Child Safety Seat Usage in Ride-Share Services

In a research project funded by the Safety through Disruption (Safe-D) National UTC, researchers at the Virginia Tech and Texas A&M Transportation Institutes are collaborating to study the current state of child ridership and child safety seat use in ride-share vehicles. Our goal is to understand how parents and caregivers currently transport children when using ride-share vehicles, how this behavior corresponds with child passenger safety laws across the United States, and how we can move the culture of child safety forward in this new era of ride-share transportation.

Transporting children safely in ride-share vehicles has become a growing concern due to the increase in popularity of services such as Uber and Lyft, and the ongoing shift from owning a vehicle to using these services. Unlike personally owned vehicles, ride-share vehicles do not generally have permanently installed child safety seats.