Hot Car Deaths

Tragically, another child is dead. If you are a parent who drives, then you are aware of the danger of leaving children unattended in a car. Dozens of hot car deaths occur each year across the country¹. I have known about these deaths as statistics. Now, through a series of intermediaries, I heard about one particular child who lost their life. I grieve for them and their family.

Here is how I understand what we collectively have done wrong, such that I can readily imagine how a good loving parent in our society could leave their child unattended in a vehicle. This should be inconceivable. In other words, we should have a society where it is inconceivable. ¹⁰

Even more clearly than with almost any other motor vehicle fatalities, most people can understand enough to not put the blame on the individual driver. If you personally react to this news by blaming the driver, stop reading because this isn’t for you.

Car seat safety

Manufacturers of cars and car seats should always try to do better. For illustrative purposes, here are ideas but not necessarily suggestions.

Measures like these may help but I fear they won’t be adequate. Although these deaths occur too often, they occur in a tiny percentage of car trips with children in car seats. It is very difficult to reduce that percentage.

The distinction between hot car deaths and motor vehicle crashes is useful in some contexts, such as when analyzing the safety impact of crumple zones or speed limits. But this distinction can also be misleading. One way to understand how hot car deaths are intrinsically related to driving overall is to consider car seats. The primary function of car seats is to protect children from the trauma of car crashes. Thus, the shape of car seats is primarily determined by crash worthiness. Furthermore, for younger children the car seats are installed rear facing for greater protection. The bulk and placement of car seats make it more likely for drivers to not notice a quiet child since they are unable to see the child from the driver's seat, even if they turn around. Therefore the danger of motor vehicle crashes, through car seat design, increases the risk of hot car deaths in stationary vehicles. Additional safety improvements to cars are good. But this is an example where layers of safety regulation have led to a particular kind of risk. We can and should be on the lookout for more good safety features, but there is only so much we can do to improve cars and car seats with further complications.

In addition to considering cars and car seats as standalone products, we should take a broader view of how cars are used by families.

Parents driving with their children

The driver of a motor vehicle is always responsible for the safety of its occupants. Parents should do their best to keep their kids safe. This applies when parents are picking a vehicle¹¹, making organizational decisions about when and where to drive, and then finally while actually driving.

All three are important but parents probably have relatively more agency in the first two stages, when shopping and then planning, than when finally driving.

When car shopping there are many safety aspects to consider. Beyond what’s mentioned above, most of these safety considerations concern crashes and are not directly related to hot car deaths so I won’t go into them.

Parents to some extent can choose to drive less. When parents go house shopping for a growing family, they can value alternative transportation options such as the ability to walk to daycare as much as school ratings. They can decide to spend a little more time with their kids by taking some trips on foot, bike, or transit without the distraction of driving. Unfortunately our supply of good housing and transportation options is inadequate and will not expand directly with consumer preferences. But there is some flexibility, and one of the benefits of minimizing car trips with children is reducing the opportunities for a child to remain unattended in the car.

When it finally comes to getting behind the wheel and driving, parents can try to be more careful. Choosing to be a good driver is more feasible for many people than choosing to be a good opera singer or choosing to be a good alpinist. But driving is not easy. We as a society downplay the mental and physical difficulty of driving to our detriment.

Parents are often tired from interrupted sleep and time spent on childcare at home outside of their work schedules. It is predictable, albeit lamentable, that parents get frustrated with or disengage from driving on their normal monotonous commutes just like other drivers. Hot car deaths are at an extreme end of a wide spectrum of driver behavior. Parents, like other drivers, often pull out their phones to chat with their digital friends. They speed. They run red lights. Even when school buses are available, parents choose to drive and fail to follow basic safety rules in their rush through school drop off lanes.

If you think this is too critical, that parents are more careful behind the wheel than I’m letting on, then I’d emphasize my message earlier that the driver in the hot car death should not be blamed. I expect that if you’re still reading then you agree. That driver temporarily forgot the most important person in the world to them. Frontover crashes are even more likely, typically when a parent has chosen a vehicle so large that they cannot see their own child before they crash into them.⁴ It is not plausible for this to happen over and over if parents are paying attention to everything else while driving their children. Parents are human, they drive as such.⁵

Car dependency and car culture

Childhood is dangerous in America relative to other wealthy countries⁶, in large part because of government policies that saturate our daily lives with inherently dangerous devices⁷. Proponents of the culture surrounding these devices object to politicizing deaths. They try to narrow the frame of discussion to the personal failures of the people involved or the mechanical particulars of the incident, rather than generalizing in a way that would make society safer. They would prefer to limit discussion of a hot car death to the safety of car seats or the lack of responsibility of the driver in the story. I reject that conservative posture. We should demand bolder responses.

In addition to corporate and individual efforts, we need systemic responses by the government to keep our public roads safe in general and to reduce hot car deaths in particular. These scenarios should be understood in the broader context of how children experience being in car seats across our society.

A town designed to penalize non-drivers and double the amount of trips with children compared to an alternative design can be expected to have twice as many crashes and twice as many hot car deaths. Excessive driving is a choice planners impose on children and their families. For the past hundred years the leaders of American society have believed that it’s good policy to try to force as many families as possible to live in sprawl and for kids to get around by sitting in the car with their parents. There’s a social stigma in much of the country among parents who drive, reinforced both by governmental policy and by automotive advertising, against choosing anything except driving to move kids around. Their perception is that the car cabin is a safe space like home or a classroom. This is a mindset that precludes policies that would keep kids safe across the country. Even in stereotypically spread out midwestern states, before automobiles there were widespread small midwestern schoolhouses that children could reach on foot⁸. Children deserve to have childcare accessible by foot or bike. In a country with hundreds of millions of people there should be wide variation, including some parents driving their kids every day. But the danger should not be imposed on so many children in America.

We as a society could choose to build dense housing with nearby childcare to help parents with young children save time and money by avoiding frequent driving. Instead our government favors car dependency. Maybe even more directly, our government prioritizes profits for land owners and developers outside of city centers, and for the automotive industry. When this car dependent sprawl causes excess deaths, that is social murder.⁹ We, through our elected officials, failed to make this country safe. We failed this child.