I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let a friend come over.
And I consider myself relatively lucky in that part of the US where I live, despite being in a relatively rural region, is remarkably walkable. As opposed to most places in the US, which are effectively micro islands when it comes to getting anywhere on foot.
Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense. That traditional areas for young adults to just "hang" (cafe, bowling alley, arcade) have increasingly priced them out. That a teenager hanging out on their own is often suspected to be "up to something"
In a time before the cell phone, we apparently let kids wander unsupervised more than we do in an era where they can get a hold of their parents at almost any time? It's ludicrous.
My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period.
Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.
In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.
I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.
Mine was also free range in an older neighborhood/suburb with a highway on two sides and river on the other two. The only rule I had was not to cross the highway, but even that rule was eventually relaxed as there were better fishing ponds on the other side of the highway and I just had to tell parents/be careful. I was also a latchkey kid (along with all my friends) so I'd get home from school, drop my books and turn right around and head to my friend's houses.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
Perhaps those are your greatest memories because that is what you were doing as a child. Would your greatest memories of you grow up now be playing Minecraft online?
I don’t really know the answer. I grew up in the early 2000s with a mix of video games and ‘outside with friends on the woods’ time. I have many great memories of playing games, but by far my best are always the ones, in person, out in the woods. Even my best gaming memories were at lan parties. Being in-person with friends is just better.
I keep telling my wife our son is literally more likely to be hit by lightning than to be snatched by some rando, but somehow that is hard to understand.
I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property.
Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed and the child snatchers are too underfunded / too far of a drive away for them to bother us over a sad faced Karen calling.
The other option that's really going to piss some people off when I say, but matches my reality, is living in a few ghetto neighborhoods when I was broke there were literally so many single moms that the child snatchers could not possibly punish all of them and the kids roamed because momma was at work and they were protected from the Karens/CPS by having critical mass.
When my first-born was six I walked around with her to all of the neighbor's houses and we introduced ourselves. We informed them that my daughter would likely be moving around the neighborhood independently, perhaps on occasion with her younger brother. I gave them my phone number and told them to call any time.
In addition to having no problems with Karens or the CPS we were able to identify the other houses that had kids in them and a band of independent neighborhood kids playing with and looking out for eachother quickly became the norm in our community.
Poor people often get a pass for various reasons. Many/most of those reasons may be bad or stupid ones, but I see it as a silver lining. There is often much more of a sense of community than in other places as well.
Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.
Good point about the proliferation of the absurd “crime” of loitering, which apparently just means “existing somewhere without spending money.” I remember being a teen in the 80s and what we did every day would be considered “loitering” today. There’s not much else for kids to do outside the home besides loiter.
Existing without spending money works a lot better when you perceive and comply with social norms. At a mall, you're unlikely to meet loitering enforcement for reading a book in the food court all afternoon while sipping a drink you brought from home. You can meeting your local walking club there too and walk for miles chatting without purchasing anything -- if you're not bowling over the shoppers.
But if you camp out in the entrance of the mall and roughhouse with your highschool buddies, your antisocial behavior will drive away customers. Perhaps you can't perceive this, or perhaps you do perceive it but don't care -- either way, once you're making shoppers uncomfortable, you're a strict liability.
This doesn't mean you can't be kicked out for other reasons. But you get a lot farther if you play to your audience.
Modern loitering laws in small-town America, post-Civil-War, were typically originally intended to enslave the entire population of black men remaining in town, or otherwise drive them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA It took most of a century for the economy to really convert everything over to an hourly-pay model. This is not the only reason, but it is the dominant, proximate one that enshrined the practice.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1].
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
Have an unmarked "free candy" type van park across your street from your house day in and day out, moving with just enough regularity to avoid parking too long, and you might begin to understand why "look suspicious but haven't committed any crime" starts to weird people out.
There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.
Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains).
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.
"Buy something or leave" has become a kind of sinister, unwritten, yet overarching principle organizing and governing everyone's lives. Participation in the work-earn-spend economy has become less and less optional with each passing day.
I'm not sure that's actually true in a typical park. It may very well be true for a bunch of noisy kids in a shopping mall which exists and is paid for for the purpose of people, well, shopping.
I would be surprised if loitering laws are even enforceable today. I can see trespassing if you're asked to leave and don't, but getting arrested for being in one place too long? Especially a public place like a park? I'd donate to that gofundme. Kids could learn something from first amendment auditors and just start filming themselves in public.
Very few children know enough and have the disposition to productively stand up to a cop (or any other seemingly legitimate authority) and try to defend their rights. Legally, whether they have the same rights as adults is also questionable.
Parks have operating hours. Cities have noise ordinances, etc., to give Cops options for booking who they want for whatever they want. Cops don't necessarily care what the laws are, anyway. I've taken a ride in paddy wagons to a station before for hanging out in a playground because a neighbor said we were causing trouble. We were just talking. No, we weren't processed, but we were left to figure out our own way back home. This was in the 90s. The same stuff happens today though.
The small rural Canadian town I grew up in (~2000 people) during the 1990s had a real estate agent that would call the cops if he saw any teenagers out after 9pm. He would literally lie to them, saying we were causing trouble if we were just walking to the convenience store. He was trying to keep the town "desirable" or something. This man fought anything that would keep teenagers occupied. Skate parks, benches, etc. My group would lay in the park during the dog days of summer just chatting and passing around a jug of orange juice, which he would tell the cops was spiked with vodka (which we did do, but never in the park).
Of course, we (as in the teens in general) probably fed into his paranoia - let's just say harassing the neighbourhood teenagers rarely ends well...
I agree that people don't give this explanation enough credit.
I was online in that age group by the late 80s. Just as in your story, that started me down a path of not going outside as much, even though the other kids would be outside doing outside things. Why would I go out and play basketball or something else I didn't like when I could instead be online talking to people with shared interests?
Me too, but I wasn't on AOL or anything long-distance, instead I called local chat systems / BBSes. And because they were local we met up physically as a group at least weekly (almost daily in the summertime).
The summer I was 16 I spent more time away from the computer, hanging out with other teenagers I met on the computer, than I would have otherwise.
> Have online worlds become the last free places for children?
> [...]This evidence tells us something important about human development: children want to explore together and build independent peer cultures that are partially distinct from the ways of adults. Yet since the early 1970s, many Western countries have increasingly limited the social and physical independence of children.
> In physical spaces, we restrict the movement of children and refuse to let them play and explore without us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t look for ways to escape.
> In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet.
I feel with larger school sizes and online capabilities we've lost the friendship of necessity - where you'd be friends with the kids on the block "because you had to" and there wasn't really any other option.
They might not be amazing friends, or life-long ones, but they were friends.
You hit on what I consider a paradox of parenting today: Kids have access to instant communication with their parents/guardians, yet they can't be left on their own in public because it's too dangerous. That never made sense to me. I've tried to convince parents that kids are actually safer today (primarily because of smart phones, but also because of Ring cameras on every damn house) than us Gen-Xers were, but no one buys it. I hear the same excuses: It's too risky these days. There's so many creeps out there. Have you seen the registered offender websites? And that's just the creeps we know about!
Came here to say what you already said: the built environment accounts for a great deal of this. It's simply not possible in a great many parts of Middle America to walk or bike over to a friend's house, and to the extent any social fabric exists, it is built entirely atop parents' willingness to drive you over for coordinated and time-boxed play-dates.
I have been arguing for almost my entire life, as a European immigrant, that built environment and automobile sprawl shapes relationships and cohesion. I was constantly dismissed and told that these are superficial differences, that people are just as lonely in dense, transportation-rich urban jungles, and that motivated people in the right cultural context can defeat any environmental obstacles to friendship and connection.
I hope the tide on that is starting to turn. Built environment isn't everything, but it's a lot.
What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places to sit everywhere, things to see, other people walking too. He could even go to the beach and be fine, as there's lifeguards. By the second week of the summer, you'd see group of new friends hanging out with no parents, just going back home for meals and sleep.
Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.
> But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs.
That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities.
And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.
But then more people can't move into the city, even if they want to, because the units in urban environments are already occupied and converting more land to urban developments is restricted by law. So the existing units get bid up until the price difference is high enough to deter people from living in the city and everyone else has to live in suburbs or rural areas whether they want to or not.
> And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.
And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto)
The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars.
You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.
I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.
You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.
In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."
This take makes no sense, if you take into account that 100 families could live in the space of one single detached home. High density building isn't suddenly going to take over suburbs like that.
Have you been to any place other than the US? The size of a single detached home, including backyard, front lawn and sides can perfectly fit an entire 5-8 story building of two 80m2 apartment per floor, if not more. If you live in a well designed city with public transport, you don't need to waste surface area on a parking garage.
The key is always setbacks - if you have to have ten feet on each side of every building, you can only get "so dense" without going for apartments that consume an entire block.
The problem is introducing the zero-setback designs organically - as the people there likely receive little to no benefit, and the people who do receive the benefit aren't there now.
E.g., a house could easily be fit between mine and the neighbors, but we wouldn't really benefit from the density improvements, and the family that would move into the "missing middle" doesn't currently exist here.
I'd love if our lot was zero setback, as I'd build an addition right up to the property line instead of having to try to find another lot/house in the area we want.
It's declining nearly everywhere except for some portions of Africa (where the trend is also towards lower fertility. I'm not aware of anywhere that is both "stable" (~2.1) and has a flat trend; that is to say that it isn't just momentarily passing through stability on it's way to declining population.
> lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent
This is impossible. Look at even the densest cities today such as Hong Kong, with many 50-storey buildings packed closely. HK as a whole has maybe 25% land area allocated for buildings and the rest is forest and green space.
Or consider Tokyo - sure, it is a big sprawling metropolis and pretty much an uninterrupted patch of concrete. But the urban area does eventually end, and much of the land area of Japan is mountains, forests, farms, etc.
There are many types of houses in between suburbs and skyscrapers. This is "missing middle" housing. Duplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings, etc. Look at Old Town Alexandria, VA on Google Street View, for example.
That cannot happen. Cities need a lot of "empty" space around them for farms. Well I suppose everyone could move to Spain (picking a random country) and leave the rest of the world to robotic farms. However we can't expand to cover even all of Spain unless everyone is living in a mega suburb with everyone having their own single story mansion.
(others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)
Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute. Those dynamics have doubtless changed to some degree. But, if I had to commute daily to the nearest large city, I'd seriously consider living there. But I don't have to so I live rurally/exurban or whatever you want to call it.
For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules.
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much.
I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree.
Of course, different people have different preferences.
Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.
Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.
It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.
I don't really disagree. One hour each way starts to seem like a lot. 30 minutes isn't walking next door or downstairs but seems pretty doable in general. Even within a large city with decent public transit, it's not hard to get up to close to a half-hour commute to get into an office. Most people who don't work from home don't live a 5 minute walk from their workplace.
Historically people had to work on a farm! The vast majority of the historical population lived close enough to their fields to walk to it every day. Sure Rome had a million people 2000 years ago, but that was only possible because many many millions of people (often slaves and thus not seen much in history) who didn't live in Rome and produced a surplus of food.
> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else
Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.
i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere.
i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to.
the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ...
it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target.
i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.
i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs.
i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
i agree it's overestimated, and it's not "as bad" as many believe it to be. but it is worse.
i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.
am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.
there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.
There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s.
But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25
minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.
Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.
So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
I don't think you have an accurate and full understanding of the issues plaguing some areas of American city centers. I can't even recall the last time I saw a person who was drunk in public causing a serious issue after leaving a downtown bar. It just doesn't happen. Besides, you don't need to go to the city center to get drunk, we sell full proof booze in the supermarkets here.
People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.
If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect property crime like motor vehicle theft to follow a similar trend, but it does. A very large chunk of the crime is gang related, and there is no gang violence in the suburb I live in.
Bars are also disbursed all over not just in the city center. We have bars here, and they produce essentially zero crime.
But even if all of the crime was alcohol related, all of the crime isn’t occurring inside bars.
People aren't statistical machine, they make judgements based on their life experiences. I've lived in at least half a dozen inner Midwest cities in the ghetto poor cores and I would describe the experience as basically "stay strapped or get clapped hellscape." People trying to rob me at gunpoint (yes happened), stealing my bikes and whatever they can find outside, testing you and sizing you up to see if you're a good mark, etc etc. On one occasion I got a flat tire and the gats immediately came out once they saw my white face; I guess they respected the fact I decided to fight back with my hands because for whatever reason they decided not to shoot me.
So yeah maybe the statistics say something else (I wonder how many people like me just don't report crime -- the police do nothing in such places) but I'm not eager to relive that experience.
That said your immediate neighbors in these areas can be incredibly nice and protective of each other as a survival mechanism, because everyone else is quite literally out to get you.
The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets.
I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."
This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.
Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there.
I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about.
Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.
> I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."
[…] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.
I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
> Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
Over time, real estate just is inflation - if it's more than inflation it eventually ends up infinitely expensive and unaffordable, if it's less than inflation it leads to cheap-as-free.
Arguably the second is more desirable from a human standpoint - but the first is where financialization leads us.
In the US the city is not a safe place for kids. Great for the 21-30 year old crowd (and older folks that didn't "grow up") since there are many great bars and parties, but there are no kid friendly places. I know several people out here in the suburbs who loved city living until they had kids. One kid under 5 isn't too bad, but as soon as the kid is school age you look at how bad the schools are and you get out thus ensuring nobody will try to fix the problem.
A large problem in discourse like this is relative terms. Specifically what people consider to be "city" or "urban" vs "suburban" vs "rural".
I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.
And part of the problem in the US is that the US census has a very binary definition: urban and rural. Myself and two neighbors live on about 100 acres (not counting adjacent conservation land). We're considered urban. because we're about an hour drive of a fairly large city.
But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.
That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids.
(Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.
No kid friendly places? Like parks, museums, their school (I admit public school quality can vary enormously in urban areas in the US), bakeries, candy stores, etc all within a 20 minute walk for me? If all one sees in urban areas is bars and parties, maybe it is the people that leave that don't grow up.
My daughter has slept under the shark tank at the aquarium as well as with the mummies at the local cultural museum. The local university runs summer camps for everything from engineering to gymnastics. The Museums run programs, too. Her grade school has a thriving parent community because the parents stand together when school is let out instead of forming a long line of cars, I've made new friends myself this way (the number one complaint I get from parents that do move out is that they know no other parents in their kid's school). Because I walk everywhere, I don't ever deal with traffic.
