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My Dad bought his '71 Mustang in May 1972, when he put me behind the wheel and, at 5mph or less, crashed into a telephone pole. Cost of car; about $2000. Inflation has raised that to around $10,000. Cars are a lot more expensive than that.
Personally, I can afford to buy a new car, which in a few years will be another Camry. With trade in it will set me back, and I'm guessing, $31,000. I can afford it. Not all can.
That, in a nutshell, is my reasoning. Airbags are not all of the increased costs but the "improvements" add up. That is why.
You seem to still live in the 70s world, OP and tend to remember and relive all events of your youth, recalling all dates very accurately, over and over again.
But fast forward, 50 years later life changed, everything is different.
Airbags aren't add up. They are security improvement. They are evolving too.
Newer, “second generation” airbags, come with a “computer operated” dual deploy, or dual stage, feature. These airbags have the ability to deploy at one of two stages, or not deploy at all, depending upon data transmitted from sensors located near the passenger's seatbelt and front seat.
I don't understand the relation between you experience in 1972 in a 1971 car and today's safety measures.
Yes, cars got more expensive, houses to, clothing and food too...
I mean, if you really want to relive those times, you could buy a vintage car without any of the modern safety improvements.
Most other people want to drive a safe car.
Our society has lost a good deal of its willingness to take risks over the years. Examples include:
1) Removing most playground that’s any fun;
2) Requiring bicycle riders to wear helmets;
3) Children don’t play outside, unsupervised anymore;
4) Children get driven every where and don’t ride their bicycles; and
5) Cars have “passive restraints”
There are other recent examples that I have omitted since this is not P and OC. I want discussion, not insults.
The costs of this excessive caution cannot be overestimated. When I was growing up, where I played, how I played, how I got to leisure activities and the like were parental decisions. When I started bicycling at age seven, my range was restricted to my six-block “neighborhood” bounded by a secondary road. Later, when that road got a sidewalk, I was allowed to go about ½ mile to the boundary of another secondary road. Later, I could go outside those boundaries but only with another child. Now, there is an unreasonable fear of perverts. When I was growing up, the injunction against talking to strangers was quite stern.
“Pickup” baseball games started in late March, and soccer was the rule in the fall. Sledding and ice skating was the rule in winter. In fact, on December 2, 1967 I did fall through the ice, and was treading deep water. I was rescued, taken to the hospital and I’m still alive. I survived monkey bars and see-saws at a younger age. These days, my older son was one of the few that took the initiative to bike around, sometimes going about ten miles to one of his sets of grandparents. There was only one fall with a few scrapes.
Turning to adult pastimes, cars have been increasingly been put out of reach of mere mortals by “passive restraints” such as airbags, and other equipment that costs more than its worth to the average person. When it comes to the recent Covid “pandemic” society was locked down to no net benefit and egregious costs. The moneys saved could and should have been used to allow the vulnerable to be excused from work and having to go out.
My profession, the legal profession, gets some of the blame for this, particularly with regard to playgrounds. Still, common-sense legislation could have granted "safe-harbors" to companies abiding by 'UL" standards.
Now, the government is getting ready to make heating and air conditioning, as well as travel more cumbersome. We live in a democratic society. Is this what we want?
I’m not saying we should have no rules or regulations. But, some cost-benefit analysis please.
Its interesting how people differ in their viewpoints. I look at most of what you have said here and I think the changes that were made created a world that was safer for our kids.
I had a friend who suffered a serious head injury when his bike tipped over in gravel because no one wore bike helmets in the 1960's. I knew another boy who died in a bike/car accident when he was struck by a car. A helmet might have saved his life.
I went to kindergarten at a school in 1964 that literally had a jungle gym playground over hard asphalt. I have no idea how many kids got hurt before they modified it, but I'm sure there were some.
Passive restraints exist in cars because over half of people were refusing to put on a seat belt. Sometimes it was inadvertence. Most of the time it was intentional. However, forty-five percent of front seat fatalities in car accidents occur with passengers not wearing safety belts. BTW, we lose a total of about 40,000 Americans every year in car accidents. You can do the math on that.
I lived in a good neighborhood. Most of the times my children were allowed to play unsupervised. I suppose that's one I agree with you on.
