I feel that all those people who talk about reducing car size and use probably don’t have a family. I have twin 6 month olds and the only cars we currently use is the Toyota Corolla from a local car sharing service. Two car seats in the back leave basically just enough room between for my wife to fit sideways inside the middle seat. She can’t stay in there for longer than a few minutes and if we get in a car accident, she is not gonna have a good time. Also, have you tried putting a child in a car seat while avoiding hitting their head on the roof of the car? It’s a tricky thing. Those are two reasons that two people who worked hard on reducing their environmental footprint end up in a situation where we have to look into buying an SUV.
And don’t get me started on avoiding cars altogether: with hospital appointments that take 15 min to drive to but would take hours of public transit to get to, the need to buy more food at a cheaper price and the fact that transit options are often not accessible with a stroller (good luck bringing a double stroller up and down a few flights of stairs) means that you need to use a car.
My suggestion: please either fix public transit so families can actually use it and organise the city so services are accessible, or offer cars that can accommodate a reasonable sized family while being environmentally friendly.
Fyi, I live downtown in a major North American city that is known for having good public transit.
Wonder how much of this is just due to how massive the us is and how far we drive. I have kids so drive a minivan. It's got 3 rows of seats and storage behind. I genuinely use all the rows fairly often or if not in use I fold them down for larger space in the back. Space I often use.
Not saying I couldn't make due with a smaller car but it would definitely make things more complicated.
As GP said, Minivan and compact SUVs are similarly priced. Yet the populace chooses the former. If being forced to drive a minivan makes parents choose not to have a 3rd child, then it's really not about car seats it's such a minor inconvenience. Deregulation fan is just arguing for deregulation here, I doubt we'd see a marked increase in fertility rates from this.
There's a lot more to consider. How many bedrooms does your house have? Are your kids gonna share? Bathrooms? Fridge space? Can they afford 20+% extra food budget, clothing? Time to take 3 kids to extracurriculars? Summer camps cost more. Do they like to travel, that extra kid is another full seat at the age they consider nixing child seats. More kids are much more inconvenient, it's just a fact.
Besides, there are several 3-across car seat options that can be found with just a tad bit of research. We can fit 3 kids spanning 5y age diff into the back of our compact e-Golf.
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.
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.
Seconding everything you wrote, especially “It’s a major quality of life improvement for us”. When we visit friends & family who live in typical car-centric neighborhoods we’re reminded of just how much time they spend sitting in cars, which is especially rough on kids. The bigger house & yard just doesn’t seem worth an extra couple hours a day sitting strapped into a car seat.
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.).
As a new parent, I was surprised how much space a kid took up. I didn't know about Radian car seats - we did Graco. We also upgraded to an SUV (Honda Pilot), and then a minivan (Pacifica) to hold all of our kids.
The cars were expensive. As young adults, with small incomes, having to buy large vehicles was a punch to the gut.
There is also an interesting childcare aspect in that for logistical reasons my wife shuffled the kids around when they were little... car seats are expensive and cumbersome to install and a PITA on a 2dr car, therefore while the kids were small, my car-seat-less little commuter car was quite literally limited to my commute only and we always had to take the giant wife-mo-bile on any (including long) family trips.
In practice I really didn't care, although the bigger the vehicle the less comfortable I am on the road (high winds scare me in a tall vehicle, I know if a tall vehicle hits a curb in an accident its rollover time killing everyone unlike my little car, obviously I have to drive more carefully to avoid hitting things because its huge, very low performance by all measures compared to my 2dr sports car, in summary I hate driving big cars). In theory if I experienced the same limitation due to gas vs electric I'm told over and over that I'm supposed to experience extreme agony, although I suspect it would be OK.
The startup lesson is to glom onto existing limitation. Oh you can't take a road trip because it doesn't have those little car seat mounting bracket thingies. Not some spooky hidden techno stuff in the engine compartment. Keep it simple, "Oh you can't road trip because it can't hold a car seat". This is a simpler marketing message.
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.
We looked around for quite some time before we found a car that fits three car seats in the back. (Mind you, we're talking European cars here, there's a chance our options would have been greater in North America.)
However, it only took us a little longer because we weren't keen on a (mini) van -- had we considered vans too, there would have been a lot more options, and they're often even more affordable than other types of (spacious) cars.
I understand that not everyone can afford to go out and buy a new car -- but if that is in your way of having more children, I'd say the reason was not the car seat requirement but cost considerations. And I think that's very much a reasonable consideration.
I don't buy the "only 57 child deaths" argument - besides obviously being ethically questionable, deaths is not the only thing you want to prevent: how about (severe) non-lethal injuries? The reason car seats are mandatory (and regulated, too) is not because there is a strong car seat lobby but because of the merits they provide. For instance, buckling up a child that isn't tall enough yet bears the risk of getting the belt wrapped around their neck instead of across their chest which in case of an impact is certainly not what you want.
You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to find the narrative of this paper questionable. Being a parent myself, I find it very hard to imagine a couple going: "Oh, we would so love to have a third child if it wasn't for that dang car seat problem..." Not that it's completely inconceivable but, I mean, come on...
I have 3 children and a minivan. We bought the minivan not strictly because 3 carseats won't fit across the 2nd row of most reasonably large cars (there's a niche market for narrow carseats, see Diono brand) but because:
1. with 3 kids we have to transport a whole lot of stuff when we travel and minivans have more weatherproof storage space than most other vehicles
2. a minivan is super functional for transporting things which aren't humans (it's effectively an 8 foot covered bed pickup with the rear seats removed). I brought a twin sized box spring home from the store inside the van *WITH* 2 kids in the middle row this past weekend, try that in most SUVs.
3. the sliding doors are SOOOO much nicer to use in tight parking spots for loading/unloading
4. minivans get as good or better fuel economy as compared to larger SUVs
5. minivans cost less than many SUVs to own and operate
This is an actual conversation I had to have with my wife, having a third kid definitely requires a larger vehicle as the vast majority of cars today simply don't work for a family of five. Child car seats are too wide and the backseats of most cars are too narrow, and the price jump to a vehicle that would be able to handle three child car seats at once is enormous. Throw in some dogs, a couple pieces of luggage that any nuclear family would have to tote around, plus a stroller and it becomes prohibitively tight.
It took me MONTHS of shopping and playing child-seat-jenga in various car dealership lots before I finally found a sedan that was actually able to hold everything (thank you, Volkswagen, for making an actual family sedan that could fit a family!).
...except if said family has kids of the age that they need
car seats, which are a pain in the ass to install correctly; ripping them out and putting them back in twice a day is both ridiculous and unsafe. And you can't realistically even have shared cars with pre-installed car seats, because they need to be adjusted all the frigging time as the kid grows.
FWIW, neither my wife or I had ever owned a car, we managed just fine with public transport and car-sharing. But once the baby came along, we pretty much had to buy a car.
Fyi, I live downtown in a major North American city that is known for having good public transit.
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