I'm not saying it's perfect, either. Urban areas vary a LOT, including within any single city and within the country. My child's been directly exposed to poverty, homelessness and mental health issues, etc. I'm comfortable enough to explain the complexities of this to her, but some people would rather not.
This is not to criticize people who want to live in a rural or suburban life. I grew up in a small town and got myself out of there very quickly, mostly because I felt isolated and trapped growing up. But cities are very much places you can live in, kids and all.
Which city? IMO having public transit and good sidewalks would be amazing for older kids in the 12 to 16 range. I grew up in a small suburb, connected to the world only by a busy 40 mph street without sidewalks. I was basically trapped at home unless I could convince my parents to take me somewhere until my friends started getting cars when I was 16 or 17.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
There are a lot less kids as a % of the population. My mom growing up in the baby boom had to stand in the aisle of her school bus (something safety doesn't allow anymore), but if she got on the bus just 4 blocks sooner she could have got an empty seat! These massive numbers of kids don't exist and so there isn't much to play with.
My kids are happy that the corn fields around our how turned into a subdivision just after we moved in because now there are kids to play with. However only about 1 in 10 houses have a kid (some have grandkids over on weekends - I didn't count that, and others were the kids live with the other parent half the time get counted half).
My suburban neighborhood has ~100 houses, and only two of them (besides mine) have children in them. Lots of grandparents, though, who briefly have children over around holidays. The landscape is dotted with parks but they're all pretty much always empty, except for the occasional adult exercising or walking their dogs. Our local school district is spread out over a huge swath of suburban land, likely because there are just not enough kids.
It's probably different in the city, where presumably more people are parent-aged. Almost all homeowners I know out by me are over 45 and their children are adults by now.
Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
This. I do remeber as a kid in the 90s, who was among the first who got a confuser at home - at age 5..6 I remember actually being pulled to my apartment, to play all those DOS games I had (didn't have game console, but a pentium PC, with windows 95/DOS). At some moment, I remember even being thrilled to spend my time playing jazz jack rabbit or something of sorts, instead of going downstairs to my apartment block yard (was living in ex-ussr space) which at the time was full of kids playing. It is not anymore.
This memory makes me sad now, what a waste of childhood. At least, I got to experience, playing with sticks and stones with other kids, and navigating DOS file system as a 6 year old.
I had similar experiences (post-communist country), but I was a bit older, got my first computer at age of 9 (Atari 65XE, replaced with C64 2 years later).
So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.
But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.
I think back of my childhood and playing the usual games like hide and seek with at least 10-12 other kids around my building and occasionally I'll slip into the "kids these days" thoughts. And then I realize I had something no kid these days has: massive amounts of boredom.
There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.
Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?
So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.
This was true but accidental when "we" were growing up, because if I wanted to play a game on the family computer, I had to figure out the right drivers and suchwith to make it work.
"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.
As to continue my anecdotal story, I could safely say that all of my interactions with computers up until the age of 14 were purely gaming with occasional drawing in ms paint. Even so, at the age of 14, I did manage to create a simple html web page, and install a php based web engine, those actions were barely conscious, just following some tutorials in my mother tongue. Only at the age of 17 I made some first real steps into using computer to compute, write first simple programs, and began to be able to understand how it actually works. I'm pretty sure, that all of the time I spent with computers before 14 contributed less than 0.1% into "getting into STEM" and that learning English, reading actual books, spending time in extracurricular classes did way, way more. But then again, that's just my personal experience. Though I believe, it's of many.
As a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was FORCED outside by my parents. The same was true for other kids in the neighborhood. We were told that chilling indoors was not an option, so get outside and be back by the time streetlights come on or at least call to say where we were.
My friends and I got yelled at for doing anything fun outside, and we couldn't go beyond our yards. Then the neighbor kid chased my friend with a knife and we really couldn't go anywhere until the little perp got committed.
> Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring.
The inside wasn't boring so much as parents didn't want their kids inside and requiring attention or supervision. TVs, tables and gaming consoles means they can be inside without this burden, so it became an easy default.
Me and my friend in the 90s dug a fucking HOLE in the back yard because we were so bored. We got it down to about 5 feet, probably just enough to be dangerous.
This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.
I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.
It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.
Oh well, not for me. I am/was a UK project manager who spent far too much time in the malls around Princeton NJ, where we were working. I had no choice because I don't drive, so I depended on bossing my lead developer about to get me places (sometimes worked) - and god how she could shop. I just prayed that the malls would have a bar - mostly not. But I would still hate malls for their horrible atmosphere.
It's not a choice between A and B. Right now we're predominantly going with C - you have little direct contact with friends, you have no mall, you exist primarily on social media developing mental illness through all the algorithmic maladies and the ones associated with constant social performance. Or D - isolated entirely from anyone but parents, socialized secondhand through media/games.
there is hardly anything kids can do in China, one of the main reasons why I moved away after my kid was born (besides dangerous toxic food and air)
while here in Europe I have within 10 minutes walk like 3-5 playgrounds for kids to play, in China I would have 0 even if we walked for half an hour, there are literally no playgrounds for kids at all, you will find exercise equipment for adults/old people in parks, but NOTHING for children and then they are surprised why people don't have kids in China
the fun with kids in China is meant to go to mall, pay fee for some amusement park and let kids play there, same with any other kid oriented facility, come, pay ticket so kid can play, but no public playgrounds, heck it's even difficult to find public football/basketball playgrounds, again in Europe I have at least 2-3 basketball courts around 10 minutes walk from home, in China impossible
been there last summer already with bigger kids and they had literally nothing to do when visiting in-laws in their miniscule 600-900K town (Beijing suburbs), we found some kids amusement park in walking distance at the end of trip, but nothing to do anywhere, they could walk to park where there was nothing to do for kids, so only time they could do something interesting was walking around Beijing, checking sights, maybe playing pingpong
> able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous.
A lot of small towns, even in the US, offer such things. Towns far from being a city. It should be more common though.
> But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning. It's not that there is nowhere for you to exist without a car, it's that there is nowhere for you to exist there at all, and you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.
If you want to build a cafe or an arcade or a hackerspace out in suburbia, can you? That's not even about density. If you could put those things there then people would and there would be something kids could walk to. But everything other than residences is banned, so of course there is nothing else there.
> It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning
> you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.
I hear your point but I think your causal model is misguided. It's two different things augmenting each other, not "one is a more primal cause than the other" (in my opinion, anyways). Like yes road diets in the suburbs won't 'solve' the problem by themselves, but the impact of the zoning changes you're pointing to may also have the impact of reducing car dependency in the area (although not guaranteed, I've seen USians drive even just half a mile). Cars collapse distance, and zoning policy eats up those gains greedily. SFH zoning spaces everything 10 miles apart, so all the residents buy cars because there's no alternatives. It's multiple threads reinforcing each other; I think if you dig into the ""trendy"" anti-car arguments you will find a lot of backing for mixed-used zoning policy as well because both types of changes are needed at once.
As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better.
Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space.
Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention the savings on your energy bill.
In most of the US, only single family detached houses are built (by law), which makes things spread out enough that people will want to drive. To address that, businesses are required to have a bunch of parking space. The end result of that is that, outside of a few places built before these rules took hold, living near amenities means living by parking lots and car traffic. The kind of street that "feels alive" is basically just precluded by rules that facilitate a car-first way of getting around.
I know of at least one business in my neighborhood that died due to these rules. They needed to expand to make the business work, but doing so would require that they buy even more land, in a fairly dense neighborhood, and turn it into parking.
People who primarily drive don't think through the second order implications.
I have been in the car with someone more than once, looking for parking, where they re-invent the idea from first principles. "Ugh, we can't find a spot, why don't they require this place to provide enough parking?"
It was a tremendous political fight to get these sorts of reforms through. People get really upset when they perceive you as taking away their convenience.
There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission.
In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).
Even where it's allowed (which is more places than you think, look at zoning maps) and some places where it's not (variations exist) the places that do pop up usually die.
It takes serious dedication and time to turn a culture around, throwing in a few "desired third places" isn't going to cut it - at least not before the rents become too much to bear.
The whole parking thing is just so weird. Looking around my neighborhood, every house has a two car garage and enough room in the driveway to park either 2 or 4 more cars. But somehow street parking is at a premium.
It's some kind of perverse regulatory capture by landlords with the self-destructive assistance of homeowners. Actual urban real estate is preposterously expensive, but the only reason it stays that way is that you can't create more of it, i.e. put urban developments in high demand areas that are currently suburbs.
The landlords who own the urban real estate correctly deduce that allowing more to be built would lower rents. They then convince suburban homeowners to go in with them on preventing that from happening, even though it's not really in the homeowners' interest, because rezoning would reduce the value of housing (i.e. price per square foot) but increase the value of land because you could build more housing on it. The urban landlords are the only losers there, because they have a high ratio of housing to land, so they want the housing to be expensive rather than the land. The ordinary suburban homeowners, by contrast, have a high ratio of land to housing, so they benefit from making the land worth more, i.e. allowing more to be built on it, but are bamboozled into wanting the price of housing to be high and therefore oppose urbanization.
You also get a lot of rubbish arguments about "induced demand" which try to imply that building housing would raise prices, when what it actually does is raise prices in the area immediately surrounding the new development (because people like new developments) while making it more affordable in all of the places they're moving from. Which is then used as an excuse not to do it, even though it improves affordability on net while creating more of the areas people actually want.
Something similar happens with commercial space. The landlords want it to be scarce. The argument used in that case will be something like "businesses will buy up houses to build Starbucks" or "it will make traffic worse" as if they wouldn't happily give you a Starbucks and a dozen new housing units on that piece of land if you'd let them, and as if traffic gets worse instead of better when people are closer to things and therefore drive fewer miles. But again it's really the landlords with the limited land that is zoned for those things trying to keep anyone else from getting any, and the other arguments are just the kayfabe because "we want rents to be high" is unsympathetic.
I do understand why it is kept as low-density, that makes sense. But why not allow intermingled small shops, family-friendly restaurant/bars, schools, sport facilities… Surely they would make the area more desirable?
I read that the banks often set minimum rents on the commercial real estate built or renovated with their loans. The minimum is too high for most any business to be profitable, so you see a series of failed attempts until a big chain like 711 or Starbucks rents it. They still don't profit and just close the store but keep the rental because longer terms usually. Not sure why the banks have this incentive.
A pet shop in a strip mall closed a few years ago due to a rent increase. The spot has been empty since. I really think there needs to be some reverse market incentives. No tax breaks on empty space if you can't show you're making honest effort to rent it out, and progressively lowering the cost of rent to reflect the lower property value.
If it's actually a market, it should go up AND down. Otherwise it's just a scam.
A lot of this boils down to decades of compounding preferences. Americans were taught that their birthright is to live in detached homes in low-density areas. The density is seen as a negative, yes.
There isn't resistance. It comes from development patterns.
A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.
I am sure that they could better maximize their returns by making room for local businesses and increasing the appeal of the area. And who says that a house will be worth more than a shop?
It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.
You need about 10 houses per shop (anyone with better numbers? this works for discussion but it is likely wrong). However everybody needs many different shops and so it isn't a case of 10 houses 1 shop - since you always need to go elsewhere anyway wouldn't even think of the local shop when it would do and so they fail. Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.
Shops do better when clustered together. People combine trips and so if they need to go one place for any reason that will often enough "drop in" to a different one.
All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!
Broadly speaking, that sounds super low, and it also doesn't echo the business density I typically observe. I think even for lifestyle businesses you need hundreds of homes actively using your services, maybe thousands total. Suppose you really could live off just 10 houses; you'd need something like $2400/yr/person in revenue at 100% cash operating margins to turn it into a reasonable income (which, given your risk exposure via rent, capital, etc, I don't think most people would start a business with the intent of the owner making less than $60k/yr in income, perhaps scaled down in much smaller, cheaper towns). There aren't many kinds of businesses where I spend that much money, and those definitely don't have anywhere near 100% margins. Just right off the bat, 100 or 1000 feels closer to correct than 10.
Most small businesses have fairly low margins. Even when you factor the cost of owner labor at zero (common for "lifestyle" businesses -- splitting it out this way so that we can look at COGS and then compare to a single family's income), you might see 10-20% cash operating margins for various shops, cafes, restaurants, 5-10% at groceries and pharmacies, 20-40% at bike shops and gyms, and 50%+ at barbers (details, especially for higher-margin industries like barbershops, depend a lot on the exact terms of rent and local tax laws, but this is a halfway decent ballpark).
Let's run some numbers.
The average person waits 2 months between hair cuts. Let's assume a moderately expensive cut at $40. The owner keeps $120/yr/person, or $300/yr/house. In the sort of town likely to have $40 be a reasonable baseline haircut price, $60k/yr is probably the bare minimum you'd want the owner to make to call this endeavor successful, especially when you factor in the increased financial risk they're taking on, so you need 200 homes actively frequenting your establishment in particular.
The average grocery bill for a single person is $300/mo, or $750/mo per household, of which the grocery store owner keeps $37.50-$75/mo, or $450-$900/yr. You need 66-133 homes frequenting that establishment in particular to keep its lights on, but I'd argue $60k/yr, while low for a barber or hair salon, is extremely low for a capital-intensive business.
Suppose you have a local cafe or bakery you visit every weekday on the way to work, or maybe every weekend on your morning walks. You spend $10 on a couple nice croissants, a single stuffed croissant, or something to that effect -- averaging the two customer types together, you spend $5/day, $1825/yr, $4562.50/yr/house, and the bakery keeps $456.25-$912.5/yr/house. You need 65-132 homes actively supporting that business. If you have customers like me who basically only stop in to the bakery when extended family is in town (preferring to cook my own), I might slightly bolster the grocer's margins (not a ton if I'm just buying flour, yeast, butter, and salt), but you need 1249-2500 homes like mine to support the bakery.
Retail shops (bookstores, local artwork, etc) have a pretty dismal outlook too. Used books are dirt cheap, I don't read as much as I used to (picked up other hobbies like playing the piano), and I do a lot of my reading online nowadays anyway. I spend maybe $100-$200/yr on books. I think that's above average, though I don't really know. The bookstore owner keeps $10-$40/yr though after rent and other expenses and needs 600-2400 homes filled with people like me (and who also don't share their books) for its support structure.
Instead of looking at rough estimates based on profit margins and usage, you can look at towns you understand reasonably well. One county I know of, for example, which does all of its business in a single, central town, has around 15k people, or 6k households (or if we're just counting the town population itself for some reason, 1200 households, but I think that's a significant underestimate). It has two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two music stores (instruments, lessons, etc, and another store outside of town), 15 restaurants (and another 5-10 in the rest of the county), and three pharmacies. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, it takes 400-3000 households to support most of those businesses, and 48-400 to support various kinds of restaurants. When factoring in just the county population, it's 2000-3000 households for normal businesses and 240 for a restaurant.
