Motorists at Checkpoint Get Lesson in Child Safety : Driving: Many receive new car seats for their youngsters. The program seeks to increase awareness and prevent injuries in accidents.

As Gerry Lang of Sun Valley approached a police checkpoint on Laurel Canyon Boulevard on Thursday morning, she quickly snapped on her seat belt. Still, when she reached the officer who was peering into cars as they inched their way through, he told her to pull over.

“I thought for sure I was getting a ticket,” she later said.

Instead, she got a new child car seat.

And a lecture.

Lang’s 6-month-old son, Davon, was in a safety car seat, but the officer noticed that it was old and not properly secured, and that two of three older children in the back seat were sharing a seat belt.

“One person, one vote; one seat belt, one person,” Stephanie M. Tombrello, executive director of SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., told her. Tombrello’s group is a national nonprofit organization advocating child passenger safety that helped establish the checkpoints.

“Next time, don’t be so nice and don’t give rides to more people than you have available seat belts,” Tombrello added. “You could get a ticket for that.”

But in exchange for the brief chiding, Lang got a free car seat with a retail value of about $70 to replace her old one and had it properly installed in her car. So did others who showed up with no seats or faulty ones.

“I thought the day was going to start out bad, but it’s been a good day,” Lang said before driving off.

The checkpoint was set up under a national program called Project Safe Baby, which is designed to increase awareness of properly used car seats and make them available to low-income families. The program is sponsored by Midas Muffler & Brake Shops, which provided the free car seats, and SafetyBeltSafe, which provided trained inspectors to check the car seats.

A similar two-hour checkpoint was set up Tuesday in South-Central Los Angeles, and others have been established for short periods in San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento.

Millie Tezanos, the project’s executive director, said child safety seat awareness is critical because, according to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, motor vehicle injuries are the leading cause of death and disability for children in the United States.

All 50 states have laws requiring the use of safety seats for young children. In California, a child under the age of 4 or weighing less than 40 pounds must be secured in an approved child seat. Failure to do so carries a fine of $271.

Annually, more than 1,700 children are killed and more than 170,000 are injured in motor vehicles, but properly used child safety seats reduce the risk of death by 71%, hospitalization by 67% and minor injuries by 50%, Tezanos said.

“This is a product for which you cannot find a substitute,” said Tombrello. “It makes the difference between life and death.”

The checkpoint was originally scheduled to be set up at Van Nuys Boulevard and Bradley Avenue near the San Fernando Gardens housing complex. But police moved it to Laurel Canyon Boulevard near Ritchie Valens Recreation Center (formerly Paxton Park), because the original location was too close to a fire station.

Traffic flow was also better along Laurel Canyon Boulevard, but maybe too good, officials said. At times, cars with children riding without safety seats were simply given pamphlets and waved through because of a backup of vehicles whose drivers were having their new child seats installed.

Tezanos said that more than 50 seats were given away Thursday.

“We’re very pleased,” she said. “We may do this again in December or next spring.”