    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [February 27, 1999]
    [Pages 283-284]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    The President's Radio Address
    February 27, 1999

        Good morning. One of Government's first responsibilities is to keep
    our people safe. And one of the most successful Governmental efforts to
    protect the public is in the area of auto safety. Hundreds of thousands
    of lives have been saved, thanks to laws requiring safety features such
    as bumpers, seatbelts, and airbags.
        Today I want to talk about our latest efforts to make car travel
    even safer for our smallest and most vulnerable passengers. Over the
    past 20 years, child car seats have become a fact of life for millions
    of parents. Where once small children bounced around freely and
    dangerously in our cars, today the majority ride in car seats, whether
    for quick errands to the grocery store or long cross-country journeys.
    Those car seats have made a difference. Since 1975, they've saved the
    lives of about 4,000 children in motor vehicle accidents.
        But all too often car seats don't protect our children as well as
    they should. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration
    estimates that more than 70 percent of all children riding in car seats
    are at risk of injury because their seats have not been properly
    installed. Now, anyone who has ever struggled to get a car seat to fit
    snugly into a backseat knows exactly what I'm talking about.
        Most seatbelts were not designed to hold car seats, and not all 100
    models of car seats can fit all 900 types of vehicles on our road today.
    For Joe Colella's family, the consequences
    were tragic. Five years ago Joe's 3-year-old niece, Dana Hutchinson, was
    killed in a head-on collision because her car seat was incompatible with
    the seatbelts in her family's car. Ever since, so that no other family
    has to suffer this tragedy, Joe has worked full-time to improve car seat

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    safety and to alert parents to the dangers of poorly fitting car seats.
        A few years ago, my administration appointed Joe to a blue-ribbon panel of parents, consumer groups,
    medical professionals, and auto and seat manufacturers to find ways to
    make car seats safer and easier to install. Today I'm pleased to
    announce that their top recommendation, a simple, universal system for
    attaching car safety seats, will become the standard for every new car
    and light truck sold in our country.
        By the year 2000, the Department of Transportation will require
    every safety seat to have three standard attachments designed to fit
    three standard anchors in the backseat of every car. With this new rule,
    and with these three simple attachments, we can save lives and prevent
    up to 3,000 injuries a year.
        But the challenge of keeping our children safe in our cars and on
    our roads is never ending. We must continue to encourage all drivers and
    passengers to buckle up, to use booster seats and seatbelts for their
    older children. We must work to make airbags safer for children and
    smaller adults. And we must press forward in our fight to keep more
    drunk drivers off our roads by lowering the national drunk driving
    standard to .08.
        Together we can work to make sure more Americans traveling on our
    roads, especially more young Americans, come safely home to their
    families and loved ones.
        Thanks for listening.

    Note: The address was recorded at 1:36 p.m. on February 26 in the
    Manager's Office at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco, CA, for
    broadcast at 10:06 a.m. on February 27. The transcript was made
    available by the Office of the Press Secretary on February 26 but was
    embargoed for release until the broadcast.