I have used car sharing for ~10 years and its been great not owning a car. Until I got a kid. Car seats are not made for carrying around and storage I'll tell you that.
Now I have a second kid. It's a complete nail in the coffin for not owning a car. Two seats!?
Ive been a bespoken car sharing advocate until I got kids, and there are probably lots of other lives being lived where cars are a must unless every need I'm similarly unaware of are met by car sharing businesses.
Proper research into the needs will have to be done before we can do any such thing as banning private cars. But I agree with your premise. Softly.
Super easy to move between modes of transport if you don't have kids.
Moving the car seat alone makes car sharing a huge pain. And it's true now more than ever since now there's a social/safety expectation to have children in a full seat or booster seat until they're at least 10-12 years old.
Of course, if you have children, you're not using the car alone.
This just opens the market up to build a carseat that solves this problem. How about a regular seat that can be folded out or transformed into a seat suitable for children?
All it takes is a billionaire genius with twin kids and a car company to finally engineer a real solution to the hassle of having room to put kids in the car seats.
I sure hope some of these ideas come in a slightly more affordable version. Amazing how many of the innovations are just everyday things like crash safety, air quality, blind holster your phone, trailer hitch that doesn't suck, and easier to get kids in their car seats - yet they have me drooling as even after 100+ years of mass auto production there are so many daily frustrations with cars.
The gist of it is that car seats do not help nearly as much as we hope. I got the impression that there ought to be a car with a built-in, non-removable car seat would work better. I'd imagine this would be an instant hit in the SUV market. However, no automaker seems to take up on the challenge. Is there a legislative obstacle that prevents automakers from doing this?
1. is never happening. If you want a proper safe car seat for a 1-3 year old, it's going to weigh 30-40 lbs no matter what sintered pixie dust you build it from. And it has to be pretty huge since a small person has to fit almost inside it.
Even the ones for babies, that people for some reason I can't fathom like to carry around in the supermarket, are actually also 20+ lbs, you've just left 15 lbs remaining in the car occupying a seat while you're shopping. And they're also bulky.
2. could happen for children aged 4+ in a minivan-sized car. I've already seen it on some long distance buses. For younger kids however, they really need to sit facing rearward, but also must be well protect against side impacts, so it's very tricky to make something retractable that doesn't take a huge amount of space.
I wish I could use car sharing and the baby seat issue is a problem with that. It seems easy to solve, though - I don't see why those couldn't be integrated into the cars by default. A lot of taxis already have that, they are just sometimes too lazy to take them out.
I don't know what you mean by personalized car seats - I think there are merely some variations dependent on size of the child? But car seats can grow along with the child, usually you can leave more and more stuff out the older the child gets?
Not sure why car sharing services overlook that atm - maybe because most families tend to own a car, so it is not a big market for them?
I’m in the market for one. When you have two kids that are car seat age, two car seats eat up a lot of room in smaller cars. Then when you and your partner need to go somewhere, there’s barely any room for strollers and diaper bags.
If they made roomier cars I’d be all for it, but they don’t. So I have to buy something that offers room.
And also (if relevant to you), regulations for children's car seats have appeared and increased so that, if you need to carry three kids, you pretty much need an SUV (or minivan) to do it.
That would be nice for commuters, but not practical for parents of small children. They need a bunch of stuff in the car all the time (child seats, diapers, clean clothes, sand toys, stroller, etc.).
The issue then becomes this:
"uberFAMILY provides one forward-facing car seat for a child who is at least (a) 12 months old AND (b) 22 lbs. AND (c) 31 inches. A child is too big at 48 lbs. or 52 inches."
What if you need two car seats, or if your kid is outside those parameters? You still need a seat. Likewise, adding these options can add significant delay to your getting a car. Most people are used to transportation being reliable. When you step out of your home or office, your car is there, ready to go. Having to wait an extra 15 minutes for the car to show up is not what most people want to do.
I think car-sharing services will change things, quite a lot, but I don't think it will eliminate private car ownership. Most families will own one "family car" for road trips, etc, etc.
Or do you expect parents to attach car seats each time they call one up? And where do you put the car seats the rest of the time? Cary them along with you?
It would be nice if the cars came with them built in, but I don't think it's possible to make a seat that can accommodate every size child.
What's the problem with families? My local Uber-equivalent will have and provide child booster seats if requested (as did many but not all "pre-app" taxi service providers), and for infants there are also a bunch of solutions depending on their age; one of them (perhaps not the best, just anecdotal example) is the combo carriage+car seat, where I can put the "carriage wheels" in the trunk and put the baby in the car safely without even waking them up, crucially, it can be done in any car or taxi, and I've taken taxi rides with a baby this way.
It does require some planning (and some support from the service providers) but it's definitely a solvable issue, if the people would want to do that, then it can be arranged.
This resonates with me. It’s beyond tedious to get the kids in and out of the car seats all the time, and needing to buy a larger car to fit more than two kids gave me significant pause. We eventually decided to have more kids, and the positives far outweigh the negatives for us, but to this day the hassle of loading and unloading the car to go places is the single biggest negative experience of raising children. It adds an extra 5-10 minutes on each end of every trip compared to adults just being able to get in and out on their own.
We need a radically new car seat design, either:
1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or
2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.
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