Traffic+safety

//Adapted from: // New York Times. (2005, July 10). The seat belt solution. Retrieved September 8, 2013, from New York Times: []


 * The Seat-Belt Solution **

Child car seats certainly seem to be an effective piece of safety equipment: big and bulky, federally regulated and expensive. (You can easily spend $200 on a car seat.) But how well do they actually work?

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data seem to show that car seats are indeed a remarkable lifesaver. Although motor-vehicle crashes are still the top killer among children from 2 to 14, fatality rates have fallen steadily in recent decades. Perhaps the single most encouraging statistic about car seats in the NHTSA manual was this one: They are 54 percent effective in reducing deaths for children ages 1 to 4 in passenger cars.

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child's riding completely unrestrained. There is another mode of restraint, meanwhile, that doesn't cost $200: seat belts.

For children younger than roughly 24 months, seat belts plainly won't do. For them, a car seat is the best practical way to ride safely, and it is certainly an improvement over the days of sitting on mom's lap. But what about older children? Is it possible that seat belts might give them the same protection as car seats?

The answer can be found in a collection of government data called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which collects police reports on all fatal crashes in the U.S. since 1975. These data include every imaginable variable in a crash, including whether the occupants were restrained and how.

Even a quick look at the FARS data reveals a striking result: among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts. There are many reasons, of course, that this raw data might be misleading. Perhaps kids in car seats are, on average, in worse wrecks. Or maybe their parents drive smaller cars, which might provide less protection.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16pt;">However, the real answer to why child auto fatalities have been falling seems to be that more and more children are restrained in some way. Many of them happen to be restrained in car seats, since that is what the government insists on, but if the government instead insisted on proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.</range id="520585082_2"> </range id="452039260_4">

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16pt;">It may be that the main benefit of car seats and booster seats is that they force children to sit still in the back seat. If so, perhaps there is a different device that could help accomplish the same goal for roughly the same price: a back-seat DVD player.