I found it to be a pretty major inconvenience. Air travel in particular was quite inconvenient - having to either bring along car seats or otherwise arrange for them to be available on both sides of the flight.

If car seats existed but weren’t required, would you have chosen not to bring them? Or, phrased differently, was it just the legal requirement that caused you to bring them?

It's pretty telling that in many countries (e.g. the EU), child seat laws are relaxed in taxis. It's an acknowledgement that there can be a tradeoff between safety and convenience.

If it's OK to hold your child in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, why shouldn't it be OK to hold your child in the backseat of your friends' car on the way to the airport?

My guess would be that it's a question of numbers. You want 99% of kids to be in child seats, and can allow a few exceptions (since e.g. nobody does a commute to daycare in a taxi). But if you allowed private drivers to avoid car seats in limited circumstances, people would abuse that privilege and never use a car seat, turning that number down to 70% or lower

There is no fundamental "why". Sometimes a law only needs to get you 90% of the way to an ideal to satisfy legislators. We live our lives steeped in such procedural gaps, but to live any other way would probably become a micro-managed nightmare.

In theory, a taxi driver is a trained professional (like an airplane pilot) whose safety record, attentiveness etc is much higher than the average driver. In practice, probably not so much.

But when it comes to driving it doesn't really matter much because half the accidents involving two cars are someone else's fault.

I'm not sure if fault is that binary. Sometimes, you're right, the other driver is at fault and there is nothing you could do. But often, you can drive defensively in a way that protects you from even serious mistakes by others.

I have personally not been in far more accidents than I've been in just because one of the two parties was paying attention and took the correct evasive action. Sometimes that was me, sometimes it was someone else. This is only the cases I've noticed, there were probably times where I did something stupid and didn't realize it, and the other person took evasive action anyway, or even cases where I took the evasive action without noting the other person did something stupid.

We need to look out for each other. Nobody is perfect, but the better each individual does the better the whole is.

I think that part of the comment was a joke.

If not for the legal requirement I probably would choose not to bring them. In my opinion going for a few days without a car seat is an acceptable level of risk.

That’s fair. I don’t enjoy doing the double car seat lug, but I would continue bringing them even if not legally required. My kids are little, though, so that calculus would probably change if they were in booster seat territory.

I asked out of genuine curiosity, so I hope I didn’t seem standoffish.

When I don't plan to do more than 50 miles of driving on one side, I would definitely not bring them if there wasn't a legal requirement.

Most of your accidents will occur while you’re close to home, because that’s where you likely will do most of your driving. It doesn’t really matter whether you get into a 30 mph collision on the boulevard next to your house or one three counties over…

I think the point was about the risk per baby-mile. If you’re going to fly and rent a car at the other side, you should bring the car seats. If you’re going to a metropolis with transit and walkability, maybe not. If an airport is a long distance from home, maybe so.

Decades ago, when I started hearing bad statistics that emphasized 'within 50 miles of home', I always thought that it was saying multi-hour roadtrips were automatically safer.

this makes a lot of sense. sure, "anything could happen", even in 50 miles, but the risk of an accident when driving a short distance is much less than the risk of an accident when driving longer distances.

this is simular to how the risk of contracting covid varies across different exposure scenarios. i'm hoping the pandemic will get us more used to thinking of risk on a continuum -- which may result in more sane policies around risk management.

I fear, wrt Covid19, it's the reverse - so many people saying masks are [totally] ineffective because breath can get around the sides.

It seems like the brainwashing that's been going on to convince people that they can't like policies, they have to be either political party A or party B has forced some notion of absolute bivalency in all matters -- everything is treated by a large proportion of the population as either 100% right or 100% wrong, subtlety seems to be entirely anathema.

"Can a viral spore get out of a mask? 'Yes', so noone should wear masks, they're an evil plot!" seems to be such a prevalent line of 'thinking'.

on the flip side, after six or seven months of quarantine, even the "safety at all costs!" crowd is figuring out how work limited social time into their lives.

