How Car Seat Requirements can Endanger Children

My favorite way to travel with my kids (ages 3 and 2) is by train. It’s much safer than driving, my son doesn’t get motion sickness like he does in the car, and I am free to interact with my kids. As I began researching a family vacation this summer, I started looking for destinations we could visit by train from Pittsburgh. Our house is a convenient bus ride from Amtrak’s Pittsburgh station so we wouldn’t need to drive.

One option that we looked into was staying at the Eden Resort and Suites in Lancaster PA. I’ve stayed there on business travel and recommend it. This resort is only 1.6 miles from the Lancaster train station, which has a daily train to and from Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, Google street view shows that the roads between the train station and the resort do not have the pedestrian infrastructure to allow for a safe walk. The hotel shuttle only provides rides to people at least 8 years old. While some states exempt taxis from car seat requirements, Pennsylvania does not.

My wife and I are not physically capable of getting to the Pittsburgh train station by bus with kids, luggage, and car seats. It is a 500 ft walk to our bus stop from our house, and a further 0.4 miles walk from the bus stop downtown to the train station. Without car seats this is easy, my wife and I each roll a suitcase with one hand and hold a toddler’s hand with the other. However, our Graco car seats are bulky and weigh 22.8 lbs each.

Any legal method of travel within our physical capability would require our kids to be in a car for a larger portion of the trip. Substituting car travel with bus or train travel increases safety by far more than using a car seat. This is documented in Table 1. As a result, legal methods of travel are more dangerous than taking mass transportation to Lancaster and a taxi without a car seat for the last segment where a safer option is not available.

Table 1: Fatality Risk by Travel Mode

Mode	Passenger Fatalities per Billion Miles	Source
Car without Car Seat	15.9	According to the NHTSA, car seats reduce fatal injuries for toddlers in passenger cars by 54%. Calculated from fatality rate for cars overall. 15.9×(1-0.54)=7.3
Car with a Car Seat	7.3	Assumes children in car seats have the same safety as passengers overall. 2000 to 2009 data.
Commuter Rail and Amtrak	0.43	2000 to 2009 data
Transit Bus	0.11	2000 to 2009 data

There are two feasible, legal methods to get to Eden Resorts. The most convenient would be to just drive the whole way using car seats. However, driving, even with car seats, is much more dangerous than a travel mode that includes taking the train (See Table 2). 

The other legal method would be to take a taxi with our car seats from our house to the Pittsburgh train station, allowing us to get our car seats to the train station. This would be a significant hassle since we would still need to haul the car seats up to the train platform. Riding a taxi with car seats is so much more dangerous than taking the bus that the added risk from this trip segment more than offsets the safety benefit of having car seats in Lancaster.

To be clear, if it is possible to use a car seat without taking other safety risks, people should use a car seat. Also, the best way to address this safety issue would be to improve transit and pedestrian infrastructure around Pennsylvania’s train stations. A family shouldn’t need a car to reach a destination so close to a train station. People shouldn’t have to use Google street view to determine if a street is safe to walk with children. This is not something I need to do before I drive somewhere.

This situation also illustrates the importance of having good transit connections with intercity rail. 

While it is not an option with Lancaster’s existing transit system, for comparison I calculated the safety risk if there were a public transit bus from the train station to Eden Resort. If this were implemented, it would be the safest option.

The safest option that is available with existing mass transit routes would be to take mass transit to Lancaster, and then a taxi without a car seat to the resort. This method is illegal due to the application of car seat mandates to taxis.

The analysis in Table 2 understates the safety benefits of prioritizing train and bus travel because it doesn’t consider the public health implications of air and noise pollution, both of which are worse for automobiles than for trains and buses. 

Table 2: Fatalities per Billion Trips by Mode

Travel method	Car seat Miles	No Car seat Miles	Bus Miles	Train Miles	Fatalities per billion trips
Drive whole way with car seats	234	0	0	0	1,708
Taxi to train station, train to Lancaster, taxi to resort, use car seats in both taxi rides	7.6	0	0	285	178
Bus to train station, train to lancaster, taxi without car seat to resort	0	1.7	4.3	285	150
Bus to train station, train station to lancaster, bus to resort	0	0	6	285	123

Implementing transit and pedestrian improvements will take time, money and political will. Until such improvements are accomplished, Pennsylvania should exempt taxis and ride shares from car seat mandates.

There is a risk to exempting taxis from car seat mandates. People may substitute trips that are feasible by transit with taxi rides. One option is a narrow policy that only exempts taxi trips that begin or end at an airport or train station. Regardless, a law that makes the safest travel option illegal is wrong. People shouldn’t be mandated to unnecessarily risk the lives of their kids.

Our inability to travel the last 1.7 miles from the train station to the resort ended up being a deal-breaker for this destination. We ended up booking train tickets to Chicago instead. Illinois exempts taxis from car seat requirements, but Chicago’s transit system is good enough we may not need to take advantage of the exemption. We won’t take our car seats with us to Chicago, and our trip will be safer than if we had driven with car seats to Lancaster.