NOTE FROM THE BLOGMASTER: I think one thing you’re going to find out about me very quickly is that I don’t tend to believe anything just because somebody tells me that it is true. I am a skeptic to the core, and as such I am going to tend to dig into some of the ideas that many people take as sacrosanct. I am going to question the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to investigation no matter how ingrained the idea is in society or how mundane the subject matter. Hopefully the subject matter that I choose to write about here is marginally interesting, but that’s another story altogether. I believe that it is dangerous to accept statements of fact out-of-hand without any investigation. Time, money and lives are often lost by blind acceptance of what is presented as factual, and those individuals that are held in positions of authority (or perceived authority) often use this blind acceptance in order to further their particular agendas. Chemical manufacturers will tell you their products are safe for you and the environment, automobile manufacturers will tell you that 17 miles per gallon is the best that can be done, doctors will tell you that you need a prescription drug to make your spleen shinier, women will tell you that they have a perpetual headache, etc. They will push their agendas (intentionally or not) through fear and ignorance; meanwhile we are left on our backs with our legs in the air. BUT THERE’S NO NEED TO FEAR! UNDERDAN IS HERE! I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too. Wherever there is injustice, you will find me. Wherever there is suffering I’ll be there. Wherever liberty is threatened...Alright…that’s enough of that crap…
OK, so what am I writing about on a semi-sober Sunday night after a long weekend on the river? Well, as I have mentioned in past entries, I have two awesome kids. And much to my surprise I spend a great deal of time thinking about their safety and well-being. My wife and I are essentially the only protection that they have against catastrophic injury, illness and destitution, so we have to be there in the trenches looking out for them every day. I’m continually researching “child-safe” medications, toys, media, child care products, and parental aides…I said parental aides, not marital aides…but, now that you mention it, I do a lot of “research” in that area, too. (Nudge, nudge, eh?) The boy is around the age that he’s going to graduate from safety seat to booster seat soon, so I got to wondering what (if any) actual (not perceived) benefits car seats provide. Again, most people accept out-of-hand without question that car seats provide a huge benefit, (my hunch is that they do as well) but I’d like to be a little more quantitative about items that are expensive and mandated by law in some states. And, usually, when everybody accepts something as truth uniformly without question, red flags start going off in my head. I mean, after all, we used to sleep in the back window of our parents’ Caprice Classic on long trips and had WrestleMania matches in the back of the station wagon on the way to the store. Most of us made it this far, so what protection do car seats offer, exactly?
First of all it should be said that I had a Hell of a time tracking down this information. You would think that something of such high importance as child safety would mean that data is readily accessible. It isn’t. Also, there are relatively few studies that relate the effectiveness and use of child restraint devices, and those studies that are available are done by either polling individuals or by searching a single insurance company’s accident report database in selected states. However, all is not lost. The data that I was able to track down did supply some valuable information.
In the US in 2005 there were 43,443 fatalities from automobile accidents when all vehicle types are counted. We traveled around 2,990 billion vehicle miles on our highways and byways, which puts the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) at 1.45. For passenger vehicles (no motorcycles, bikes, busses, or commercial vehicles) there w
ere 31,415 fatalities in 2005 and 2,750 billion VMT, which makes the fatality rate 1.14 per 100 million VMT. If the average person drives about 15K miles per year then they would have to drive for about 6000 years in order to be involved in a fatal accident. I think I was driving behind an old lady today that was only a couple thousand years away from that. There were 2,581,000 non-fatally injured people involved in accidents in 2005 (286K incapacitating injuries, 698K non-incapacitating injuries, 1,545K “possible” injuries). With 2,990 billion VMT that puts the injury rate at about 86 per 100 million VMT. So you’d have to drive about for about 77 years to be assured that you will even get injured in a crash. Per mile traveled, the odds are two-times better that you’d get a royal flush in poker on the first five cards dealt (649,740 to 1 times 2) than be involved in an injury accident. So drink up and hit the road! (Only joking of course.) These numbers are for the entire population, but I am only concerned (for the sake of this article, and in general) with children. So I’ll try to focus my attention on kids under 9 years old, which is when they can usually graduate to normal seat belts.
ere 31,415 fatalities in 2005 and 2,750 billion VMT, which makes the fatality rate 1.14 per 100 million VMT. If the average person drives about 15K miles per year then they would have to drive for about 6000 years in order to be involved in a fatal accident. I think I was driving behind an old lady today that was only a couple thousand years away from that. There were 2,581,000 non-fatally injured people involved in accidents in 2005 (286K incapacitating injuries, 698K non-incapacitating injuries, 1,545K “possible” injuries). With 2,990 billion VMT that puts the injury rate at about 86 per 100 million VMT. So you’d have to drive about for about 77 years to be assured that you will even get injured in a crash. Per mile traveled, the odds are two-times better that you’d get a royal flush in poker on the first five cards dealt (649,740 to 1 times 2) than be involved in an injury accident. So drink up and hit the road! (Only joking of course.) These numbers are for the entire population, but I am only concerned (for the sake of this article, and in general) with children. So I’ll try to focus my attention on kids under 9 years old, which is when they can usually graduate to normal seat belts.
In the age group made up of children 0-3 years old, there were 370 deaths in 2007. Motor vehicle accidents (MVAs) were the #3 cause of death behind congenital anomalies (462) and drowning (437). What’s the #4 cause of death in infants? Homicide (328). Sick fucks. For children aged 4-7, there were 449 deaths from MVAs which made it the #1 cause of death followed by malignant neoplasms (390) and congenital anomalies (205). Interestingly, almost one-fourth of all children between the ages of 5 and 9 years who were killed in MVAs were pedestrians. They could be removed from this car seat discussion, but I’ll leave them in to bolster numbers.