You are not running the same numbers I am. If there are 1000 houses I'm claiming there should be about 100 retail shops. That people only get a haircut every few months is why those can't spread out.
That sounds plausible. If you're talking about total shop count of any kind, then as a conversion factor between my numbers and yours we're saying there are 20-100 types of shops people visit with any regularity in a year. That sounds about right.
Problem with insulation is that it kills off all sound, not only noise. For example people might actually enjoy the sound of wind blowing leaves, squirrels running around or an occasional car driving by. There are devices generating natural noise for Passivhaus because its insulation is so great that people starts to feel eerie.
lol, no--you just made an unsubstantiated (and stupid) claim that any apartment that isn't an NYC penthouse is a slum, and i countered that you can't use the limits of your own experience to reliably define what the world contains
Most american suburbanites completely disagree with this take. They want their street to be quite and devoid of people. I think this is largely because there is no recourse for anti social activity in the US. People who have spent a lot of time in cities start to notice that anti social activity doesnt really get stopped and many decide it would be better to just not be around outsiders who could annoy them so they enact exclusive zoning to minimize interaction with people they dont know.
Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance"
Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?
I lived in Manhattan (NYC). Walked a mile at a time (or more) without thinking about it. To/from work, in cold, in rain, etc.
Now I'm in NYC 'burbs. The train is 1.1 miles from my house. I walk that distance on occasion but not often. My wife drives to/from train most days.
Town is also 1.1 miles from my house, near the train. My daughter is about to be 8. I'm not far off from letting her wander into town on her bike (or on foot), but it's anywhere from a 10/15-25 minute journey depending on how fast you walk/bike and how often you stop.
So, I think there's a difference between nothing to do and it's "close" - whatever that means to you, and there's nothing to do and it requires a 30 min car ride.
Those latter suburbs aren't far from me, and I grew up next to one good example of a suburb w/large houses and nothing much else (Dover, Massachusetts)
How far people are willing to walk depends quite a bit on what they are walking past. Lots of people will walk through an area of shops, cafes, etc, fewer will walk through an area of house after house after house, almost nobody will walk through an area that is one long concrete wall.
> Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance". Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?
It may partly be psychological: in 'the city' there is human activity and you do not feel isolated, and you feel part of societal activity.
A good portion of these houses were built before the car was invented, and while many folks park on the street (you have to pay for a permit), there are also lanes and garages for many of them. A couple of schools with-in walking distance, banks, churches, library, shops, etc.
Sidewalks are missing there but there are plenty in town.
I used to live in two of the streetcar suburbs: Newton Ma, and Brookline Ma. They are indeed more urban than suburban in many spots, but again, proximity matters. Those places feel more urban when you live near the MBTA Green Line (the streetcar) - let's say within 10 min walk.
It depends on the infrastructure as well. I'm about a 7 minute drive from my local commuter rail but it's essentially unwalkable as that 7 minutes is basically along an interstate. I do take the commuter rail if I'm going into the city 9-5 on weekdays but that's very rare.
I find this whole topic reductive in general. Specifics matter quite a bit. I don't disagree with some of the article but it feels very gloomy compared to suburban life I see around me.
Yeah, it depends on your definitions I guess. I'm certainly not in classic suburbia. I think ESRI says I'm in an exurb. In any case, I'm certainly not walking anyplace except down to the river or to a couple adjacent neighbors or conservation land within a 100+ acres total. Where I grew up was similar. This is considered urban by the US census by the way.
It’s more rewarding to walk 2-3km when there is a lot of things to see/do compared to walking 1km just to get to the station in a lonely walk. Just having/seeing people walk along/across you makes a world of difference.
I think walking VS driving is also about convenience.
In the example we're replying to, the shared suburban street has a marked median (implying medium traffic), minimal shoulder, and no sidewalk. While the houses and foliage are very nice, it feels a little unsafe to walk on. Presumably the train station has nice parking, so driving is quick and easy to do. Choosing to walk in this case is more for leisure or for exercise.
In the city though, driving is a whole other thing. Storing a car and finding parking just to go 1 mile is a huge pain: it's much simpler just to walk it. Walking in this case may be for leisure and exercise, but it's also for convenience.
I think you're right about people in proximity along the walk. Always liked that about Manhattan.
But even in Manhattan, I didn't regularly stop to chat with strangers. Maybe I stopped to grab coffee along the way. To your point, plenty to see and do along the way but I was often moving from point A to B - just like the 'burbs.
When I walk to/from train or town now I usually listen to something on my AirPods. Happy to do it without them but not a terrible way to spend the 20-25 mins.
> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
This is an important point. In my hometown, I spent a lot of time playing in vacant/double/unused lots. Those lots are all gone and have been turned into parking lots or mini-McMansions. It breaks my heart every time I visit my parents' house and I see that our old soccer, football, wiffleball field and all of the trees we used to build forts have been replaced by cheap houses whose lawns are covered in a rotating cast of inflatables.
I can't fault the landowners for cashing in on their spare property but it would seem that the town could do with more localized parks. If anyone has been to Alphabet City in NYC, a lot of vacant lots were turned into community gardens and they're incredible little oases to stumble upon and relax in for a few minutes. I wish the town had had the foresight to do this with some of the aforementioned lots.
This is a major aside but another major change is that >50% of the trees which used to dot my hometown are gone. They either fell, died or got in the way of the power lines and were not replaced by the town or property owners. The streets all used to be covered in leafy canopies, everybody's houses were a few degrees cooler and all of that wood prevented a lot of the noise pollution from the Metro-North and I-95 from making its way through.
Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children.
Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays.
But the children friendly aspect of society described above is 100% true. It hasn't degraded at all compared to when I was a kid.
I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why.
I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept in the living room. Sure, it’s not perfect, but people did it. Same story happened in villages, and even it was the standard for some time.
So, whenever I see this argument I say we’re too posh in thinking it. There are different less comfortable ways to start a family and have kids, we just don’t want to do it.
For reference, now in my country everywhere new apartments are built (overbuilding the main city in the process, but different topic), yet prices are still soaring especially relative to the average salary. So same issue of high prices like everywhere.
Yet no one here thinks about the other option. The same argument from the linked article applies - too much comfort.
It's not just a matter of comfort. If you have no housing, you have a monthly recurrent payment to make, where failing once makes you homeless.
Will you be able to afford it next year? Next decade? After retirement?
Removing that permanent threat of ruin is then the priority. It has to be solved before children because once you have them, that's a an extra economic burden and you won't make it out with that extra weight.
The generation that lived through that, the next generation does not wish to live through it, as alternatives are "available" now (at least on paper). Those kids who grew up in 50m2 with no privacy, and at the same time absorbed western TV, where 300m2 detached house is a base in every show - formed their dreams towards that. This is why everyone is delaying family, because the image in their head is that to be truly happy, this is what you need. Very few people, living in those tight conditions grew up to be happy about their childhood.
Is it hard to imagine that younger generation wants to live better lives? They don't want to suffer like their parents did. They are already fed up with all the bullshit that the current generation of politicians leaves to them to figure out?
What is this argument, "too much comfort, too posh"?!
> Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront
Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".
As someone living in the center of Barcelona, i might have to come over to Galicia in the future. Hows the public schools in general, similar to here in catalunya i assume. Buying anything around here feels like a half million investment and its not wort it.
The kids get to take a couple of classes in Gallego instead of Catalan, but otherwise I don't see too many differences.
Fair warning, that if you want to live in a city, while Vigo and A Coruna are cheaper than Barcelona or Madrid, I don't think its that stark a contrast - my friend was buying in a rural village, an hour from Vigo.
I think that most of western Europe is fucked in that sense. Previous generations piled up a ton of debt and so now there is no breathing room for subsidize affordable housing, parenting benefits, ... . Add to that that you need 2 salaries to live, that you must study until when you are 25+ to have a degree, that you don't want to have a baby just when you career is starting, that housing is extremely expensive, that you need to save for your pension because clearly the pension system will be drastically neutered in the future due to the above mentioned debt, ... . Basically, there are a bunch of factors that stop many many couples from having children.
I'm Italian so the situations is similar if not worse back at home.
> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
This is very bizarre to me. I never once thought about a chair as a child. _If_ you got tired you just took a seat anywhere or just laid down.
An empty lawn was the perfect place to play any number of things. Even better was when 2 empty backyard lawns connected and there wasn't much/any landscaping for some really big activities.
While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.
But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.
I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)
Also you'd take your bicycle and pretend it is a motorbike, hacking stuff likw mounting a playing card to the seatstay so it hits the spoke and make revving sound when you accelerated or looking for planks and construction material to build ramps
> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be.
We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.
There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.
Yeah I get that, the point I trying to (snarkily) make was that we have control over where we live and raise our families. People often opine about the wonders of urbanism but then move to the suburbs!
But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).
I live in what passes for a walkable residential area in the south us. A 15 min walk to a street with shops and restaurants. You meet people on the way. But the weather is definitely a factor. It bounces around freezing for a month or three and bounces around 100F for another five. That leaves the final ~5 which are torrential rains interspersed with lovely weather.
It's not really true. Almost every neighborhood in Atlanta has a cluster of shops or food hall kind of thing to walk to.
It's true that it's a massive lifestyle leap to go to no car. But walk to the park. Walk to get ice cream. Ride bike to school are all easily doable in atlanta.
It's certainly true in Atlanta. That "cluster of shops" can be a long way walking (10-15 minutes) from where one resides. It's small, incomplete, inadequate, etc.
I grew up in Atlanta proper, so know the city well, and later, by choice, lived there for a few years as an adult without a car and it was genuinely complicated. I chose a place to live near my place of work (near = it was 30 minutes solid walking). I had access to a supermarket (15 minutes walking), two (!) transit (MARTA) stations each at 15-20 minutes walking, and several bus lines (none with frequency greater than 30 minutes nor standard deviation less than 20), as well as the "cluster of shops" to which you refer. It had a bar, a few restaurants, a laundromat, and a drugstore. For real shopping other than food I took MARTA to a mall. My morning walk to work around 6 o 7 am required crossing a street used by prostitutes and drug dealers. They didn't bother me but the cops were suspicious of me for being there on foot and more than oncee I had to avoid cops with guns out chasing someone down.
People there generally considered me nuts for choosing to live this way.
I remember fondly that on my way to work there was a street full of pecan trees and at the right time of year I could get a handful from the sidewalk (there were sidewalks!).
When I was growing up (true, this was a while ago), again in the city proper, the nearest park was 3-4 km away. I went there by bike and played pickup basketball or went to the public pool, but it wasn't exactly nearby, and it wasn't walkable. Ice cream bars could be bought at a convenience store several km in a different direction. The bus stop was near the park and the bus came every 50 minutes, with considerable variance. On it it took something like 40 minutes to get to a MARTA station. A single to and back trip on public transport could easily take 3-4 hours in total so I didn't do this often. My school was around 12 hilly kilometeres away, a bit longer if one avoided the interstate. Biking there required riding on heavily congested roads with no shoulder and dealing with drivers completely incomprehending of cyclists and later crossing 8 lane roads and facing considerable danger the whole way. It could be done and I did it, but it was not particularly safe as there was no way to get there without dealing with rush hour traffic accessing the interstate.
I vaguely remember that there was a store within walking distance that sold automobile tires ...
There are some places in the US--probably Manhattan most obviously--where there's a culture that doesn't have the expectation that you have a car. But, while people living in most other cities can basically do a post-university lifestyle without one even in cities with relatively good public transit, a lot of their friends probably live outside the city, a lot of activities depend on cars, etc.
I do know an adult couple in SF who gave up their cars but I'd observe that they rely on Ubers and various rentals a lot. I don't think I know anyone in the Boston/Cambridge area who doesn't have a car. Of course, they exist but I don't know one.
Where is this? Our dream is to live in the city for independent access to amenities and frequently visit the woods. I have the economical means for this but the city is not the thing people say. As an example, Taipei had zero traffic deaths of children under 12 in the last 3 years. My San Francisco neighborhood alone has had 2 and Taipei has more kids.
Those were for accompanied children because San Franciscans adapt by helicoptering their kids to keep them from dying whereas I saw unaccompanied kids in Taipei everywhere and Taiwan is a basket case for fertility with a 0.7 TFR.
If we move out of SF it will be because the compensatory mechanisms required to keep my children alive here will overwhelm their freedom. But if there are cities of the Asian or European form here where children under 12 can independently move around then I’d love to know from someone who also has children in such environs. Often, online, people provide advice on this subject while being childless themselves and that’s not useful to me.
I've been priced out of these areas. I'd gladly move back in town if I could afford anything closer, but I can't. I make quite higher income than the median, so I'd be extremely surprised if this was NOT the rationale for many others.
There is a shortage of places for your kid to sleep at night though, as reflected in housing prices. It is especially bad for families because new apartments are often studios or one bedrooms.
In most US cities the kid friendly places are the suburbs not the urban centers. Those suburbs require a car to do anything, but all the kids live there, and so all the things kids do are out there too.
I’m sorry, but so few of these urban environments are affordable with good schools. I lived in Philadelphia and we chose to leave when our son was young because the schools generally aren’t good (most don’t even have libraries, but this is a whole different topic), the green space barely exists and isn’t maintained, and I’d never feel safe with my kid taking the transit.
NYC and Boston seem like the only east coast options and those are very expensive. What other options are there on the East Coast?
Philadelphia is absolutely an option, but it depends on the neighborhood. Eg if you live in the penn alexander, greenfield, or meredith catchments you have a great elementary/middle school and there are lot of kids of late elementary/early middle school age moving around the city independently.
I live in west philly and it is great: the park is excellent and lots of kids safely go there by themselves, the local school is very good. Transit (specifically the trolley) is good and safe.
Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!
It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person. I think urban people are just so desensitized to it its hard to understand how big a deal it is to people who have never experienced that.
There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids or the general lack of unlocked freely available clean bathrooms in businesses.
> It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person
Is it? I never struggled with this, been yelled at countless of times by crazy people on the street, both growing up in a very rural area and now living most of my adult life in a metropolitan area. I don't think it's much of a shock to most, we know there are mentally unwell people out there already.
> There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids
What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.
Hmm, in what way? How is homelessness related to public bathroom besides the fact that homeless people use public bathrooms? Not sure how that's related to the age of the person using the bathroom, but surely I'm missing something here.
