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Title:

State- and Driver-Level Analyses of the Effects of the Child Restraint Law

Accession Number:

01626389

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Child Restraint Laws (CRL) on the number of children fatalities and drivers’ decision to use a Child Restraint System (CRS). Although all states require drivers to use CRS for their children of age 0 to 4, many states cover further age groups with their CRL. A research question arises: can the extended CRL effectively promote a CRS-use for the additional age groups? In order to answer the question a negative binomial model was developed to estimate a crash modification factor (CMF) and revealed that CRL can reduce the number of fatalities not using CRS by 29% for children aged from 5 to 9. Another research question is whether the existence of the CRL as well as other individual drivers’ characteristics can significantly encourage CRS-use? The estimated logistic model uncovered that the presence of the CRL has a positive effect on using CRS for the corresponding age group. It also discovered other variables that influence the driver’s decision to restrain his/her child such as child’s age, driver’s restraint use, road classification, weather condition, etc. It is interesting that driver’s residence features also affect the CRS-use behavior. It was shown that the drivers from the communities with deprived socioeconomic status are less likely to use CRS. The findings suggest that the CRL is effective to reduce child traffic fatalities and to promote the use of CRS. Therefore, it is recommended to widen the age coverage of CRL to save children’s lives in traffic crashes.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB45 Standing Committee on Occupant Protection.

Monograph Accession #:

01618707

Report/Paper Numbers:

17-05633

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Bustamante, Claudia
Lee, Jaeyoung
Abdel-Aty, Mohamed

Pagination:

16p

Publication Date:

2017

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Maps; References (32) ; Tables

Subject Areas:

Highways; Law; Safety and Human Factors

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-05633

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Dec 8 2016 12:15PM