Portable Seatbelts For Children
by Breanne Boyle
I
love telling anecdotes in my Ask Patty posts. I hope you don’t mind
reading about the randomness of my life and how it relates to
automotive post fodder. So let me get into it again. I remember taking
the bus to school every day from about age 7 to age 13. By the time I
was 13 it was a bit degrading, but heck, it gave me time to read. I had
the nickname “bookworm” for years after because of it. I mistakenly
told my husband that name and he won’t let me forget it.
When
we rode the bus there was always one or two seats (always in the back)
that would be bouncier than others. We would clamber down the aisle to
get to that extra bouncy seat so when we would go over speed bumps in
our friends’ neighborhoods, we could boing boing up and down like
little Popples (I’m a child of the 80s). Sometimes, like a trampoline,
if you added force when you hit the seat again, you could fly up even
higher the next time.
Little did we know that we were being
incredibly unsafe, if not obviously dorky. It begs the question, Why
aren’t there seatbelts in school and city buses? Shouldn’t we be
concerned about roadway safety in those public vehicles as well as our
own personal ones? Automotive.com touches on this ever-important issue
of safety in their recent post. “Portable Seatbelt Approaches Reality,”
which talks about a portable seatbelt for use in buses or any other
transportation that doesn’t come equipped with safety restraints.
Anne
Schewe and the students of University of Massachusetts created the
prototype, which right now weighs five pounds. They are planning to
carve it down to a more manageable two pounds. Schewe lost her daughter
to an accident while she was traveling on public transportation in
India, and she was inspired to help save others. It’s a wonder why
there aren’t mandatory seatbelts in all public vehicles, but maybe this
will be a good start.