So homeless people use bathrooms to do drugs and somehow that means there is a age limit? I'm sorry but this makes no sense, how are they at all related? Why would it matter what someone does before you use the bathroom, it's not like drugs stick around in the air and impact people entering the room afterwards...
The last time I was in a major city with my kids I went to a major, nice park. They had to use the bathroom. There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.
There is absolutely no reason to tolerate this in a civilized society, and it’s completely unheard of in the region I’m from, a major culture shock - along with the attitude that I should just get over it.
> There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.
What the hell? No offense, but was this in a slum somewhere or something? Not saying it doesn't happen in other places, but I think I've came across that once in my ~35 years, visiting countless of public bathrooms, cities and towns, admittedly mostly around in Europe, South America and Asia, but still...
I don't think that's a "city" thing, that might be very local to the specific city you visited, or the specific area.
This is funny, as it almost doesn’t pass Poe’s test.
I also find people are much angrier and misanthropic in the suburbs and exurbs as they spend their entire days in metal death cages that dehumanize everyone around them and turn every interaction into a confrontation.
Guess that misanthropy hypothesis gets another check in the anecdata column.
I've been in my city (Seattle) for 40 years. Homelessness has increased faster than population growth. Crime rates are way down. Like half what they used to be.
Mental health is down everywhere, nationwide, and we spend an absurd amount of money on our police.
I love it here, great city. It's not perfect, but I can't imagine living elsewhere.
If you actually look at US statistics, per capital crime rates are often higher in rural areas than urban one. Just, you know, more people in cities so bigger numbers.
It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.
Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.
Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.
No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
We didn’t need things to do back then. We would usually find something like playing wall ball against someone’s house. What we need is kids who respect other people’s things, neighbors to not be crotchety, wide open spaces and trails would be nice.
I know the discussion of urbanism vs suburbanism is a common topic on HN, but I don't think suburbs themselves are the root issue here.
When I was growing up in the suburb, there were kids outside all the time. Yes, some friends lived across town in another suburb, but we just biked there instead of walking.
Now when I visit that same suburb, there are no kids in sight. I still see adults of parenting age, so I assume there are still children in the neighborhood, but they're just indoors. The density of the town didn't change, but rather people's attitudes towards where kids can and can't be seem to be what changed. I also suspect the declining birthrate and having fewer kids is contributing to the problem too.
Surburbia gets a bad rap but you can have your burbs and something for kids to do. You need regular buses or trains, footpaths and parks with skateparks etc. My preteen kids get a bus up to (checks map...) 20km away.
It would be cool to live in a very dense Tokyo kind of place though. Tokyo is like a playground it is awesome!
Suburbs are fun as a kid if the parents are chill. Some of my best childhood memories have been roaming suburbia like a pack of dogs with no regard to anyones property lines. Places to sit? Kids don’t need that. We are content with some bushes by the drainage ditch with some standing water to throw rocks in. Yes, this happened in internet era too. If you had friends, those are way more fun than web surfing alone. We never even grew out of that stuff. Transitioned right out of games of tag in the woods right into smuggling beer into the woods.
My family grew up in communist Poland. In the kind of neighborhood with those ugly grey buildings.
Well, say what you want, but the communists knew how to build neighborhoods.
Between all buildings there was always a 30-50+ meters green space with benches, places for kids to play, walkways, etc.
I remember in the early 90s how lively and safe it was. People spent a lot of time of the day outside. Grandmas had their benches, looked the kids, play, adults would gather and have a drink, etc.
Today? It has all been swallowed by cars. As progress and money came the entire neighborhood has been swallowed by cars. Kids are confined in a single area. You rarely see people outside. People sit at home.
For reference, this is my old neighborhood, albeit the street view is a decade+ old (half the areas are from 2013 because since then entrances to cars have been gated and are only for private cars), but if you stretch the imagination and try to put people around and benches and kids playing areas you can get the sense:
Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.
Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.
Suburbs are still like that. However each one is different. The block bbq always only happened because someone living there arranged it. Not every suburb had that person and so not every one had a block bbq. Likewise, kids play together when they are of close enough age. My daughter has lots of kids to play with, but my son just a few years older is frustrated because there is nobody to play with - it is completely chance that a bunch of 9-11 year old girls live in my area and few boys.
As a GenX kid who was pretty much literally "raised on hose water and neglect", I find it incredibly hard to relate to modern parenting (disclaimer: I don't have children). I had SO much freedom to roam around and do stuff, and half the time my parents had no idea where I was. Once I got into bicycle riding, I'd jump on my bike and go miles and miles from home. And there were no ubiquitous cell phones back then, so if your parents need to find you quick it was pretty much "call all the other parents and popular hang out spots and ask "have you seen Phil?", and/or jump in the car and start visiting the spots they knew I frequented.
Was there a measure of danger to allowing a 12 year old that much freedom? Sure, probably. But to illustrate something that lines up perfectly with TFA... the worst thing that ever happened to me or any of my friends during this time, was when me and my then best friend were riding our bikes on the road between our homes, and he was struck by a car.
Were we ever worried about being kidnapped, or any of that crap? Hell no. That's not to say it couldn't have happened, but that wasn't on anybody's minds back then (I'm talking approx 1984 - 1990 or so).
That said, if I were a parent today, I think I'd be somewhat scared to give my kids the same amount of freedom I had. Which makes me a hypocrite I guess? Maybe I've bought into too much of the prevailing media narrative stuff myself.
That said, if I were a parent today, I think I'd be somewhat scared to give my kids the same amount of freedom I had.
Why? Stranger kidnappings are down since you were a kid. What media are you consuming and what is it saying? "if it bleeds, it leads" has long been an adage that the news talks more about violence than other things, so take the volume of violent stories with a grain of salt.
I think when you are a parent, you also understand that other people in the community are watching out for stuff like this, whether they have a stake specifically in your kids, or keeping your community a nice place to live. Other parents, the guy at the corner store, older siblings, the coach at the basketball court at the playground, the teacher who lives in the neighborhood, etc. It takes a village and if you aren't going to school or other community events, you can lose sight of the village that's out there.
Why? Stranger kidnappings are down since you were a kid. What media are you consuming and what is it saying? "if it bleeds, it leads" has long been an adage that the news talks more about violence than other things, so take the volume of violent stories with a grain of salt.
Sure, and of course I know all that. But here's the pernicious thing about it... even being aware of something like "it bleeds, it leads" doesn't automatically make you immune to some degree of subtle/unconscious influence. Active effort can combat that, and I'd like to think that if I did become a parent that I'd be able to make that effort and make the right decisions. But I have no doubt that there would be some nagging doubt in the back of my mind.
And to make it a little bit more real... I'm still an avid cyclist to this day, and I'm acutely aware of the dangers of riding bicycles on the road. Especially in the era of distracted drivers who are "texting and driving" and given how vehicles have gotten larger when many road have not necessarily gotten correspondingly wider. And proper bike lanes are still rare in many places. So yeah, if my kid said "Hey, I'm jumping on my bike and heading out to Bobby's house", I'd have some trepidation just about the possibility of them being hit by a car... no "stranger danger" / "chester the molester" stuff required.
That said, I'd be worried about an adult doing the same thing, and for the same reasons! I can even fully acknowledge that it may not be a rational thing to engage in road cycling these days, but I still do it myself, so... what can ya do?
I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community.
- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings.
- Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out
- Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well
- You did most of your shopping at the local shops, you knew the people that lived in the suburb. You ran into them picking up the newspaper or at the local video rental place.
- My mum always joked that I couldn't get away with anything because someone would see me and it would get back to her some how.
- There were some wierdos around sure. But the whole suburb was on the look out for the kids roaming around
Then there were other things like just that cars were smaller. A kid on a pushie would be as high or higher than a person driving around in small sedan. I don't think I would let my kid play on the same street I spent 90% of my time riding my bike or playing with the other kids in the street these days. They'd end up underneath a giant landcruiser or ford ranger/hilux in no time (and they are smaller that the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big)
I know some nordic countries are still a bit like this. But I'm talking about a car centric Sydney (Australia) suburb in the late 80s early 90s
I grew up in a suburb like yours. I'm raising my kids in a suburb that's by and large the same.
The biggest difference, imo, is the number of families.
I lived on a small street with a cul-de-sac. Maybe 35 houses or so. At least half had kids aged 0-15.
I now live on a street about the same size with my kids. There is one house with ~7-10 year olds, two houses with 3-5, one house with a couple of teens, one house with a baby.
Nothing else really matters, you can't expect kid communities to self generate at these densities.
This is my current experience, too. There are a lot of "empty nest" houses on my street. Wouldn't it figure that those people are all upset about the apartments that are being built in the neighborhood which are all being scooped up by young families ...
- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all.
This is a big factor. Although the gender side of things is kind of loaded, it used to be broadly the case that a two-parent household would often have one primary breadwinner and one home-maker. Nowadays, both parents need to make money which means that the 'home-making' needs to be done after both parents have finished work. So at 6pm, you're cooking, not hanging out at soccer practice. After that, you need to do the washing up, hang out the clothes, etc. There's just less time for leisure. On top of that, there's a lot of folks (probably some of them reading this comment) paid very well to keep folks indoors consuming, instead of outside meeting people.
Absolutely yes, but there's a bit more nuance than it seems. For example, 40 years ago, most families had one car, no computer, no mobile phones, no Netflix, DoorDash, etc. Houses are bigger, foreign holidays, expensive white goods, etc.
On the other hand, property costs have definitely increased massively. Folks are having kids later and less frequently, so there's a higher percentage of dual income couples looking for houses. Lenders are prepared to offer more to dual income couples, then house prices adjust, and suddenly, you need to have two incomes to buy a house. Then when it does come time to have children, you need the second income to pay for child care, and there's not much left over afterwards.
Higher household income doesn't necessarily have to mean higher property prices. It's a factor, but that's only one half of the demand/supply equation. Long term, the price of housing is driven by how much it costs to build more.
Good point. Building more housing is indeed part of a possible solution, although it’s hard to convince folks whose mortgages are baselined on inflated prices not to oppose building more.
Realistically, I don't think most people think that way. ("Don't build that apartment! The resulting increase in the local supply of housing will decrease my property value.") It's more that they don't want to live next to whatever is being built or don't want the character of the neighborhood they live in to change.
Which is somewhat understandable, but there's a balance here between the rights of existing residents vs the property rights of the owner of the property being developed (and future residents thereof). There are also regulatory burdens associated with any legal processes intended to give more rights to existing residents.
I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined.
When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was good and you could kick a football and ride bikes out there safely. When I visit now, there are so many cars that it's sometimes hard to find a park. I would guess the bulk of it is residents who don't want to shuffle cars in the driveway or have their garage full of other stuff rather than the cars.
I would not want my kids playing out there unsupervised.
I agree. I'm in Sydney and certainly the next phase of development going through my suburb is duplexes. Suddenly you've doubled the amount of cars on the same block, and the garage is 50/50 used for one of the cars or not.
Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there used to be.
In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:
1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on
2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group
3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)
Probably these too, but if I compare mu childhood (sixties) and society today, the experience kids got/have are in especially sharp contrast. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable.
It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting. If I look at my students (highschool and college level), most of them are absolutely terrified to interact with people very different than they themselves. A single difference is enough to keep distance, dump relationship at all. They are not used to it at all.
> the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big
Yeah, big trucks have started showing up in Norway too unfortunately, it's making it much harder to keep our environment of freedom and responsibility :(
Where I lived we knew a few neighbors but didn’t really interact every day or feel like they would watch out for other people’s kids.
That didn’t stop me from biking and exploring all over from age 6-7, which seems unthinkable now. I think it was mostly just more risk tolerance and less flashy warnings about danger. Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
Your suburb sounds nice but I guess Im just saying that level of community wasn’t necessary for kids to have freedom.
> Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
I’m convinced that’s more of the explanation than we realize. Adults in a lot of places move about almost entirely by car and often look down on other modes of transportation, to the extent that having your kid walk or bike while you have a car in the driveway seems wrong, like if you shopped at Whole Foods for yourself and fed your kids on gruel.
From the age of 5 in my town everyone would just let all us kids out to play and we'd just come home when it was getting dark. There were no cell phones. We didn't even have a landline until I was 12. I'd walk the mile or so each way to school. Some days I'd get treated to the bus fare but I usually just spent it on candy and walked home anyway :D
Another aspect for sure is that parents did not think as much before too. Kids were given much more freedom while parents should probably have kept an eye on them a little more. I knew of countless domestic accidents that would probably not happen nowadays. Sure that made kids experiment more and all but we ended up with more dead kids too.
The data doesn't necessarily bear that out. Yes, childhood accidents have declined, over a similar time period that childhood freedom has declined.
However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements. Cars are far safer now than in the 70s, so are kitchen appliances, electrical outlets, playground design, etc.
And at the same time, child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
You can lookup the studies on loss of 3rd spaces and the relation to mental health in adolescents (and adults, albeit to a lesser degree). This is pretty well-trod science
> However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements.
very hard to differentiate between product safety improvement and attitude change of parents, because both are co-factors. There is no good way to dissociate one from the other.
> child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.
My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design.
"Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well.
The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
The article cites the huge drop in children's mobility in England since the 1970s. Planning here pays more attention to making it safer to walk than it did in the 70s. The numbers show it is far safer. We still have that decline. Does that not show it has to be a cultural change in parenting?
It does seem like it. However, there's the game theory problem/positive feedback loop where each parent who defects and drives their kid makes it more dangerous for all the other kids who are still walking; iterate a few times and everybody has defected and is worse off than before.
Perhaps it was culture, but the above loop only needs cheaper cars and more income, both things present in the 70s as the effects of WWII wore off.
Its far safer to walk than it was in 70s despite more parents driving their kids around but we still have kids walking less. The feedback loop is possible, but its not what is happening.
I think its linked to a general feeling of safety. I live in a village where people feel they know each other etc. and lots of kids walk to school. Kids in cities are statistically as safe, but the atmosphere is different.
Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
Americans and their cars are simply insane. Most cars here in Europe are, well, cars. Still dangerous tons of fast moving metal bullets, but in the US cars are essentially designed to efficiently kill children. The hood of many cars is so high that you ensure to hit the kid's head in an accident. And people drive these huge tanks in the city where there is zero need for them and they are just impractical in every way because you compete for limited space.
> if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them.
