chrisishardcore.com

How about this: If any seatbelt in the car is buckled for more than 15 (or 30) minutes after the car is locked with the remote, the car will text message you directly and alert an OnStar-like service to get in touch you. They could roll down the windows and/or have the horn start honking to alert someone (or maybe the car would just do that on its own).

One con to that approach is that the seatbelt(s) securing the car seat(s) would have to be buckled/unbuckled everytime the child is put in/out of it.

This is indeed tragic. But check out the stats: 35 such deaths in the United States in 2004 and 42 in 2003. While I'm no Law and Econ adherent, those are pretty tiny numbers, and hardly justify adding an expensive safety mechanism. Instead, how about advocating better jobs so that working parents aren't so tired from multiple jobs that they forget about the kids in the back seat?

Paula:
a) Why assume it's expensive?
b) I heard that 30 of the 35 deaths last year were all in one incident.
c) Isn't it enough to save just one life?
d) The man was working so much to have even more money for his family - we can't just go giving away high-paying jobs.

I agree. How about a higher paying job sounds like a bogus offer. Who's to say this guy wasn't making enough money at one job but wanted to make even more so he was working two? Not much government can do about that.

Saying to parents we will do everything we can to make sure your child or any other child (or pet or whatever) does not die in a hot automobile sounds like good politics to me. The fact that anybody who opposes a proposal like this will look like a total corporate whore only sweetens the deal.

a) Even if it's cheap per unit (say $2), it's expensive if you have to put it in every car. When you divide that by the number of lives saved, well not to be callous, but there are cost/benefit issues to be concerned about.
b) That just proves my point. I have no idea what happened with the 30 death incident, but it sounds like an aberration to me that does not call out for a legislative solution. Similar to saying since some large number of people died in a freakish accident that only will occur once every few years, we should make everyone carry around a safety device to prevent it.
c) No. If that were true, then you should ban all cars, cause hundreds of thousands of people die every year because of cars. See Calabresi, The Cost of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis.
d) I'm not suggesting giving away high paying jobs. I am suggesting that the real cause of this incident, and many others like it, is lack of suppport for working families. So the answer isn't safety devices, but support for working families. Which, if you are hoping for a nice political issue that appeals to the masses, seems to be a winner to me.

Accidents happen. Some happen so often they are worth investing resources to prevent. Some are very very sad, but so infrequent or expensive to prevent that we live with them.

I think it would be pretty easy to add a device like this to new cars. Obviously you can't be recalling millions of cars to retrofit them with such a device, but adding $10 or $15 to the price of a new car is not that big of a deal.

Second -- what type of support do you propose to offer, and what is your definition of working familes? Maybe this guy was making $40K all ready but wanted to tack on an additional $25K. Certainly that is correct. And even what he is doing (construction) can be a very quality and high paying line of work to be in. I'm all in favor of people having better jobs, I just don't know what they are and it seems to me that it's hard for others to come up with some a solid policy suggestion as well. That's why I think there's a lot of future in just kind of accepting all but the worst of the status quo and looking at issues such as how can we make this better. So instead of busting your brain trying to figure out how to get 1,000,000 new jobs in Georgia that offer health care benefits, just do state health care etc.

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