[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 9 (Monday, March 8, 1999)]
[Pages 332-333]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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 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

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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.