On the other hand, the risk of a collision on city streets is much higher than on a highway.

Didn't Levitt and Dubner establish that a standard seatbelt would be safe enough to class as a car seat for children over 2 if they weren't explicitly banned by law.

Would you mind linking that if you have it around somewhere? It seems quite doubtful that a seatbelt would work on someone who isn’t even tall enough for the sash to go over their torso…

Here’s the paper:

https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/doyle-levitt%...

And here’s a pretty entertaining TED talk he gave:

https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0

Someone let the airlines know.

Airline seatbelts are designed to restrain you from flying out of your seat in turbulence. They will do little to restrain your head from hitting the seat in front in a front-on impact, and have a good chance of causing injuries in any kind of impact. For that reason, if an impact is considered more likely than usual, you will be instructed to assume the brace position. (Note also that crew have proper harnesses.)

But those are lap belts, and also planes tend to have different issues than cars do.

if you're riding planes that are at risk of >50kph impacts, you should probably move to a different airline

IIRC, what they claimed is that there was no statistically significant evidence that car seats for children over two (i.e. not infants) saved lives.

I recall when I was young (before car seat laws), the car had shorter seat belts in the back. Almost as though they expected children to sit there . . .

When you were young back seats has lap belts but not shoulder straps.

That is true of the first car I remember, but the second had (child-sized) shoulder belts.

I believe so. The single largest factor in survivability at any age is just being in the back seat, ie further Way from the impact.

Way further from the windshield that opens to the pavement.

Most US airlines let you check carseats for free. What's the inconvenience, if you don't mind me asking?

It's just a very large volume of luggage to be traveling with. Two young children require an awful lot of luggage to begin with: diapers, wipes, food, changes of clothing, towels, toys, strollers, etc. And trying to keep them happy is stressful enough on its own. Add in two bulky car seats, which as I recall need to be checked at the gate so you need to bring them all the through the airport and security, and the whole experience can become downright unpleasant.

Car seats can be checked as hold baggage and claimed at baggage claim. In the US, I believe they have to be free (in any case, I never had to pay for them [nor strollers] and they never “counted” if it was just a car seat or stroller, even on Spirit).

We would generally bring the car seat onto the airline and have the child sit in the seat on the flight. It prevented some of the chaos of wanting to run around the airplane. “This is transport; just like in the car or other airplanes, you have to be in your seat.”

Needs a window seat (obvs) and the red sticker “approved for aviation use” (which the cabin crew did check every single time, which was impressive). Ask for a seatbelt extension and adjust the belt so the buckling is done on the side rather than smack in the middle of the seat.

Carrying it around, along with the other luggage. It's not exactly a convenient, portable thing.

You can use a fabric-only portable car seat.

No, not in America and not on airlines. Here those aren't a thing...

not a parent, but checking baggage is already an inconvenience. once I was old enough to pull my own suitcase, my family never checked a bag again.

So a pretty minor inconvenience, got it.

That's clearly a minor inconvenience.

Out of curiosity, have you had the experience?

> saving 57 children in a single year is a lot

Yes, but I think this figure was proposed in order to be contrasted with the reduction of 8,000 births that same year.

There's clearly quite a difference between dead kids and kids not being conceived, or condom manufacturers would by lynched on street corners.

We can argue if the lives saved by seats are enough to counterbalance the inconveniences they pose, but among this inconveniences I would not put the reduction in the number of third children - I would actually put that as a plus, as a super-soft demographic control policy.

> I would actually put that as a plus, as a super-soft demographic control policy.

It is not a plus, because in the US there is no need to control births. To the contrary, there are not enough births.

Why are there not enough births?

Sometimes there's only one candidate for a job and that person demands more than minimum wage. It hurts profit.

Births in western Europe are less than the amount needed to keep the population stable: the population of those countries is long term decreasing. (but there is often immigration to make up for it)

I think the US is about even, or slightly positive. But then the US has a lot less people than Europe on a per land area measure.

It also prevents 8000 kids per year from being born. The net effect is -7943 children.