It might be good if kids did ride their bicycles more places. However, there is more traffic on the roads these days than there used to be.
I would say *most* of these changes are good. Most of them.
Safety equipment is not a bad thing. Concussions are real. Seatbelts save lives, airbags save lives. My mother swinging her arm over across my chest in a close call vehicle incident would not have stopped me from flying thru the windshield in our 1970's Plymouth station wagon.
Our school and public playgrounds are well equipped with merry go rounds, see-saws, swings and slides, jungle gyms you name it. Our kids go outside to play in rain and snow. They are only mandated for recess inside if:
Honestly the only issue I see is that some parents allow their kids access to non-stop gaming.
Safety gear is good. Period. People can call it the nanny state if they want but that misses the point. In the mid-1950s Ford tried selling safety as a feature. People shunned it. You have to level the playing field for all manufacturers and make safety an industry requirement. So we did. Deaths are down and injuries are more survivable.
I recall the 1960s when every 3-day weekend the local radio station would give us the death toll from highway accidents. Few seat beats. No air bags. No anti-lock brakes. No padded dashboards - just hard metal ones to crush your skull. No guardrails. No bridge abutment collapsible suicide barriers. No collapsible steering columns - just a metal spear to go through your chest. No crumple zones - just get all chopped up. The death toll was staggering and so was the severity of maiming. Society bore those costs, i.e. we did. In higher auto and health insurance costs. In lost wages. In lost productivity. In lives cut short.
It's the same in a lot of areas, like the stock market. The FEDs have to regulate it to keep crazy excesses from wrecking our economy as the greedsters did in 1929, 2008 and several other times. Few if any industries can self regulate, all it takes is one to commit excesses and the rest have to follow or lose out. People are the same way, you have to make them toe the line or they'll flake off on you most times. The more abuses that occur the more rules and regulations are enacted. Bravo to any who can self regulate, even when no one is watching.
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Why kids are driven everywhere and don't ride their bicycles?
This has to do with urban design, again.
Most American kids don't live in cities anymore. Most American cities and suburbs don't have well developed public transportation and smaller kids can't travel alone anyway.
Places where they go for various activities aren't close enough to places where they live. Even to schools most can't walk or bike anymore due to safety reasons and distance.
Here is a reading material for you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682557/
You skipped past to point of kids not riding bikes by mentioning public transport. The vast majority of streets, side streets, sub divisions can all be traversed on bikes. IMHO the more dangerous aspect of biking are adults on main busy roads sharing the same lanes as autos.
We built forts, climbed trees, caught pollywogs, had dirt clod fights.... I knew one kid that fell out of a tree and broke her arm. Cement playgrounds, tall swings, tall slides, dodge ball, king of the mountain. We played rough and got dirty. Life was good. We learned how to interact with people, how to get dates. We didn't need to run to a safe space because of anxiety if we didn't get our way.
A group of us had a killer tree fort about 1/2 mile into some thick woods. We used to camp out there all the time, 9-12 years old, no supervision, took our own breakfast food to cook for the next morning.
As a baby-boomer kid in the 1950s and 1960s, I did all sorts of things that today's kids are not allowed to do or, seemingly, are not wanting to do. It seems today that we "got away" with stuff a lot more than now but that isn't how we saw it. It was normal kid stuff.
We lived where you could go find tadpoles and snakes. Not many kids do that today or else there is a high fence around the horrific hazard of a frog pond. We used to play on an island in the Missouri River, walking across the ice in the wintertime. We would ride our bikes 15 miles there in summer, but a parent took us there in the winter and dropped us off and came back for us later. We had a friend that went deaf because he got hit in the head by a baseball at a little league game. Nobody got sued. We had a classmate that fell off her bike and landed on her head. She was a little goofy after that. We lived through polio and knew kids with short arms or legs, so we didn't think much about natural hazards or accidents. We had a-bomb and tornado drills at school -- what worse could happen?
As a 11-year-old I would walk a mile to a bus stop, take the bus, transfer twice, and go to a dentist appointment (on time) by myself and then do the same coming home. I got to know the city of a million people and several routes around town. There were no cell phones, no Uber. I can't imagine a kid doing that today.