That's not true. Obviously if you hit a child on the highway with 100km/h that child is gonna be dead. But when you're going 30 in a residential area and suddenly there is a child in front of you car, so you hit the break slowing down to 15km/h it makes a huge difference how your car is build.
> being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
Safety doesn't work by just teaching the weakest part to protect themselves while allowing everyone else to build more and more deadly machines. This car centricity that puts the blame on pedestrians for daring to walk in the sacred car reserved area that separates everything from each other is exactly the problem.
These huge trucks are dangerous for absolutely no reason and they also take away insane amounts of space for no reason. They make everyone unsafe, destroy the planet and make cities shittier.
They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods?
There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.
I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.
It's called living, which has become insanely safe compared to what it used to be only a generation or two ago.
Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.
Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.
Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.
That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.
Living isn't putting your childhood self or your kids into mortal danger on the regular. There's quite a gap between unsupervised kids doing reckless stuff and knowing putting your kids out into a world not built for adult pedestrians, much less child pedestrians.
My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.
I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships.
I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.
I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.
I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:
I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.
I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:
It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
> Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
> It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)
Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.
When I was in China I got nearly run over walking on green light because someone decided they were in a rush and run a red. It's apparently socially acceptable if you have enough money to afford the fines and you honk your horn while doing it. Unregulated crossings are another level of rolling the dice.
I don't think you need to show videos, but definitely discuss street safety with your children when they are young. Possibly several times at different ages.
When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.
I walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
About a block away from me is a private community pool that is highly used during the summer. Across from it and another block down is a park with some trails. There is a cross walk between them, but there is no lighting for it. Basically no one ever stops at the crosswalk when they see pedestrians waiting. It's a steady stream of cars just flying by at 35-40 mph. It's to the point where I don't even want to stop for them because I don't trust the other lane to stop and I don't want to "encourage" pedestrians to walk out because they see me stopped but the other side won't respond leading to an even more dangerous situation. I've even seen cars who stop get passed on double yellows because who would dare slow down a car driver trying to get somewhere. Crazy that two such popular community features are separated by thousands of pounds of steel flying by without a safe way for kids or even families to get across. To reach a protected crossing, you've got to walk about a mile in either direction to reach a stop light intersection.
Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car?
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...
You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
I would live for this to be the answer - it’s definitely helpful, but I know a number of people who have made eye contact with a driver who has then proceeded to drive directly into them. I’ve had near misses like this too. It’s hard to imagine until you’ve experienced it, but incredibly scary to see someone who is looking directly at you and still somehow not reacting.
Both scar(r)ing them AND telling them to make eye contact seems better to me. People don't appreciate low-likelihood or abstract risks. I bet children appreciate them even less than grown-ups. They've never witnessed someone being hit by a car but they've witnessed thousands of people NOT being hit by a car. How do you think they would really internalize the rule to make eye contact without any evidence? Hell, even I'm more likely to make eye contact with the driver after yesterday's spike in my heart rate, and I'm not 5 years old
It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers appear to not register blindingly obvious objects in their path.
Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.
In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...
Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.
I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.
No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks:
As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater).
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car.
Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)
If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.
I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier.
I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
Small nitpick, abs isn't there to reduce braking distance, it just prevent someone who panic brakes from losing the ability to steer. Technically it even increases minimum braking distance a bit, but if someone is locking their brakes up anyways they were already incapable of achieving that peak braking performance because you need to maintain about 10% wheel slip and most drivers are not practised race car drivers.
But what percentage of cars on the street had it. I understand it existed but not even disc brakes were nearly as ubiquitous as they are today, let alone electronics control of them.
The chart there is certainly worrying but it lacks a per 1000 column (but does include it in this quote, "The rates of pedestrian crash deaths per 100,000 people are highest for people ages 20 and over.").
Population is up but less people are walking (probably). Is it more dangerous to be a pedestrian now than it was at some point in the past? That chart doesn't have that information.
You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.
This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard.
And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
I don't believe people keep their kids 'safer' because they think the world has become more dangerous.
It's slightly taboo, but I think people protect their kids more now because they are more precious to the parents. The average number of children per mother has plunged in the last 200 years, and investment required in them per child to get them to child-bearing capability is much higher also. Child mortality has dropped like a stone, so any harm coming to children is much less tolerable.
Parents have so much invested in their children - and so few of them to "spare" - that they get far more protection than before.
I'm 55. Growing up in Florida in the 70's and 80's, I was outside for hours at a time. I would wander in the woods, following streams to their source and actually mapping the entire forest (I still have the map). I rode my bicycle all over town, by myself and with my equally adventurous friends, getting into all sorts of dangerous things. I went fishing by myself, literally dodging moccasins and alligators. I'd clean the fish with a very sharp knife when I got back. I still have scars all over my body reminding me of all the trouble I got into.
I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.
In Norway my children sometimes came home from primary school (ages five to twelve) with notes saying things like:
"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."
No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.
In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them. Seems pretty reasonable to require that to handle something that could kill another person so quickly, easily, and even by accident.
Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.
> In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them.
You can teach kids how to safely handle and use blades. This reduces -but does not prevent- accidents... and some kids will handle them carelessly despite the training. [0]
In other words, the fact that a kid on the trip was cut by his friend doesn't mean that there was no blade safety training prior to the trip.
[0] Source: In another life, I used to teach kids these sorts of safety courses.
I accidentally had a pocket knife in my backpack after a camping trip when I was a kid 20 years or so ago. Being a good/naive kid, I told the teacher. Luckily the teacher was cool and said just leave it alone and we never had this conversation. That could have ended very differently with no tolerance policies starting around then.
In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after school. Then we were old enough to keep our mouths shut haha.
When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.
Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.
Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.
Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these justifications mirror those "adult" rules..
An administration that shows the kids it's willing to place _its own status_ at risk might earn their loyalty.
(By contrast, the American edu system you speak of prioritises maximising its own safety hence the -ism suffix)
I'm hunting for real world examples of such. It seems that you might have encountered them!
When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.
When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.
Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!
That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.
I think you’re a great grandparent and gave my son the same thing at 10 plus encouraged my daughter to practice knife skills whenever she can with appropriately sized blades and powerful shears. I can’t imagine nerfing the world for kids that age and then expecting them to learn how to gauge risk appropriately a few years later when they start driving and taking on major decisions. I do understand keeping the knives out of school, but that seems like a simple oversight that should have no police involved unless actual danger occurred.
Here in Norway, my third grader gets to take a "scout knife" on school trips, we sometimes get pictures from the teacher of the kids sitting there sharpening sticks which I guess they use as swords or something because it's always too wet to barbecue.
That has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with "safety" being a magic word that gets way to many people to turn off their brains so the school is using as a pretext to enforce capricious rules and basically teach the kinds "do what the system says, however stupid, or else".
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.
I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.
I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
One of the most underrated things about living in a Western country compared to say India is that your 13 year old daughter can ride a bicycle to field hockey practice without ending up in a snuff movie.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.
I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.
Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.
Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.
Two daughters, both born in the 90's. Yes, I encouraged the same kind of freedom, but they weren't quite as adventurous as their dad. I thought they were a bit more adventurous than most of their friends, though.
A large part of the protectiveness of children is about the fertility trend. Parents with four children think about safety very differently than parents with probably ever only one. I saw this on my home street growing up. The girl next door was an only child who her parents hovered over relentlessly. When I was ten, with three brothers, and told mom I was going exploring, she made sure I had a quarter to phone home if my bike got a flat and told me to have fun.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
I can't help but think that thee's some sort of tragedy of the commons type thing going on here. Probably the wrong metaphor. But: it seems like a lot of what the article is getting at is that we can all intuitively agree that the population of children in society being more independent is good for a healthy society (or not just intuitively I suppose, he backs it up with mental health data). Any given parent can know this. But even if you know it, can you knowingly accept doing something that causes a 1% chance of losing your child in exchange for a 99% chance that they'll grow up better off? It seems most parents can't.
I call bullshit. The parents that WANT to let their kids roam free are stymied by "helpful neighbors", aka busybodies who simply will not let kids be alone.
I've seen it too many times: CPS or COPS (!!) called on children "unattended" outside -- even when it's really obvious their parents are watching through a window. Let's ALSO not gloss over the fact that CPS & police are used by neighbors to harass each other.
Let's say the simple truth: *US Culture is a literal abomination and its getting worse not better*
I think parents just have more time and energy to devote to an only child. Consequently they pour all of it into that child. Three kids? If they don't die or end up in prison, you've succeeded. (that last part is a joke, but the overall idea holds I think).
Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;)
But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.
Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.
But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...
I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.
I'm not sure if single child households have done this to parenting culture as much as neurotic culture/economic incentives have pushed single child households. When everyone is competing it makes sense to focus on one child as you don't want your child to be at a disadvantage vs those who can spend on tutors/extra curriculars/.... It's a problem in Italy and some eastern countries, a bad and anti-social evolution in my opinion but I doubt it's going to change.
People used to knock out children as a social security/insurance policy for old age, or to work the farm as they aged. The rise of the welfare state(s) in urban societies removed that need.
This feels like assigning intent where economics is more correct: your priority is your children, but if you have three then by necessity you didn't multiply your attention or time in proportion.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
people still think about bloodline when having kids or when caring about safety? I would think that would be the last thing to worry about with kids safety.
Well they tried to minimize the number of kids until they hit middle age and suddenly want to maximize the number of grandkids. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that ;)
Eh, I don't think that's it. I come from a two-child household, and our parents weren't particularly precious about our safety in the neighborhood in the 80s and 90s. I knew plenty of other two- and one-child families that were the same.
But, Japanese, Germans and Polis are not that overprotective and dont have many children. If it was about fertility, you would see countries with low fertility all move toward overprotectiveness.
But, that overprotectiveness is very much an American phenomenon - exported a little but not that much yet.
Definitely some truth to this. I'm the oldest of five. Most of my friends when I was little seemed to have older siblings and they could do what they liked while my parents hovered over me a bit more. By the time my youngest sibling was born that completely changed. My little brother was allowed out with us pretty much as soon as he could walk!
>Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s.... The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.
This is the step that otherwise smart people fail at.
"We were afraid of danger X so we did Y to prevent it and turns out it was a waste because not only did X not get worse, it got better! To heck with Y!"
And don't consider, maybe, things got better for that reason?
This is "only sick people take medicine" logic.
If you're tempted down this line of thinking you need to consider: If nothing had changed or they got worse, would that have been the expected results? What then would be the expected outcome?
Comparative analysis at a minimum, not just to other societies with different norms but attempting at least to find pockets that didn't change as much or as quickly, what happened there and in other sub populations where factors varied.
Otherwise you're just someone complaining how things used to be different, better in any way that fits a narrative that makes you feel comfortable or righteous or whatever.
so are means. Mean reported crime dropping in urban areas does not mean that things are adequately safe. having x% lower chance of getting mugged in the hood doesn’t mean that your kids can ride the bus alone.
Urban areas in the 90s , in projects and ghettos were basically war zones in terms of murder rates. They pushed the average murder & violent crime rates off the charts. Those have come down, but that doesn’t mean that the cities are now safe for 5 year olds to walk around alone.
Compare moderately sketchy parts of LA to Tokyo or Helsinki and tell me which one feels safe and which doesn’t . You can tell yourself “LA is so much better than the 90s” but you still won’t feel safe in the same way.
Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code.
My hope is that agentic analysis that does this tedious methodical chipping away, comparative cross referencing of seemingly disparate datasets, will help shift society the tiniest bit away from law & policy making via hot takes that make even the well intentioned fall on their face with poor reasoning and the more cynical wield ambiguity a cudgel of control by any emotion they can incite, usually not the good ones.
Let’s see how it goes. I don’t think safety is properly being measured. Much like you can’t measure a beautiful property or a delicious dish. It has to be experienced.
Moreover, AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.
> When I tell people these numbers, the usual response is some version of “the world is more dangerous now.” It certainly feels that way. The only problem is that all of the data we have shows it’s much safer than when you or I were wandering the streets. Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s. Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today.
Could it be possible that we're confusing cause and effect here?
You could defintiely argue abductions and crime have reduced because there are fewer opportunities (because we keep the kids safe). But that still doesn't mean you can conclude the world is MORE dangerous.
Well, you could conclude the world is now more dangerous for any kid let wander - even if fewer do, and even if the observed average risk to any kid is lower (given they are allowed wander a lot less).
I don't want to be on the 'overprotect kids' side of the argument, but I'm not sure the numbers argur cleanly in one direction or the other.
I also often think of selection bias whenever anyone says "I was allowed do a lot more and we were fine" in the context of child safeguarding; because it also sounds like a lot of kids were abused in the past, who don't speak up in that conversation.
I don't know. I worry I overprotect my kids, but I also am not sure how to price in small risks of massively negative events. I think that's the crux of it for parents - trying to weigh hard tradeoffs.
The issue is not only on the parents side. For years my daughter walked on their own to their primary school. But same school didn't allow kids to leave the school unless a parent/legal guardian or person allowed by them would show up. I was ready to sign a paper but they refused.
Regarding leaving the front yard, there are so many communities/streets with lots of interdictions like prohibition to play with a ball, this is ridiculous. Yes kids are noisy, I know I have a small football field next to my office where kids still hang out after school and play until way past sunset. They are still less noisy than traffic and they bring life to otherwise boring neighborhoods.
The article is confused. The opinion is, it's so much safer _now_ than it was in the 1970s, it makes no sense to restrict children's wanderings.
But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"
It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.
> But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
The article considers exactly that.
> Similarly, in an international study that looked at 7 to 15 year old children across 16 different countries they found that most english-speaking countries were in the lowest autonomy tier (12th- Ireland, 13th- Australia, 16th- South Africa). Americans weren’t surveyed, but countries like Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Denmark scored the highest on autonomy.
These countries are considered because they would generally be considered roughly as safe as one another (generally safer than America). These countries are the counterexample to your hypothesis: you can simultaneously have safe and independent children.
This article may not address this, but many articles of this type by Lenore Skazeny and others do address it. IIRC the findings:
- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now.
- safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ...
- car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.
It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.
Yes, I often wonder this too: It's said all the time that communities are much safer than they were, so why restrict kids? But that raises the clear possibility that those preventative measures might be why it's safer now.
Whether we've hit the right balance of freedom VS safety is still very much worth discussing. But it certainly feels possible that the preventative measures we take have led to safer outcomes.
Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; that the numbers on this in the United States are in the order of 100,000s per year (at least of missing/unaccounted I think). How can it be like this?
I just can't conceive it - how is this even a thing? What is the psychology of these adults doing this? How is the morality of this lacking? And how can there be so many people involved? Where is all this insanity coming from? How did it develop? How did it slip through the idea of safety in the neighborhood we used to have?