Let’s set aside the unlikely odds that you or your children are going to be killed or injured in an accident, and let’s assume for now that the unlikely event has happened - that you’ve just been in an accident. What are the chances that you are injured or dead? What benefit does a child restraint system have? Why is your armpit in the glovebox? Really, I’m just looking for what matters, what really improves the chances of walking away. In my digging I found an excellent document that was published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis dealing with child passenger fatalities and injuries. It’s a 56-page study that is packed with great info about vehicle types, age groups, restraint use, seating position, and basically everything that you could ever ask for…except for the actual formulas that they used to calculate some of the relative numbers. Putting that last tidbit aside, the conclusions of the study are very useful.
In many of these studies the term relative risk is thrown about a lot, so I’ll briefly describe it here. A relative risk is defined as a ratio of two probabilities, P1 and P2. For calculating relative risk here, P1 can (for example) refer to the percent of unrestrained children that were fatally injured in a fatal crash. P2 can refer to the percent of restrained children that were fatally injured in a fatal crash. So for example, P1 for 4 though 7 year olds in a single-vehicle fatal crash in a SUV was 26.9%, and P2 was 12.5%. P1 divided by P2 equals 2.15, which means that for the specific type of crash described, an unrestrained child was 2.15 times more likely to be fatally injured than a restrained child. Note that this says nothing about actual numbers of fatalities. An increase from 3 to 6 fatalities would show the same relative risk increase.
For children from 0-3 only 6 out of 1000 kids that are in MVAs are seriously injured. That is about .006%, or 1 to 167 against getting injured if they are in a crash. This is about the same odds as getting audited by the IRS sometime in their life (175 to 1). For 4-8 year-olds this number increases to around 17 per 1000 in accidents. Still pretty damn low. If the child is restrained at all the numbers drop 38%, and if they are in an “appropriate” restraint (booster seat) they drop 59%. Research on the effectiveness of child safety seats has found them to reduce fatal injury by 71 percent for infants (less than 1 year old) and by 54 percent for toddlers (1-4 years old) in passenger cars. For infants and toddlers in light trucks (like I drive), the corresponding reductions are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively. Also, I think it is worth noting that although only 5.7% of these crashes occurred with drivers 16-19 years old, the children involved in them are 6 times more likely to be injured than if driven by someone 20 years or older. There could be a lot of reasons for this (speed, inexperienced drivers, the shite cars they drive, etc.), but I think it’s because teenagers are dumbasses. They are most likely too busy texting their friends about who Justin Timberlake is dating, painting their toenails, and dicking with their iPod to ensure that their passengers are strapped in properly and seated in the right position.
O.K. So what did I really learn? It seems obvious not only logically, but also quantitatively that child restraint systems have some benefit. I mean, speaking as a parent, having the kids strapped in where you can see them, control their movement, and reach them if necessary makes driving anywhere possible. Otherwise it would be like turning a squirrel monkey loose in the car. You’d be dodging a constant barrage of Hot Wheels and YoGos. Now, I threw a lot of percentages around here, and it is apparent to me that they are statistically relevant. Even if they weren’t statistically relevant, saving even one child from death or debilitating injury is positive. However, I believe that it is important to realize that the numbers are very low even though relative risks change by significant percentages. If we drop teen drivers and pedestrian accidents out of the equation the chances of injury or death become quite literally astronomically low. Why do I mention that? Well, I think that the stress that is heaped upon parents overwhelms common sense in many cases. And I believe the almost primal fear of child injury or death has been played expertly here by the manufacturers of child safety products to their benefit. You shouldn’t feel like a bad parent if you don’t strap your child into a five-point harness if you are just pulling the car into the garage off of the street. You should, however, feel like a real f-up if you have ten kids loose in the back seat of your Volare` with a 15 year old driving as you crack a beer and have a smoke while screaming down the interstate. There’s a middle ground somewhere in there that I hope you can see.
O.K. So what did I really learn? It seems obvious not only logically, but also quantitatively that child restraint systems have some benefit. I mean, speaking as a parent, having the kids strapped in where you can see them, control their movement, and reach them if necessary makes driving anywhere possible. Otherwise it would be like turning a squirrel monkey loose in the car. You’d be dodging a constant barrage of Hot Wheels and YoGos. Now, I threw a lot of percentages around here, and it is apparent to me that they are statistically relevant. Even if they weren’t statistically relevant, saving even one child from death or debilitating injury is positive. However, I believe that it is important to realize that the numbers are very low even though relative risks change by significant percentages. If we drop teen drivers and pedestrian accidents out of the equation the chances of injury or death become quite literally astronomically low. Why do I mention that? Well, I think that the stress that is heaped upon parents overwhelms common sense in many cases. And I believe the almost primal fear of child injury or death has been played expertly here by the manufacturers of child safety products to their benefit. You shouldn’t feel like a bad parent if you don’t strap your child into a five-point harness if you are just pulling the car into the garage off of the street. You should, however, feel like a real f-up if you have ten kids loose in the back seat of your Volare` with a 15 year old driving as you crack a beer and have a smoke while screaming down the interstate. There’s a middle ground somewhere in there that I hope you can see.
Oh, yeah. Not to kick the beehive on my way out the door, but in two of the major studies that I referenced 69% of the drivers in these accidents were women…
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