The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:

- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)

- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)

- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)

- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)

- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)

The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."

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sfn42 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Here's what I found doing a basic Google search:

> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975

> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.

It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.

> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."

If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..

	▲	enoch_r 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		See my comment summarizing the evidence as I understand it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590700 What articles did you find, exactly? What primary evidence are they basing their claims on? Many of the numbers you'll find with a google search are unclear about what they're comparing to - I believe both of the fatality numbers above (71% and 54%) are relative to completely unrestrained kids, which is not the relevant comparison. The 45% number I specifically discuss in the other comment, but every independently reproducible study using publicly available data has found much smaller effects, around 10-25% for minor injuries and no statistically significant difference in severe injuries. To be clear, I'm not saying "don't use car seats," I'm saying that the evidence doesn't support mandating them through age 8 (or 12!). Our kids would be much safer if we drove everywhere at 15mph - less convenient, but it would prevent many unnecessary deaths. Unfortunately, it is impossible to do anything in the world without risk. So we're forced to balance convenience against safety every day, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not.