I don't understand how this is real, the scale is inconceivable (how can so many people be so totally demented) it's the craziest thing I cannot comprehend.
100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.
OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.
There will be many sick people in a nation of hundreds of millions.
Stigmatizing mental help drives a lot of problems underground. So does our awkward immigration system that keeps all kinds of migrants in precarious positions, even legal agricultural laborers.
Our president has the strongest personal ties to the most prolific sex trafficker in recent decades, second only to Gladwell. Yet he has suffered no legal consequences for his association, nor even serious investigation. Epstein himself seemed afraid to name him under oath, and yet privately called him "the dog that hasn't barked". This leader of the nation bragged to journalists of sexually assauting people, and over 20 victims say it's true. And roughly half of the voting public still checks the box with his name on it.
I'm in my sixties and reflect sometimes on how much freedom I had as a kid, and why things have changed so much in terms of risks parents are willing to accept.
One correlation with "safetyism" this article doesn't mention: the rise of the two income household (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-d... for the US; the UK appears to be similar.) In reality when we kids were running wild about the town, someone was watching us out their windows. If we got into (or more likely caused :) ) a problem, adults, usually a housewife, would show up quickly from somewhere. Even when we were off in the woods there was a sense that we could find a house where a grown-up would help us if needed (like if some kid's little brother ruptured his spleen on a dare, which actually happened.)
Nobody would call Child Protective Services - you knew it was little Billy who threw that rock that hit Jimmy, so-and-so's kid. You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it. Now I imagine police and lawyers would be involved. It seems we don't have the informal social connections any more, which were largely driven by someone just being around.
The above link BTW shows that "only" 50% of mom's were stay-at-home in the 1970's. In my specific time and place, many of the moms who did work outside the home had jobs that revolved around the school schedule (i.e., working at the school, or some work schedule that allowed them to be home when the kids were not in school.) The ones with full time jobs like my single mother, supporting three kids through full-time work, were a rarity back then. Maybe my brothers and I had excessive freedom because there simply wasn't anyone to watch over us - fortunately we all turned out more or less OK :)
I'm in my early forties and both my parents worked (as did all my neighborhood friend's parents) and we still spent a lot of time wandering around. Honestly I think people are really overthinking this. We spent a lot of time wandering around outside because we were bored. Now kids have an endless well of entertainment to choose from so staying at home is a much more appealing option. It's always tempting to romanticize your childhood but if I'm being honest, most of that time wandering around outside I was bored out of my skull. I was just marginally less bored than I would have been sitting at home.
Late 40's now. Both of my parents worked in the 80's-90's and I wandered up to 10 mi (16 km) away when I was 13. I was cycling up and down fire roads in the mountains. They never gave two shits how far I went so long that I wasn't in the house all the time but was back before dinner or sunset.
It's not necessary, but it might be necessary for the child to believe that's a possibility. It's like armies. The presence and the possibility do most of the work. My grandfather didn't beat his children, but e.g. spanks and being hit on the butt by a belt were permissible by society. He didn't do that AFAIK, but the children knew it was possible, and a single look from him sufficed to get them to stop misbehaving.
He's very loved by them, BTW. I didn't meet him, but they always talk with admiration of him.
It might be like brakes. Some people abuse the brakes for their own self-satisfaction to e.g. brake-check others, others brake hard every time they need to come to a stop (e.g. intersections) because they don't know otherwise, and then others make it seem like the brakes don't even exist as the car glides without disturbance to the point that you might find it normal to have a drink from a open cup throughout. It's always necessary to have the brakes, and always permissible to slam on them in case an emergency is happening, but they're ideally used sparingly and softly. They should ideally be made to seem like they don't exist, even though everyone knows they do.
Dude, you're breaking the analogy. Imagine an ICE car from the 90s. It's not about what technologies you're using. It's about the skill and intent with which you use the brake pedal (considering it the only form of braking).
Did we stop letting kids leave the front yard, or did they simply stop doing that themselves?
I grew up in the late 80s / early to mid 90s. We were allowed the roam around until dark. But that was also a more natural thing to do, as there weren't a whole lot of things to do inside (we had to ask very nicely if we could stay inside to play).
But as I got into my teens, indoor activities became more accessible. Everyone had a computer, the internet became a thing, you suddenly had more options than to just bike around or play. As I got into my young adult years, I noticed that team sports and things like that had dropped off significantly where I came from. Even in my small rural town we'd have 3-4 soccer teams in my age group...10 years later, they could barely string together a single team of teens to play for our town team. Many kids had simply lost interest, and were occupied with other things.
My context is that I was born in the late 90s: The main thing that lead to me prioritizing using the computer and playing with people online over in person was one of convenience. My parents did a really good job at making it a massive pain in the ass as a young teen to have a friend visit, or vice versa.
"Hey can I go visit X?"/"Can X come play?"
"what time? did you already call to ask if it was ok? What did their parents say? Who's going to drive you, their parents or me? how long? Our house is too messy for visitors."
Very quickly I got sick of having to play 20 questions. It was far easier to just add my friends on skype, spin up hamachi, and host minecraft servers for us to play together online. No exhausting negotiation sessions with my parents, no worry that the scheduling won't work out, I just get to play.
Definitely not a universal experience, in that regard. But I think its definitely a component of it. Why bother trying to fight for the permission to be independent out in the world, when you could be digitally independent far more easily?
In the 90s/2000s, my parents refused to even let me go into the front yard alone because I'd get "kidnapped". 24 hour news made lots of parents absolutely deranged and plenty of people really thought kidnappers flew around like hawks, waiting for under 18s to be outside of the sight of parents for one second so they could swoop down and carry them away.
I tried to go outside a few times. Learned the hard way that it wasn't allowed. Plus many other kids weren't allowed outside either.
I'm old enough to remember Atari when it was new. Playing a video game at home was quite something, no quarters required! But it also had somewhat limited replayability. Doesn't matter how good you are, eventually Defender is going to beat you.
The NES was a radical departure in how games were played and how good they were. You'd never spend all day in front of the Atari, but you could with the NES.
Add to that the steady increase in the availability and affordability of cable tv, then VCRs and video rentals, and now the TV is even more central to the ordinary person's life. Then came computers, the Internet, etc.
I think there is definitely something to kids just not being as interested in going outside. Why would they be? All their friends are in the magic box in their pocket. Outside is where you get sunburn and ticks that make you allergic to meat.
Similar experience here. Lots of time spent outside until around 14, when I got my first self-built computer. After that more time was spent inside chatting with friends and playing games. It was self-isolation.
Of course around the same time my older brother, and all our friends were doing the same. So it was just natural to spend less time outside or hanging out with friends in person
I blame apps and products like WhatsApp and Nextdoor. We've created these online means of connection (and conflict) which allows us to communicate without having to actually meet anyone in person.
Absent these forced meetings, parents barely know their neighbors and consequently, their kids barely know anyone even two doors down.
Modern establishments (businesses/governments) work by making people afraid. It is truly, the age of fear.
Let me quote M.I.B
>There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!
At some point we figured that there is good money to be made by making the people perpetually aware of how they or their loved one are going to die 24x7!
- Less families with kids the same age in suburban neighborhoods
- Less community between neighbors
- More on demand entertainment inside the house
Basically it's more that there is less to do outside and more to do inside. Parents just want their kids to busy themselves, and inside is easier than outside now.
A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.
But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.
Grew up surrounded by farms in rural Ontario. My parents did a great job of driving me to friends houses to socialize, but when there wasn't an organized play date I had two options: stay at home or go wander. I usually opted to stay at home and read or play video games but I did often just pick a direction and go walking. My parents made me take a hunting knife with me and only let me do this around the age of 12. While it is great to romanticize my wandering in the wilderness, it was typically pretty boring. As a result I played more video games as I got older.
My best friend lived in a sort of suburb (still very rural) but we'd spend all day biking around, meeting other kids, getting up to trouble, and making grand adventures to the store to buy mountain dew. This was all the way up until high school. After 14 I was too busy with school and sports in the academic year to do anything else, and in the summer I worked at a camp.
I talked to my mom about this recently and she said that 'kids can't just wander around anymore it's unsafe' and I'd argue that a child with a smart phone that constantly pings their location is a million times safer than whatever the hell we were doing.
I think the challenge is that parents are more anxious and video games and social media are way more convenient than anything outside the house, making a perfect storm. I don't remember leaving the house as much as a kid because there was that much to do outside, but rather we had exhausted all the activities at home. I feel like now you have unlimited options for entertainment at home so why bother, especially if your parents would rather you be at home anyways.
Interesting what factors people choose to explain it. I just read Life After Cars which makes a compelling case that a major factor was the car: people don’t feel safe letting their kids wander and prefer driving them everywhere… which makes people feel less safe letting kids wander.
As I'm sure many people on HN with kids do, I think very highly of my toddler's capabilities. I'm looking forward to the day I can stick him on a cross-town bus and have him fly solo (or at least with a peer/buddy). I'm hoping he can do it by age eight or nine. That was the same age my parents let me ride my bike several miles across town to a friend's house.
My biggest fear for my kid out in the world is not abduction, but injury or death by automobile.
This matches research done by Let Grow that claims that kids spend so much time on their smartphones because they are on a short leash and would prefer unstructured play time:
As a parent of a 9 year old I often find myself keeping them on a short leash and need to consciously give them the freedom they crave. Reading these articles help me be more aware and courageous.
As a 16-year-old, I want to say this: My friends and I do go out, but that sense of spontaneity we used to have is gone.Everything's pre-arranged in group chats now, those spontaneous get-togethers always excited me more, but they’re very rare now. And I think this is now universal in most places
> According to a 2017 study, approximately 38% of all children will be investigated by CPS by the time they are 18.
This seems outrageously high. The study says it is an "estimate". I'm willing to be their methods or assumption are seriously flawed. Would be curious if someone has looked into it.
I'm also curious what it really means to have CPS called on you. People talk about it like it's a foregone conclusion that they'll take your kids away. I just can't believe they would do so lightly. Now of course even having to interact with them must be extremely stressful.
I overall agree with this article. I was mostly raised in the US but spent time from ages 7-9 in Finland, where I took the metro to school alone, so I see myself reflected in this statistic:
> For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.
However, I feel the need to push back against this small addition to the main point:
> It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom.
The article is about parents and parenting-culture _restricting_ a child's freedom, especially during important developmental stages.
Trigger warnings in a college classroom are for adults to casually and quickly let other adults know when content might trigger their PTSD (not simply discomfort) so they can make an informed decision about attending a lecture or not, given that it simply might not be worth their time if they won't be able to listen and learn in a clear-minded state. There are no restrictions to anyone's ability to make these decisions, simply a bit more information being provided up front to allow one to do so.
It feels rare to find authors online who both see the danger of raising a generation of children who are never taught that they are allowed to take care of themselves, but who also recognize the value of being kind enough to warn people when you are going to discuss sensitive topics in a lecture, harming nobody in the process.
edit: In fact, thinking a bit more about it, one of the large points the author makes is that consuming either traditional or social media, which is biased towards showing us negative content related to crime, violence, tragedy, etc, will prime parents to over-protect their children. And in the same article, claims that being warned about content that might provoke an intense emotional reaction is an overstep.
Maybe if these parents were also warned that "hey, I know you're just trying to catch up to the news, but reading about a child abduction 2 states over is actually just going to spike your cortisol and make you a worse parent", it would help a generation of parents self-select the media they consume, and help them avoid this trend?
I was a free range kid in the 80s in Daytona Beach FL, i was a bit of a handful so i would literally get grounded to "outside the house" and told not to come in until the street lights where on. Ironically, Daytona Beach FL during that time was not the place for a free range kid. I remember bulletin boards full of "have you seen me" posters of missing kids and runaways at the beach arcades. As a teen I was moved to Abilene TX (culture shock to say the least) but same situation, I skated all over that little city by myself between ages 12-15. My kids today ( 16 and 14 year old boys ), are doing more and more outside but they certainly didn't has young children. My wife and I encouraged it but there was just no interest. We'd have to drag them to playgrounds and parks.
My 14 year old has gotten into mountain biking so he's on his bike a lot. It's funny how proud boys are of scrapes and bruises. My 16 year old has taken up skateboarding which warms my heart as an ex-skater so he's been doing that more and more. Plus, the 16 year old has a driver's license now so he can get to a skatepark or hang out with friends without having to coordinate with me or his mom very much.
We raised out kids in an urban setting, Dallas proper. If i had to do it over I would have raised them in a suburb. There whole setup in the northern suburbs of DFW are just better for families. The public schools are acceptable, the parks are better, no gunshots every night, no vagrants shooting up or shitting on the sidewalk, more family oriented businesses the list goes on.
For those who grew up in a time and place where you were able to wander without supervision, how far away were your friends? Follow up, how much traveling did you do on your own?
For me growing up in 2000's suburbia, the closest kids around my age that I knew of were about one mile and major road crossing away, but to get to a friend it could be a lot more. I think kids out in a group doesn't feel like a safety concern to most people even now, but if they have to travel 5+ miles solo just to meet up with one other person, that's where the issue might lie.
Born in 1990. In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, many of my friends lived in the same neighborhood. That's how we became friends in the first place: you'd see each other outside and gradually become friends.
By the time I was 14 or so, many of them had moved to other parts of the town, typically 2-3 miles away. By this age I was comfortable riding a bike or walking to visit them, though equally as often we'd ask our parents for a ride just to save ourselves time or because we were bringing heavier stuff with us.
I did have a few friends that were farther away, about 4+ miles, and I rarely if ever made it out that far on bike or foot. That was a mix of the distance and the type of roads I'd have to take or cross to get there.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends were within a 2 block radius, so about 300 yards. Tack on another block each year and that was the standard walking distance to a friend's house.
And of course in high school there was the standard minimum of one student death per year per school, usually related to driving. So teen deaths seemed more prevalent than younger ages.
I had some friends within half a mile or we'd meet at a park. But in high school, my friends were a few miles away and across a few highways. We needed to drive. Idk if this counts but my parents did let my older brother with a license take me places in his car.
I spent part of my life growing up in a major Asian city where communal ties are very strong, and spent a very significant fraction of my childhood outside of my house, just because there was so much to do - whether it was playing soccer, playing hide and seek, or taking the local bus/train with friends to shows, coffee shops or restaurants. All of this was before cell phones. If I got lost or needed help I'd ask a stranger for directions or navigation.
