To be honest here, I feel like I'd be one of those super safe parents who refuses to put the kid in the trailer until they're 3 years old. From talking with my brother, he says it's pretty standard to wait at least 6 months (better for a year).
How can you consider yourself a 'super safe parent' when you will still put your kid in a car? I know that society in general forgets about the risks of being in a car, but that is the point that I'm trying to make. I feel that if there were child restraints designed specifically for biking, that it would be a safer means of transporation than a car.
I know many bought in wholeheartedly to MMM's claim that biking is the safest form of transportation; not one person commented directly on the data I put in a comment on that post that read as follows:
An article entitled “Motor Vehicle Crash Injury Rates by Mode of Travel, United States: Using Exposure-Based Methods to Quantify Differences” that can be found online, full text, free, here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17449891 reports the following fatality rates per 100 million person-trips (not per mile) for 1999-2003 in the US:
Passenger vehicle: 9.2
Motorcycle: 536.6
Walking: 13.7
Bicycle: 21.0
Bus: 0.4
And the following nonfatal injury rates for the same time interval, same denominator —
Passenger vehicle: 803.0
Motorcycle: 10,336.6
Walking: 215.5
Bicycle: 1,461.2
Bus: 160.8
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Clearly, it's difficult to find decent data to compare the relative safety of bikes and cars and I don't imagine the above to be precise or perfect. Still, I'm going to continue to stick with preferring academic-researcher produced, peer reviewed publications (from which those stats come) to biking-afficionado blogger data, myself, but you may prefer MMM's thinking on this, or have your own sense of which is safer in general or in your particular community/circumstances.
Still, asking why one gets in a car (but not asking why one gets on a bike) seems a tad silly (which may of course be your point).