Technology Sabotaged Public Safety

Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on October 10, 2019.

When my father was 18 years old, he fell asleep at the wheel while driving home late. That’s never good, but it was particularly bad then, in 1954, the year he crashed his car on the early-morning Milwaukee streets. Seat belts weren’t common until the 1960s, and federal law didn’t mandate them until 1968. Dad’s unharnessed body was thrown out the windshield, through the quiet night, and onto the pavement. He survived—otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this—but not without permanent disability.

The road to mandatory seat belts was a long one, involving decades of medical and military research, legislative intervention, and corporate acquiescence. But today, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 90 percent of Americans use seat belts, which, the agency claims, save some 15,000 lives a year. They are almost automatic for most drivers and passengers.

Except in one case. Even people who wear seat belts religiously tend not to do so in taxis. New York City cab passengers over age 16 are exempt from seat-belt laws (for now), and a 2014 NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission survey of such riders reported that only 38 percent of them wear seat belts. Why? In a 2008 study of 100,000 car trips, two psychologists concluded that riders might assume a lower risk of calamity in cars for hire: The trips are shorter, the drivers are seen as professionals with lots of road experience, and the passengers (wrongly) perceive a lower risk of harm in the back seat.

For years, this particular threat to public safety didn’t affect people who didn’t take taxis. But now, thanks to Uber and Lyft, trips by hired car have increased dramatically all over the country. Americans took 3.2 billion ride-share trips in 2018, and they were almost as likely to forgo a seat belt on those trips as New York City taxi patrons. One survey found that 43 percent of car-hire customers reported not always wearing a seat belt, and 80 percent don’t buckle up for short trips.

Sixty-five years later, my oldest kids are now about the age my father was when he was hurled from a vehicle, absent a seat belt, to permanent effect. Because of Uber and Lyft, they are far more