I think that the media has helped this safety trend along by pushing stories of tainted or boobytrapped Halloween candy and other stories. That inspires copycats even if the story is fake -- it plants an idea. Trick-or-treating is not much like it was 60 years ago. Kids are kept on a short leash.
As the Boomers aged, they accumulated all of this bad news about lost kids and kids injured or killed by misadventure. They reflected on what stuff they did. The idea of youthful immortality faded away. Also, families were smaller with fewer kids, and it was easier to keep watch. Some safety measures were encouraged, helped along by local safety councils and the media. Schools started having after-school programs so kids weren't going home as latchkey kids.
A kid from the 1950s would not recognize kid-dom today, and vice-versa. We live on a different planet -- one that we saw in comic books or funny pages back then. We read books and watched cartoons. We were joiners (Scouts, Little League) because we wanted to be part of something. And, later on, we joined the counterculture. We were conforming nonconformists in some ways and did our nonconforming in groups. Some kids today are part of gymnastics or dancing classes, maybe youth soccer, etc. -- but I have the impression that it is parental selection of approved playtime as much as anything else. They have to pry the cellphone out of the kid's hands so they can play. I wouldn't want to be a kid today with a helicopter parent hovering over my head at all times.
When the risk of injury to head, face or neck is viewed as a whole, bicycle helmets do provide a small protective effect. This effect is evident only in older studies. New studies, summarised by a random-effects model of analysis, indicate no net protective effect.
This just goes to show - the folks who are gung ho on bicycle helmets (here at CD and in real life) are the very poster children to which the OP was referring. They're overly risk averse. That's the technical name for "wuss-i-fied."
This type of "don't take any risks" behavior is where I think the OP was going, but the specific examples aren't great. You just have to ask: Is being taught at a young age to nearly never take risks helping you out as an adult? And the answer there is a clear NOPE. Look around. Anxiety much?
(obviously, some risks are better off not taken - the airbags and seatbelts have been a great lifesaver, complaining about the cost is irrelevant. On the other hand, I suspect "walking to school" is not inherently more dangerous - but kids are oblivious to their surroundings more now than ever, with the "text first, talk never" life style, and that ALSO refers to the "kids" behind the wheel. Most could not find their way home from school on foot if they missed the bus. I wish that were an exaggeration. I see adults with that problem daily.)
When the risk of injury to head, face or neck is viewed as a whole, bicycle helmets do provide a small protective effect. This effect is evident only in older studies. New studies, summarised by a random-effects model of analysis, indicate no net protective effect.
This just goes to show - the folks who are gung ho on bicycle helmets (here at CD and in real life) are the very poster children to which the OP was referring. They're overly risk averse. That's the technical name for "wuss-i-fied."
This type of "don't take any risks" behavior is where I think the OP was going, but the specific examples aren't great. You just have to ask: Is being taught at a young age to nearly never take risks helping you out as an adult? And the answer there is a clear NOPE. Look around. Anxiety much?
(obviously, some risks are better off not taken - the airbags and seatbelts have been a great lifesaver, complaining about the cost is irrelevant. On the other hand, I suspect "walking to school" is not inherently more dangerous - but kids are oblivious to their surroundings more now than ever, with the "text first, talk never" life style, and that ALSO refers to the "kids" behind the wheel. Most could not find their way home from school on foot if they missed the bus. I wish that were an exaggeration. I see adults with that problem daily.)
I'd like to add to this post.
I think a great many members of our culture believe we (the Government) should have all bases covered. That somehow we should be able to anticipate every possibility of error or accident and set up preventative measures.
When the unpredictable happens immediately we see a rush to point the finger of blame. That is usually whichever party has the most cash. Don't people believe in accidents anymore?
I think people used to be more realistic in the matters of injury and mortality. We read of people doing unlawful and/or incredibly stupid stuff and dying because of it. What's the first thing we hear? "Yes, that was wrong, but nobody deserves to die for making a mistake." Since when did we start imagining life could conform to our emotions?
We accepted that death or injury was around the corner for all of us because our work world was so much more dangerous than it is now.
I want an improved future but I think it is foolish to assume we can make life utopian. It sets people up for discouragement and depression. Treat people as though they are fragile and they will become fragile.
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