Does Ohio Need Stricter Booster Seat Laws?
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
But does it? For instance, Dr. William Cotton, medical director for the Primary Care Network and Nationwide Children’s Hospital contended that “recent research into 48,000 crashes involving some 56,000 children showed that youth in booster seats were 59% less likely to sustain an injury” (this is Gongwer’s summary of what he said, not a direct quote). However, as Stephen J. Dubner and Steven. D. Levitt, he authors of Freakonomics, point out, this data is based on comparing the use of a child in a booster seat to an unrestrained child, not a child who was using a seatbelt. Since the law already mandates children use seatbelts, this statistic is worthless in informing this debate.
Levitt and Dubner go on to point out:
In recent crashes and old ones, in big vehicles and small, in one-car crashes and multiple-vehicle crashes, there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2. (In certain kinds of crashes — rear-enders, for instance — car seats actually perform worse.) 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 mandates, but if the government instead mandated proper seat-belt use for children, they would likely do just as well / without the layers of expense, regulation and anxiety associated with car seats.
While it is understandable that Rep. Shannon Jones, the sponsor of this legislation, thinks the evidence points to the need to revise Ohio’s laws, it just isn’t so. While the popular conception is that booster seats save lives, this conception is based on a misreading of the data. Public policy needs to be based on solid facts. It does not seem this legislation is.
