abbreviated):
The reduction of predicted benefit from regulations that intend to increase safety is sometimes referred to as the Peltzman effect in recognition of Sam Peltzman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who published “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation” in the Journal of Political Economy in 1975 in which he controversially suggested that “offsets (due to risk compensation) are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths”. A reanalysis of his original data found numerous errors and his model failed to predict fatality rates before regulation (Robertson 1977).
… But “Peltzman’s theory does not predict the magnitude of risk compensatory behavior.” Substantial further empirical work has found that the effect exists in many contexts but generally offsets less than half of the direct effect. In the U.S., motor vehicle fatalities per population declined by more than half from the beginning of regulation in the 1960s through 2012. Vehicle safety standards accounted for most of the reduction augmented by seat belt use laws, changes in the minimum drinking age, and reductions in teen driving (Robertson 2015).
The Peltzman effect can also result in a redistributing effect where the consequences of risky behavior are increasingly felt by innocent parties (see moral hazard). By way of example, if a risk-tolerant driver responds to driver-safety interventions, such as compulsory seat belts, crumple zones, ABS, etc. by driving faster with less attention, then this can result in increases in injuries and deaths to pedestrians.
Tosafos Bava Kama 27b s.v. H.G. Amai:
ה”ג אמאי פטור איבעי ליה לעיוני, אבל הך לא פריך אמאי חייב בנזקו כשהוזק איבעי ליה לעיוני כדפירשתי לעיל (דף כג. ד”ה ולחייב) דיותר יש לו לשמור שלא יזיק משלא יוזק ולא שייך כאן כל המשנה ובא אחר ושינה בו פטור (לעיל כ. כד:) דגבי אדם לא אמר הכי והא דאמר (לעיל דף כב.) הניח חנוני נרו מבחוץ בעל הגמל פטור ולא אמר איבעי ליה לעיוני וי”ל דדוקא במקום הליכתו אמרינן איבעי ליה לעיוני וקצת קשה הא דאמר רבא לעיל כי אית לך רשות לסגויי הא בהמה נמי איבעי לה לעיוני כדמוכח בהפרה (לקמן דף נב:) דשור פקח ביום פטור וליכא למימר בממלא רה”ר שאינה יכולה לעבור אלא דרך עליה דא”כ לבעוטי נמי אית לה רשותא.