One thing I've wondered is how people deal with car seats with Uber/Lyft/Taxi's. Do they carry their own with them and take the time to install it and uninstall it? Do you just take the bus and not worry about a car seat?
Yeah, it is possible to do this without much effort, if the car-seat has a seatbelt strap in the base and the stroller can carry the car-seat around instead of being held in the hand.
I had no car for the first eight months, with my child in SF.
The Lyft plus generally has enough space to stow the stroller and the kid wasn't heavy enough to hurt myself by picking up the carseat with the baby in it.
However, once day-care starts, it gets pretty inconvenient to use a taxi every day.
In my experience, drivers are generally a _lot_ more careful when there are kids in the car, compared to, say, a pool driver at rush hour.
* actual carseat requirements vary by state, the laws seem to be at: http://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/child-passenger-safety/
But that’s not how life works. We all risk our lives and those of our kids every day, for convenience, life experience, laziness, etc. You should be aware of the risks and then pick the place on the risk / reward curve that you can live with.
Not affiliated with this company but own one and am happy with it. Only for kids 3+.
From local laws. From physical laws they are not. As a kid long time ago, I was sitting in a Fiat 124 when a bus driver wasn't paying attention to the road ahead and hit the stationary car on intersection in full city speed, thankfully it was direct hit from behind and there was nothing in front of the car, so there were no serious and only some very light injuries, but it was ugly.
But I cannot image having a kid sitting freely in a lap nowadays just because the car in question is exempt from regulations. There doesn't even have to be a collision, emergency braking (either human or autonomous) is enough to throw the kid off against the car interior and sustain injuries (yep, had that too in the old no-rear-seat-belt-times when an ambulance without siren appeared oncoming wrong way, almost bit my tongue off).
Don't use restraint systems just when they are required by regulations. And especially in nowadays tenfold traffic.
Absolutely, but I think the context was clearly indicating that we were talking about human laws, not physical laws.