AP file (2011)
Marie Phillips, right, gets advice from child passenger safety technician Dan Barga, left, on securing her newborn daughter Anya in a rear-facing car seat at a car seat inspection station in Columbus, Ind. A highway safety group is praising Nevada for a new state law that requires rear-facing car seats for children under 2 years old. The law took effect Jan. 1, 2022.
Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Nevada’s adoption of a new child car seat law has separated it from states with the weakest regulations for preventing traffic fatalities, according to a safety advocacy group.
Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety praised Nevada for passing a law requiring rear-facing car seats for children under 2 years old. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, also requires car booster seats for children under 57 inches tall.
Nevada was upgraded from red to yellow on a three-color scale, with red the worst and green the best, according to a report the group released this week.
The group — a coalition of consumer safety and public health advocates, police agencies and insurance companies — bases its color ratings on the number of laws a state adopts from 16 it has identified to minimize crash injuries and fatalities.
Nevada is among 31 states rated yellow, while 11 states were rated red and eight states, plus Washington, D,C., earned the green designation.
“Nevada must prioritize safer roads,” state Assemblywoman Shannon Bilbray-Axelrod, who sponsored the car seat bill, said in a prerecorded message for a panel discussion of the report. “I urge legislators in every state to use this report as a playbook for action in 2022.”
Nationally, an average of 1,100 children a year died in car crashes from 2015 to 2019, Bilbray-Axelrod said, noting that 40% involved children who were unrestrained.
“Improperly restrained child passengers are a serious public health problem,” she said.
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden in November “would save, literally, tens of thousands of lives … and millions and millions of dollars that are associated with crashes.”
The bill updates federal safety regulations and guidelines for automakers.
Among the laws most needed in Nevada is one making not wearing a seat belt a primary traffic offense, meaning a motorist could be pulled over solely for not buckling up, the report said. Now, drivers can only be cited for a seat belt violation if they are pulled over for another offense.
The report also marked down Nevada for several laws regarding teen drivers, including that the minimum age for a learner’s permit — 15 years, 6 months — is too low. The report also found Nevada’s regulations too lax for young drivers regarding restrictions on nighttime driving and the 50 supervised hours of driving before earning an unrestricted license.
Erin Breen, director of UNLV’s Road Equity Alliance Project, said the problem wasn’t so much young drivers but inexperienced ones, regardless of age.
“Certainly if you’re under the age of 30 and you’re a new driver, you should have to jump through the same hoops,” she said.
Nevada, meanwhile, got top marks for its DUI laws, joining 22 other states and Washington, D.C., in banning open alcohol containers and requiring ignition interlocks — a Breathalyzer the driver must blow into for the car to start — for those convicted of DUI.
Impairment and speeding were the main reasons traffic fatalities spiked 18% nationally through the first six months of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, said Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
It was the biggest increase since at least 1989, she said.
“Allowing this change to occur year after year when solutions are readily available is simply unacceptable,” Chase said.
In Nevada, fatal crashes were up 19% last year compared to 2020.
There were 357 deadly crashes that accounted for 382 deaths, according to the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Office of Traffic Safety. It was the most deaths since a record 431 fatalities in 2006.
Agency spokesman Andrew Bennett also cited speed and impairment as leading causes for fatal wrecks.
