I am lucky enough to not dependend on a car for my everyday activity, and only using my car a couple of times a week.
I can totally understand people being in the habit of getting in and out of their vehicle without checking the rear seat.
Any child death is a tragedy, and a loss for the whole community.
Because no children would ever die in an accident involving public transportation?
We could just call it an accident and not try to dig too deeply into societal problems to explain it. A little perspective: 3.6M babies/year are born in the US every year. 15-20 accidents like this occur each year. Tragic, yes, but it's not even remotely close to a trend that needs some underlying explanation.
I apologise for an appeal to "common sense" since I really don't have any data, but it seems sort of obvious that it would be safer for two reasons:
1. There's almost always other people there, so someone is likely to warn you that you abandoned your kid.
2. Your kid is there with you, so it's not like you have to remember them.
You're trying to make the argument that "a few kids being locked in cars every year isn't that significant in the larger picture". That's a different argument than "the reason kids are locked in cars is because people are driving in cars".
My point was that those kids die because their parents are forced to use their personal vehicle to do anything (groceries, drop mail, going to work, see friends) that sometimes they forgot they brought their kids with them, because of habits of being alone in the car.
So, yes, so death are the product of a society dependant on personal vehicle.
That is a bold assertion. I have certainly been the only human on public transportation at times.
You are intentionally narrowing your argument to "forgotten in personal vehicle" so you can say that personal vehicles are bad. That does not seem profound. Moving entirely to public transportation would eliminate that precise risk while introducing others. And the net result may actually be more deaths. Keep in mind how rare children dying in cars is today.
> I have certainly been the only human on public transportation at times.
Their are always a driver of a vehicle, or other passengers coming in less than an hour or so...
> Moving entirely to public transportation would eliminate that precise risk while introducing others
I never imply to move entirely to public transportation. The best solution is multi-modal transportation.
> Keep in mind how rare children dying in cars is today.
This is an argument I despise, specially related to cars... Any death is bad, and should be avoided, whatever how!
A simple example, in the USA, is the whole wave of rules, laws, etc. after the attach of 9/11. Less than 3000 died[1] because of it. That's equal to only one month of road death in 2020 or 2021[2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm51SPa6.htm [2] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
My guess would be more die from being tramped