Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

I will say there is a difference in regulation though, car seats are required for much longer, and car seats have ballooned in size. You'd be hard pressed to fit two of todays car seats in a Ford Tempo and even with my sister and I being 3 years apart, you'd still need two full size car seats which my parents never had.

I know nothing about car seats and how big they have to be! But I wonder if the focus on getting kids in car seats for longer is an example of focussing on a single criterion and not considering the safety/usability picture. Of course they are safer, all else being equal, but they also can't go anywhere?

I think car seats themselves make sense, and admittedly they do make more sense now. Or rather, cars are safer now--for occupants anyway--but children would not benefit from those same improvements without using a car/booster seat because the restraint systems in the vehicles are not designed for them and their effectiveness depends on the size of the occupant.

Or more concretely, when my mom drove me in her Ford Tempo, all we had were lap belts and no airbags. Those were just as effective protecting my mom in a crash as 5 year old me. But today our vehicle has auto-retracting three-point belts along with side impact air bags. Those are not effective in protecting a 5 year old, so it makes sense that they need some kind of adapter to improve safety (to match that of other occupants).

But the seats do not need to be the ridiculous things we have here.

More over, I think for most children, they don't really lose much, if you live somewhere that you must be driven everywhere, your parents probably own a car, putting a car seat in it and keeping it there doesn't restrict mobility much over that already massive restriction. I know it has affected me, but I know we're a pretty extreme outlier.

What it does probably do is put additional obstacles in the way of improving our transportation policy and habits.

That being said, it is certainly an issue of car blindness that our government regulates that children must use car seats, but doesn't regulate that you should be able to see a child standing in front of your vehicle. I.e., the only children's lives who matter are the ones *IN* the car.