Russian ideas on safety Nr 2

Tim and I will be flying to Novosibirsk at the end of August. While preparing for this trip it occurred to me that since my folks don't have a car it will be a problem to get home from the airport at their end. Normally we'd catch a cab. Those who've been to Russia will know that Russians are not big on seatbelts. Cars either don't have them (esp. old ones), drivers de-install them, or simply don't use them. Whenever we go in a car that actually has seatbelts and I put one on I get weird sidelooks from the driver.

So you can imagine what the situation is like with child car seats... We arrive in Novosibirsk at about 8pm so we could potentially take the bus, but on the way back our flight is at 6am and buses don't run at night. So I spoke to Dad and after being 1) laughed at that I worry about such things and then 2) being told that "oh - we'll just ask the taxi driver to be careful and Tim can safely just sit on your lap and it'll be fine" I convinced him that I will not be doing this and 3) Dad agreed to try and find something. My brother seems to have actually found a company that's called Child Taxi where you can hire a taxi with a child seat and a non-smoking(!) driver so we have to see if that might be an option. My brother also seems to be of an opinion that I am a silly western person who cares about such stupid things and apparently child seats are just propaganda of the car industry in order to make money. Ahhh conspiracy theories.

Thus, my family seems to think that I am a safety freak. They are not alone. When searching on the internet about this I came across forums where anybody who mentioned that child carseats are important got laughed at, sweared at and abused. These seats became law in Russia only relatively recently and from what I can tell the majority of people don't really follow it. The two main arguements going around against them are that 1) child car seats are the invention of the ГАИ (Russian Road Police who are notorious for their bribery) in order to scam money off the poor and innocent people, or (and this is the strongest and most popular arguement) 2) "we lived without these stupid things for so long and didn't have a worry and everything was fine and now suddenly we do - there must be something wrong with these stupid seats!".

*sigh* Yes I am a silly western person, yes I know that the risk of being in a car accident is minimal, yes it is an inconvenience, but to use the line out of my favourite movie "HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY? AM I THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES?". In the meantime Jack and I made a point of finding videos of various crash tests and I found some accident reports describing consequences of accidents where children were travelling on mother's lap. To summarise for those who might be wondering if child car seats are really there for a reason - yes, they are.