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Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Levitt and Dubner establish that a standard seatbelt would be safe enough to class as a car seat for children over 2 if they weren't explicitly banned by law.

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Would you mind linking that if you have it around somewhere? It seems quite doubtful that a seatbelt would work on someone who isn’t even tall enough for the sash to go over their torso…

Someone let the airlines know.

But those are lap belts, and also planes tend to have different issues than cars do.

if you're riding planes that are at risk of >50kph impacts, you should probably move to a different airline

Airline seatbelts are designed to restrain you from flying out of your seat in turbulence. They will do little to restrain your head from hitting the seat in front in a front-on impact, and have a good chance of causing injuries in any kind of impact. For that reason, if an impact is considered more likely than usual, you will be instructed to assume the brace position. (Note also that crew have proper harnesses.)

Here’s the paper:

https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/doyle-levitt%...

And here’s a pretty entertaining TED talk he gave:

https://youtu.be/um5gMZcZWm0

IIRC, what they claimed is that there was no statistically significant evidence that car seats for children over two (i.e. not infants) saved lives.

I recall when I was young (before car seat laws), the car had shorter seat belts in the back. Almost as though they expected children to sit there . . .

When you were young back seats has lap belts but not shoulder straps.

That is true of the first car I remember, but the second had (child-sized) shoulder belts.

I believe so. The single largest factor in survivability at any age is just being in the back seat, ie further Way from the impact.

Way further from the windshield that opens to the pavement.

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