Waymo, which operates a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the Phoenix East Valley, is partnering with the Phoenix Children’s to raise awareness about child passenger safety.
Blanca Villaseñor, a child passenger safety technician with Phoenix Children’s, said the hospital’s partnership with Waymo was based on shared values of child passenger safety.
“Our goals align in terms of keeping kids safe every time they ride in a car,” Villaseñor said. Villaseñor, who is a certified car seat technician, works to educate the community, parents and caregivers about how to keep kids safe in and around vehicles.
“Most of the reasons we see kids end up in the hospital after a crash is the kids were not in the right seat,” Villaseñor explained. She said that families might think they don’t need a car seat for their child if they are just going around the corner, but they do.
“We always want to make it a habit to make sure that we buckle up and keep kids safe in the right car seat,” Villaseñor urged.
For Gina Millsaps, the school principal of Dunbar Elementary in downtown Phoenix and a third-generation Arizonan, the issues of correct seatbelt usage, child passenger safety, and distracted driving are very personal.
Nineteen years ago, in a split-second of distraction while handing her niece a juice box, she became involved in a rollover crash with two of her daughters and her niece in the vehicle. The car flipped several times.
“The police officer said that, had my daughter and I not worn our seatbelts that day, she probably would've been ejected from the vehicle,” explained Millsaps. “Seatbelts saved our lives.”
More than half of all crash fatalities in 2020 involved unbelted drivers or occupants, a 14% increase over 2019, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s data on cases where seat-belt use is known.
Since the day of her crash, Millsaps said she has become passionate about road and car seat safety. She recently took a fully autonomous Waymo One ride with her grandchildren Chloe and Jacob.
“When I belted my granddaughter in, it was tight and secure,” Millsaps said. “She was snug as a bug in a rug.”
Millsaps also said she felt safe on her ride. Fully autonomous driving technology holds the promise to improve road safety because it can be designed to carry out all the tasks of a human driver while obeying traffic laws, never driving distracted, and being constantly vigilant of everything around the vehicle.
Millsaps urged drivers to put safety top of mind.
“Thinking about taking those couple extra seconds to really make sure that we're safe, that our families are safe, our kids are safe in the car by just buckling up,” Millsaps said. “It's something that takes a couple seconds, but can truly save our lives.”