Nothing bad ever happened to me, and most people were actually quite kind and helpful to a 14 year old kid asking for help and directions. That sense of confidence in myself - that I could figure out how to pretty much do anything - has stuck with me in a way that a lot of my friends who grew up in sanitized suburban neighborhoods just don't have.
We would go into a forest and chop down trees... among other things. A sibling did get in trouble once, because it wasn't our forest, but it wasn't that big of a deal.
What happened is we learned the extend of sexual abuse of minors. Estimates in the early 90s was around 1%.
Research in the late nineties revealed the actual percentage was about 9% and 10%.*
Are we over-reacting maybe but maybe not.
* I vaguely recall that in an episode of PsychologyInSeattle, a guest that was doing research into food addiction back then realized that over 40% of their patients had experienced some sort of sexual abuse when they were a child, this led them to expand their research into that subject and discover the full extent of the issue. I think the research they did put the figure for the general population at 16% but take these numbers with a grain of salt it's been a while since I listened to it.
.. however, isn't that almost entirely from people known to the child? Authority figures, teachers, priests, step-parents? "Stranger danger" was in some ways a recoil from recognizing how bad the "system" was in secret, as it relied on abuse of trust.
I think that only reinforces the fear. The old thinking was the danger was the guy in the van snatching up children. Now we assess the danger may be the father of the kid next door.
I am also very dubious of the findings. The very low level of mobility in Sri Lanka contradicts what I see - especially relative to England. Most families do not have cars, for example. I suspect a bias to Anglophone affluent urban families.
I was wondering what the hell people here are talking about. Then I saw that my country (Finland) is number one on that list.
Indeed, my children (3 and 5 year old) run freely around the half hectare communal yard of my housing company (which includes 12 apartments). Almost all kids here go to school by themselves either by walking or by bike, starting at the age of seven. I also see kids around this age playing without adults in groups on streets and parks all the time.
City planning gets a lot of shit here, but apparently we did something correctly. It might also have something to do with cities here being generally safe. I'm probably just as concerned about my children's safety as parents in any country, but it just isn't that scary out there.
Reading through the comments here, it shows just how underrated small towns and rural communities are. I've hardly even seen anyone here mention them as an option. While they have their own downsides, they check most / all of the boxes that people are talking about here in terms of child-friendly environments.
I was there when entertainment became available. 1 or 2 kids dissapeared inside, watching or playing on the new PS1/N64. Slowly more and more got PCs. Playing online.
I won't criticise actual parents - these are their children, their decision, their responsibility and their either regrets or appreciation later. That is a trade-off and they will see in about 20 years whether it was worthwhile. Even not having children I know parenting is difficult (I just remember how hard it was for my parents). However I definitely appreciate that I was allowed to wander through my town (in central Europe) when I was a child/teenager. Moreover - I regret being so afraid of everything and not exploring more. Maybe it was a time to have that fear so that I could overcome it in later stages of life. Maybe.
To be a devil's advocate - maybe lower frequency of crimes against children is a result of that red tape? Or maybe not. I don't know.
I live in the SE US suburbs and a regular story on the news are fears over roaming packs of kids on e-bikes or e-motorcycles. Now, while the safety concerns of reckless riding are warranted, it also tells me that at least some of the kids are alright.
I live in a low density, large neighborhood where kids 8-17 are out roaming all the time, the older half heading to adjacent shops and other neighborhoods. I recognize and know who most are and their parents. The common trend I see is a purposeful limiting of screen time.
We have the same "problem" where I live in central coast CA. It's so rad to see kids ripping e-bikes all over town. Would I prefer the kid riding on the back seat isn't staring at her phone? Of course! But at least they are outside exploring! Fwiw most of the kids I see with this freedom are Mexican but that could be because I live closer to and work downtown, closer to lower income areas and not in the suburbs.
It's fascinating to me that we forbid our kids to wander and socialize outside believing it's "dangerous" while it's safe.
And instead we let them wander endlessly online where they can easily get abused...
children are pack animals ... as a kid the neighborhood was full of children and all of us had freedom to walk or when older ride our bikes anywhere always in a herd ... this is still the case in that tiny one red light village ... challenge is due to globalization most of the factories within driving distance have shuttered so working age adults have moved to where the jobs are leaving that village dominated by grandparents ... same freedom exists yet without the density of kids
The point of the article is that children have less independence now even though cities are statistically safer.
Yet a lot of the comments here suggest that kids would have more independence if cities were safer (particularly from cars).
IMHO, the answer is to improve safety by teaching children how to navigate dangers. Teach children how to cross the road; teach children to be aware of distracted drivers; teach children about situations to avoid (e.g., being in a blind spot).
Waiting for cities to be sanitized theme parks before letting kids out of the house is how we got into this mess.
Moved house earlier this year, from an apartment in a not so safe area to a house in a family area with no cars and more green.
The kiddos have been out so much more, and it's awesome to see how they find phones / screens less interesting when they can just go and play outside.
You can't control a society without keeping them afraid, so roll that tape of predators, kidnappers, gangs, and drug pushers!
What? A child doing something without adult supervision? Next thing you know they'll start thinking for themselves, asking uncomfortable questions, or looking for forbidden books in the library. Better call the cops and accuse them of vandalism or something.
> But the kindest thing I can do, the thing that will actually make my daughters resilient, is to let the small problems happen.
I live in an average California suburb. Average priced homes, relatively quiet street, not really any disorder or even appearance of disorder. When I let my kids play in the front yard - minding themselves - neighbors call the cops. I've written about this before, and it's not simply a matter of choosing to let your own kids have more freedom.
There are simply no kids outside anymore so if yours are, they stand out. Kids playing outside is now so outside the norm and neighbors on edge that they will call the police. The police will not ignore it, and you or your kids will have to contend with a police encounter. This has the effect of making parents perform a calculus every time their kids ask to play outside.
If there's a way to get neighbors to feel that kids playing in yards is normal, I'm all ears.
The notion that children are not allowed to play outside within a couple of blocks of their home seems like a mass delusion to me.
However, I'm GenX and having all my friends and I roam the neighborhood from the time we got out of school until our parents got home from work with no supervision seems perfectly normal.
"Come home when the street lights come on" and television PSAs asking "It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?" were the norm in the 70's.
I first became aware of how insane things could be when a single mother was arrested for allowing her child to play at the park a couple of blocks from their home while she was working.
Meh, even when you have the infrastructure for kids like in Germany. You still need to keep your eye on them. I've heard too many horror stories, including from personal friends of them just being dragged into a bush by a stranger and scarred for life. :/
It's a garbage world containing many garbage people and I think the "good old days" where you could just send your kid out in the morning and only see them at dinner never existed in the first place. It's just that predators can only prey on so many at once...
They're probably a lot safer in big numbers though, like if you had a group of 4 kids, each with cameras ready to film a potential attacker you could maybe give them ways in which they can protect themselves without necessarily needing adult supervision.
It's gonna be a hard problem to solve when I'll be a dad.
This is not a isolated phenomenon. Security measures for software products, for example, kept increasing making good old working software to be highly vulnerable in today's world. There are some islands that have un-contacted tribes. They can't survive if they move out of the island. In my childhood, there were some popular movie songs and stories which advised people to stay in villages, not to venture out to town-side and showed the scary stories of what happened to people who ventured out.
It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.
Facebook/Nextdoor has been a curse for kids. Parents gossip, moan and report kids constantly. Recently hysteria over e-bikes. But really it’s any trivial annoyance.
I think adults / elderly completely lack perspective and compassion for kids. Berating them for using iPads, berating them for playing outside.
In reality there aren’t that many kids out socializing, and not many avenues for them to be free and be themselves. They are constantly monitored directly via their phones and indirectly via the E-Stasi .
When I was a kid in the 80s/90s there were kids just everywhere: parks, streets, malls , playgrounds, school facilities. We had to sneak into abandoned yards to find our own space.
Now adults are whining about a few kids roaming around being kids.
I'm a Gen-Xer. I work with a lot of younger, fresh-out-of-college kids. I tell them about how it was as a kid in the 70's and 80s, but they generally reject it with disbelief. They think I'm lying when I tell them that my single mother would leave for work in the morning, and us kids would have absolutely zero supervision until she got home, usually around 7PM. Contacting her at work was basically impossible ("If you call me at work, someone better be dead!") In the summer months we roamed the streets with other neighborhood kids like a pack of wolves on BMX bikes - completely unsupervised.
I had a friend get shot (some dumb-ass kid was playing with his dad's gun in the woods). One of the neighborhood kids was a Boy Scout and knew enough to tourniquet his leg. Another kid knew how to drive his dad's pickup truck, so we threw him in the back and drove to the ER. No parents around (until they showed up at the ER).
There was also a time when some creepy older dude used to come down to the woods where we all hung out and rode our BMX bikes. He was probably in his mid-20s. It was totally stereotypical. He used to offer us beer and rides in his cool Trans Am. We all thought he was a creep so we stayed away. One of the kids told his dad, and shortly thereafter the dude stopped coming around. I assume some sort of "street justice" took place, but I'm not sure.
Kids would get in fist fights around lunchtime, then be best friends by dinnertime. We lit stuff on fire, built ramps and treehouses with wood we stole from the nearby construction site, and we drank water directly from random houses' garden hoses.
Anyway, all of this stuff (and A LOT more) happened all the time. All the neighborhood kids stuck together and looked out for one another, even if we didn't necessarily like one another. Parental involvement really wasn't an option. Almost all our parents worked. And the best part: it was awesome!
I'm sure kids think Don't Tell Mom the Baby Sitter's Dead is preposterous, but our parents frequently left 6+ kids unsupervised for a week or more at a time. The oldest at home was 13
This still happens in most European countries, kids go to school on their own, you see them all over the place on public transports, play with their friends somewhere back home and then are eventually back.
To me, this is one of the many issues with designing around motor vehicles and motornormativity (i.e. viewing personal cars as the only viable mode of transport).
It's been spoken about a lot of times with philosophies such as 15-minute cities and there has been progress in Europe with promoting active travel and banning some cars from city centres. However, there's a lot of entrenched money and power that push for ever increasing numbers of cars and that's why the discussion ends up polarised.
Personally, I like Cory Doctorow's phrasing of "geometry hates cars". When places are designed for cars, more room is required for attempting to ease congestion (induced demand makes this futile) and parking, but facilities can be moved further apart as people are using cars to get there. That leads to more cars being used, which leads to more congestion, which leads to more space being allocated, which leads to facilities being spaced further apart. Rinse and repeat until cars are the only mode of transport which can be used.
It doesn't even matter if you choose to parent your kids like this anymore... there's nowhere for them to go and no one else to hang out with these days. There's no more village.
There's also one metric that I've heard that gives a lot of parents pause: while being out and about in the world is generally safer than ever in the US from a social standpoint, it's more dangerous than ever to be a pedestrian.
I have concerns in this area myself but I find the attempt to create an opposing ideology "safetyism" and then attribute unrelated stuff like trigger warnings to that ideology to be unnecessarily reductive.
I call this "Shitarticlism" and it includes OP's article and also a bunch of clickbait I read. And Microsoft Learn.
If I work from home I see tons of unaccompanied kids going to school in the morning. I live in what is statistically the most crime ridden area in my city. My toddler has a drive for independence that will probably lead to him doing this himself in a few short years just need to impress road safety on him a bit more.
My oldest son of 10 years already cycles alone through our village. Hangs out with friends in nearby parks or soccer fields. Here in the Netherlands infrastructure is build around cyclists and pedestrians. I can't imagine him sitting home all the time. As soon as he wakes up in the weekend he leaves the house. During the week he cycles to school which is about 2 miles by bike.
No phone, no gps. It's how we live.
Very likely declining social trust has something to do with this phenomenon.
>But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
>"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
> This is a product of making everyone and everything reliant on cars.
That's not necessarily the whole story. While walkable villages and cities would be a huge improvement in many areas of society and community resilience, however kids in un-walkable US suburbia and urban sprawl have had bicycles, skateboards, skates, or some form of mobility device since at least the 1950's. There have been dedicated bike lanes in some areas since around 1985-1990 and many have bike or multi-use trails. While not as fast or efficient as cars, it was how we got around before 15 ½ when one could apply for a learner's permit. About age 9 or 10 was when we were let loose.
You're looking at it too shallow. Kids don't bike because everything is too far away, because they expect you to drive out of the suburbs. The roads feel less safe, because everyone is in a car. Everyone in cars are unanimous, no social control.
When you have infrastructure that doesn't rely on cars, you will have schools and stores and communities right in your "suburb".
"A 2008 study found that media exposure explains why Americans, in particular, often see the rest of the world as dangerous
Other research shows a link between the amount of crime reported on the news and the degree of fear people have over crime."
So we should go back to the 'good old days' and not report the crime? I guess ignorance is bliss. If there is more crime being reported in an area, that's a signal that it's more dangerous, and you should take precautions.
"Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today."
It's the same with plane crashes. The problem is that it only has to happen one time for total devastation.
There are now grooming gangs in countries like the UK to worry about (which wasn't the case in the 80s and 90s). The Internet has made it much easier for predators to organize, share information, and get to your kids.
When I was 11, I was around people doing drugs, smoking, drinking, and lighting illegal fireworks off (nearly blew my fingers off a few times), all without my parents knowing.
The dangers were always there. Society just chose to ignore them in the those days.
I have seen the opposite argument, such as kids having too much autonomy in so far as social media usage .Or just go on Instagram and you will see tons of examples of young adults taking steroids and other stuff. I'm sure the parents are aware of this, but meh.
Is likely due to how humans react to issues. They fix it or make a big deal to over fix it when someone gets hurt. The baseline risk shifts and people will get scared looking back doing a mental calculation: lower risk better then higher risk.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. You can fall or be hit by a car/tree branch anywhere. They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes.
A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar.
> be hit by a car
Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people.
> They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
They're annoying enough that they do, in practice if not in theory. To say nothing of the fact that drivers pass you closer and more dangerously if you're wearing a helmet.
> helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
It's the most common sports related head injury by a wide margin and helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1] As a public health policy it makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally I've flown over my handlebars and hit my helmet without serious injury, and I'm sure I would have been in much worse shape otherwise.
On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measures. If you have a study suggesting that helmets would significantly help I'd be curious to see it.
I'm sorry for your loss, but your school is very much an outlier; public policy should look at the overall rates, and statistically it is rare. Particularly if we're talking about an everyday school commute along surface roads (the risk profile for mountain biking or BMX-style stunt riding is quite different, and wearing helmets for those activities makes a lot of sense).
