The Deleted Scenes - The Case of the Car Seats
In a long piece on urbanism as pro-family policy back in June, I wrote this, about strapping kids in car seats:
A few people reacted as if I had put in words exactly how they felt about this. And a few others wondered why I focused so much on car seats, of all things. Then I got a letter from a reader, which included this bit:
I suspect people’s experiences with this differ. Every child throws a tantrum over something different. But the response, and that response in particular, really struck me. The funny thing is, we don’t have kids yet, and I don’t even remember being strapped into a car seat. I wrote that mostly just imagining what it would be like having to deal with it as a parent. Losing the breeziness of jumping into the car and pulling over and getting out whenever you want, at your own pace. Whenever something I write rather casually hits a nerve, I try to go back and think further about it. And that leads me to a tweet I saw the other day. I can’t find it again, but the gist of it was, “We built suburbia and designed everyday life around the car back when it was legal and normal to pile five kids in the station wagon without seat belts.” In other words, the laws—and a proper understanding of safety—have caught up to our land-use pattern. And in some ways, this combination has stranded young families in an environment that simply does not work smoothly for them. It’s like if you could cross the street in a city at any point you wanted, but you had to pick up a 100-pound weight and carry it across the street as you did so. It’s taking the fundamental selling point of car-oriented development and then takign an ax to it. The frustration of knowing that things could be different, in some ways, is the whole thing. I’m going to use this line in another piece, but I think it applies here: frustration is the gap between possibility and reality. But the possibility here is either subjecting your children to much higher likelihood of dying in a car accident, or fundamentally reevaluating our national approach to land use. You know, of course, which possibility I support. But I think the bit about suburbia not being designed for the later development of child car seats is fascinating. I’m struggling to think of an analogy that gets at this phenomenon. Maybe big, complicated houses built before central air? But construction took into account natural climate control back then. Building the whole house and then realizing that the foundation needs major work? Maybe lawyers struggling to maintain records on physical media, like cassettes or floppies, as the broader commercial support for physical media deteriorates in the face of digital everything? What do you call it when a genuine improvement leaves an important group of people worse off, with no real way out that isn’t even worse? And the theoretical question this leaves me with: if we were starting today where we were, land-use wise, in 1910 or 1920, but with all of the modern safety mechanics and understandings we have today, would we ever have embarked on the project of making almost all of America car-dependent? And viewed it as almost obviously a good thing? Related Reading: Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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