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.