This quote in a Strong Towns article caught my eye:
According to the Centers for Disease Control, for children ages 5 through young adults age 24, the leading cause of deathis auto accidents. For accidental causes of mortality, there is no close second. Even drowning, which we are militant about here in terms of baths, pools and time at the lake, is just a fraction of auto accidents. Imagine two 9/11 attacks each year that killed just kids and you still would not have the number of child fatalities America has each year from auto accidents…
If we are serious about wanting what is best for kids, shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to reduce the number of auto trips people are required to take each day? And when people do take trips, shouldn’t our top priority be reducing the travel speeds on local streets? Once outside of the local street network, shouldn’t our top priority be the removal of the greatest source of accidents – intersections – so traffic can flow smoothly?
The best thing we can do for the safety of our children is to get them out of the car by building mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
The post also mentions a controversial Freakonomics article suggesting that the biggest increase in children’s safety came from putting them in the back seat of cars, not from car seats.
This brings up a couple interesting questions that I grapple with. First, I think it is crystal clear that the less your child is in cars, the safer they are. So living in a neighborhood where they can walk to school, and you can walk together on most shopping and recreation trips, is a big win for the child’s safety. The difficult questions are, when you are occasionally caught in the rain or late for school, is it okay to jump in the back seat of a cab or Uber with your child, even though you haven’t lugged along the car seat, and it may even be illegal? And second, if you have a school within walking distance that doesn’t have the reputation of a school that requires a car or bus ride everyday, what is the overall best choice for the child? My wife and I make these decisions every day, and the choices we make are not the ones most people we know would make in the same situation. In fact, we just don’t talk about these choices much because people tend to have strongly held opinions. So I’ve added car seats and urban school districts along with politics and religion to the list of topics I don’t bring up in polite company. And yet, to me the choices are clear and I feel perfectly fine about the ones I have made.