BuckeyeBlog

Last year, Americans for Prosperity and COAST were part of a group of organizations that enacted a red-light camera ban in Cincinnati. Red light cameras’ effectiveness as a safety tool is questionable. In fact, there is strong evidence they actually make intersections less safe. It is not questionable, though, that they help enrich local governments, are ripe for abuse, and are a violation of citizens’ privacy.

Now AFP and COAST are bringing their crusade to end this government abuse to Toledo:

The groups will be hosting an organizing meeting for the 2009 campaign on Monday, January 12, 2009 at the Point Place Branch Library, 2727 117th St. Toledo 43611 at 7:00 PM.  Members of the public are invited to join the assemblage to help place the initiative on the ballot.

Red light cameras are one in a long-line of proposals that ostensibly advance safety at the expense of liberty. It’s good to see people out there who actually care about liberty battling the nanny state.

As reported by Gongwer($), Ohio is looking at strengthening its booster seat law to require older children to use these seats. Backers contend that “extensive empirical evidence” points to the need for more government regulation.

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.