The Human Cargo in the Back of Trucks : Well-Intentioned Legislation Is Simply No Substitute for Parental Oversight

Travel anywhere in Southern California and you are likely to see children, and adults, too, riding in the back of pickup trucks. It’s a way of life some places. But researchers at UC Irvine College of Medicine, and others like them around the country, have turned up some disturbing findings about how unsafe such travel really can be for anyone, especially children.

For the past decade, the UCI researchers have looked at injuries to children taken to 10 Orange County hospitals after falls out of the back of trucks. A surprisingly high number of the injuries, some quite serious, occurred when there was no crash at all; the truck had simply hit a bump, swerved or turned a corner sharply. No wonder Dr. Phyllis Agran, an associate professor of pediatrics, says, “A kid traveling in the back of a pickup truck is an unguided missile.”

There’s already a law on the books in California that hasn’t done much to keep youngsters from bumping their heads or sustaining more serious injury. It says that children under 12 may not ride in the back unless a set of dubious conditions are met--for example, unless an adult is riding in the back, too. Even so, a chaperon won’t be much good if a turn or crash renders him, like the youngster, into another, but larger, missile.

The problem with designing legislation to protect children in pickups is obvious. It’s virtually impossible to legislate effectively against the appeal or convenience of a truck, even when people are thoughtless enough to put a child in the back of one on a freeway. And there are absurdities to the current state of the law: For example, dogs currently must be tethered, but their 13-year-old human friends do not have to be restrained.

Assemblyman Eric Seastrand, (R-Salinas), has introduced well-intentioned legislation that has cleared the Assembly and awaits action in the Senate. It’s a dramatic solution: Simply prohibit anyone, regardless of age, from riding in the back of a pickup or flatbed truck. Yet, while new legislation might close loopholes, it would present the same old problem. That is, how to mandate good judgment so widely abandoned?

Adults have some latitude to make their own risky calls, a privilege many exercise in taking a chance in the back of a pickup. But children, for whom adults ought to be making safe and sane decisions, are another story. Those under 12 already are covered by a law that doesn’t seem to work. So there’s really only one place for everyone to go from there--that’s up to the front of the truck, by choice.