Consider the risk compensation theory where people take bigger risks when they feel safer. Not sure how true it is with regards to bike helmets, though. I saw there are a few studies but don't have the time to read them.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE
Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.
> not overactive safetyism.
Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.
I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.
And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.
To be fair, good noise cancelling headphones nowadays have "transparent" or "ambient aware" modes that actually electronically pipe the outside noise in.
(Whether the cyclists in question are actually using that feature, who knows?)
People use helmets because they are forced to. Not because they actually believe they are doing something dangerous while casually biking to work. People who got convinced casual biking is dangerous just drive while listening to audio book.
No idea about bicycle, but for motorcycles, integrated helmet headphones are a thing for long time. It maybe helps that a typical motorcycle helmet is quite noise-cancelling by itself, so one relies mostly on moving faster than traffic and if that fails, on mirrors and not on sound.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
> You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle [when wearing a bicycle helmet], so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
With surgical assistance, I can heal from leaving half of my face on an obstacle. Healing from leaving a big chunk of my brain on an obstacle [0] is -at best- quite a bit more involved.
> In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.
So basically the main change affected already the childhood of, what? 85% of the average HN reader, at least if they are from England.
What are we talking about then?
Is not rocket science, if everyone has enough, then everyone has something to contribute, then a nicer environment flourishes. Why do you think the finland example is there. Inequality create problems
I remember being young when "kids don't play in the yard anymore, they just play on their phone/consoles/computer" started to be a big talking point. Even then I recognized that the reason I was on the computer so much was, at least in part, because it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house, or to convince my parents to let a friend come over.
And I consider myself relatively lucky in that part of the US where I live, despite being in a relatively rural region, is remarkably walkable. As opposed to most places in the US, which are effectively micro islands when it comes to getting anywhere on foot.
Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense. That traditional areas for young adults to just "hang" (cafe, bowling alley, arcade) have increasingly priced them out. That a teenager hanging out on their own is often suspected to be "up to something"
In a time before the cell phone, we apparently let kids wander unsupervised more than we do in an era where they can get a hold of their parents at almost any time? It's ludicrous.
My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period.
Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.
In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.
I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.
Mine was also free range in an older neighborhood/suburb with a highway on two sides and river on the other two. The only rule I had was not to cross the highway, but even that rule was eventually relaxed as there were better fishing ponds on the other side of the highway and I just had to tell parents/be careful. I was also a latchkey kid (along with all my friends) so I'd get home from school, drop my books and turn right around and head to my friend's houses.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
Perhaps those are your greatest memories because that is what you were doing as a child. Would your greatest memories of you grow up now be playing Minecraft online?
I don’t really know the answer. I grew up in the early 2000s with a mix of video games and ‘outside with friends on the woods’ time. I have many great memories of playing games, but by far my best are always the ones, in person, out in the woods. Even my best gaming memories were at lan parties. Being in-person with friends is just better.
>Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted
When the statistics are vastly in one's favor, it isn't luck.
I keep telling my wife our son is literally more likely to be hit by lightning than to be snatched by some rando, but somehow that is hard to understand.
Not many movies are made on people getting hit by lightning. Perception beats stats and facts.
yes, feels and vibes beat rationality and science.
Is it any surprise the US is backsliding?
Can't tell if it's backsliding or reverting to the mean :(
probably the same thing, but mine has moral judgment.
I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property.
Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed and the child snatchers are too underfunded / too far of a drive away for them to bother us over a sad faced Karen calling.
The other option that's really going to piss some people off when I say, but matches my reality, is living in a few ghetto neighborhoods when I was broke there were literally so many single moms that the child snatchers could not possibly punish all of them and the kids roamed because momma was at work and they were protected from the Karens/CPS by having critical mass.
When my first-born was six I walked around with her to all of the neighbor's houses and we introduced ourselves. We informed them that my daughter would likely be moving around the neighborhood independently, perhaps on occasion with her younger brother. I gave them my phone number and told them to call any time.
In addition to having no problems with Karens or the CPS we were able to identify the other houses that had kids in them and a band of independent neighborhood kids playing with and looking out for eachother quickly became the norm in our community.
Poor people often get a pass for various reasons. Many/most of those reasons may be bad or stupid ones, but I see it as a silver lining. There is often much more of a sense of community than in other places as well.
Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.
>Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted,
You fell for the trap that caused this whole issue, you were about as likely to get abducted as struck by lightning.
Good point about the proliferation of the absurd “crime” of loitering, which apparently just means “existing somewhere without spending money.” I remember being a teen in the 80s and what we did every day would be considered “loitering” today. There’s not much else for kids to do outside the home besides loiter.
> existing somewhere without spending money
Existing without spending money works a lot better when you perceive and comply with social norms. At a mall, you're unlikely to meet loitering enforcement for reading a book in the food court all afternoon while sipping a drink you brought from home. You can meeting your local walking club there too and walk for miles chatting without purchasing anything -- if you're not bowling over the shoppers.
But if you camp out in the entrance of the mall and roughhouse with your highschool buddies, your antisocial behavior will drive away customers. Perhaps you can't perceive this, or perhaps you do perceive it but don't care -- either way, once you're making shoppers uncomfortable, you're a strict liability.
This doesn't mean you can't be kicked out for other reasons. But you get a lot farther if you play to your audience.
"Antisocial behavior" You are describing teens being social. You dont get to define what antisocial means.
Well, you do to some extent, and having people define what antisocial is for them is how teens learn to be prosocial (inshallah).
Not a Karen -- it's about striking a balance.
So why were loitering laws introduced? I doubt it was purely a sadistic effort to ruin the lives of kids.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
Modern loitering laws in small-town America, post-Civil-War, were typically originally intended to enslave the entire population of black men remaining in town, or otherwise drive them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA It took most of a century for the economy to really convert everything over to an hourly-pay model. This is not the only reason, but it is the dominant, proximate one that enshrined the practice.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
For a take on the origins of the Anglo cultural tradition of persecuting the poor in general, this goes a lot further back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs
My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1].
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
[1] https://eji.org/news/visual-history-loitering-laws/
Have an unmarked "free candy" type van park across your street from your house day in and day out, moving with just enough regularity to avoid parking too long, and you might begin to understand why "look suspicious but haven't committed any crime" starts to weird people out.
There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.
Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains).
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
Loitering laws have existed since english commonlaw, but in the modern era were adapted to penalize homelessness, unemployment, etc...
A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.
"Buy something or leave" has become a kind of sinister, unwritten, yet overarching principle organizing and governing everyone's lives. Participation in the work-earn-spend economy has become less and less optional with each passing day.
I'm not sure that's actually true in a typical park. It may very well be true for a bunch of noisy kids in a shopping mall which exists and is paid for for the purpose of people, well, shopping.
have you looked at satellite maps of the US? there are plenty of places that are concrete jungles with little green space.
Its to drive homeless people away, shamefully enough
I would be surprised if loitering laws are even enforceable today. I can see trespassing if you're asked to leave and don't, but getting arrested for being in one place too long? Especially a public place like a park? I'd donate to that gofundme. Kids could learn something from first amendment auditors and just start filming themselves in public.
Very few children know enough and have the disposition to productively stand up to a cop (or any other seemingly legitimate authority) and try to defend their rights. Legally, whether they have the same rights as adults is also questionable.
Parks have operating hours. Cities have noise ordinances, etc., to give Cops options for booking who they want for whatever they want. Cops don't necessarily care what the laws are, anyway. I've taken a ride in paddy wagons to a station before for hanging out in a playground because a neighbor said we were causing trouble. We were just talking. No, we weren't processed, but we were left to figure out our own way back home. This was in the 90s. The same stuff happens today though.
The small rural Canadian town I grew up in (~2000 people) during the 1990s had a real estate agent that would call the cops if he saw any teenagers out after 9pm. He would literally lie to them, saying we were causing trouble if we were just walking to the convenience store. He was trying to keep the town "desirable" or something. This man fought anything that would keep teenagers occupied. Skate parks, benches, etc. My group would lay in the park during the dog days of summer just chatting and passing around a jug of orange juice, which he would tell the cops was spiked with vodka (which we did do, but never in the park).
Of course, we (as in the teens in general) probably fed into his paranoia - let's just say harassing the neighbourhood teenagers rarely ends well...
Compare how things were back then to now and this RE agent probably stroked out from the mannerisms of the recent newcomers
I agree that people don't give this explanation enough credit.
I was online in that age group by the late 80s. Just as in your story, that started me down a path of not going outside as much, even though the other kids would be outside doing outside things. Why would I go out and play basketball or something else I didn't like when I could instead be online talking to people with shared interests?
Me too, but I wasn't on AOL or anything long-distance, instead I called local chat systems / BBSes. And because they were local we met up physically as a group at least weekly (almost daily in the summertime).
The summer I was 16 I spent more time away from the computer, hanging out with other teenagers I met on the computer, than I would have otherwise.
> Have online worlds become the last free places for children?
> [...]This evidence tells us something important about human development: children want to explore together and build independent peer cultures that are partially distinct from the ways of adults. Yet since the early 1970s, many Western countries have increasingly limited the social and physical independence of children.
> In physical spaces, we restrict the movement of children and refuse to let them play and explore without us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t look for ways to escape.
> In the past two decades, children have found a new place to roam: the endless jungle of the internet.
https://psyche.co/ideas/have-online-worlds-become-the-last-f...
> it was so much easier to hang out with my friends online than it was to coordinate with my parents to try and get travel to their house
The norm in the 70's was for younger kids to have multiple groups of friends, at least until they were old enough to ride their bike across town.
When you spent time with larger groups of kids, like at school, you could make friends based on shared interests.
After school, your friend group was based on proximity.
I feel with larger school sizes and online capabilities we've lost the friendship of necessity - where you'd be friends with the kids on the block "because you had to" and there wasn't really any other option.
They might not be amazing friends, or life-long ones, but they were friends.
> Then lets also add on how loitering is treated as such a great offense.
The Wikipedia page on Loitering [1] is wild. A surprisingly large number of places seem to have criminalised "just existing somewhere".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering
You hit on what I consider a paradox of parenting today: Kids have access to instant communication with their parents/guardians, yet they can't be left on their own in public because it's too dangerous. That never made sense to me. I've tried to convince parents that kids are actually safer today (primarily because of smart phones, but also because of Ring cameras on every damn house) than us Gen-Xers were, but no one buys it. I hear the same excuses: It's too risky these days. There's so many creeps out there. Have you seen the registered offender websites? And that's just the creeps we know about!
Came here to say what you already said: the built environment accounts for a great deal of this. It's simply not possible in a great many parts of Middle America to walk or bike over to a friend's house, and to the extent any social fabric exists, it is built entirely atop parents' willingness to drive you over for coordinated and time-boxed play-dates.
I have been arguing for almost my entire life, as a European immigrant, that built environment and automobile sprawl shapes relationships and cohesion. I was constantly dismissed and told that these are superficial differences, that people are just as lonely in dense, transportation-rich urban jungles, and that motivated people in the right cultural context can defeat any environmental obstacles to friendship and connection.
I hope the tide on that is starting to turn. Built environment isn't everything, but it's a lot.
Not to mention how parents might get in actual legal trouble now for not acting like this
What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places to sit everywhere, things to see, other people walking too. He could even go to the beach and be fine, as there's lifeguards. By the second week of the summer, you'd see group of new friends hanging out with no parents, just going back home for meals and sleep.
Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.
> But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs.
That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities.
And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.
But then more people can't move into the city, even if they want to, because the units in urban environments are already occupied and converting more land to urban developments is restricted by law. So the existing units get bid up until the price difference is high enough to deter people from living in the city and everyone else has to live in suburbs or rural areas whether they want to or not.
> And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.
The existing "city" was the suburb of the past:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
* https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middl...
The problem isn't that the city is full. It's that suburbs are made for cars.
You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.
I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.
You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.
Isn't the issue that there are zoning laws preventing the conversion of the suburbs into more city?
In the extremes I fear this would lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent. At some point, a lot of people want a multi-generational space to stick around in for a long time (where the sun isn't blotted by tall buildings). Tearing up suburbs for skyscrapers every generation can't possibly be "the answer..."
This take makes no sense, if you take into account that 100 families could live in the space of one single detached home. High density building isn't suddenly going to take over suburbs like that.
That’s a huge exaggeration. Tall buildings require a much greater footprint than a single detached home.
Knock down three adjacent homes and you can get maybe 6-8 levels, which would be no more than 40 families.
Have you been to any place other than the US? The size of a single detached home, including backyard, front lawn and sides can perfectly fit an entire 5-8 story building of two 80m2 apartment per floor, if not more. If you live in a well designed city with public transport, you don't need to waste surface area on a parking garage.
The key is always setbacks - if you have to have ten feet on each side of every building, you can only get "so dense" without going for apartments that consume an entire block.
The problem is introducing the zero-setback designs organically - as the people there likely receive little to no benefit, and the people who do receive the benefit aren't there now.
E.g., a house could easily be fit between mine and the neighbors, but we wouldn't really benefit from the density improvements, and the family that would move into the "missing middle" doesn't currently exist here.
I'd love if our lot was zero setback, as I'd build an addition right up to the property line instead of having to try to find another lot/house in the area we want.
Average density in an urban core (North America) is like 90 residents per acre, vs like 5 res/acre in suburbs. Not a very big exaggeration
Population is generally stable or declining out side of the developing world.
Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.
It's declining nearly everywhere except for some portions of Africa (where the trend is also towards lower fertility. I'm not aware of anywhere that is both "stable" (~2.1) and has a flat trend; that is to say that it isn't just momentarily passing through stability on it's way to declining population.
> lead to Dredd-like Mega Cities just taking over the entire continent
This is impossible. Look at even the densest cities today such as Hong Kong, with many 50-storey buildings packed closely. HK as a whole has maybe 25% land area allocated for buildings and the rest is forest and green space.
Or consider Tokyo - sure, it is a big sprawling metropolis and pretty much an uninterrupted patch of concrete. But the urban area does eventually end, and much of the land area of Japan is mountains, forests, farms, etc.
There are many types of houses in between suburbs and skyscrapers. This is "missing middle" housing. Duplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings, etc. Look at Old Town Alexandria, VA on Google Street View, for example.
That cannot happen. Cities need a lot of "empty" space around them for farms. Well I suppose everyone could move to Spain (picking a random country) and leave the rest of the world to robotic farms. However we can't expand to cover even all of Spain unless everyone is living in a mega suburb with everyone having their own single story mansion.
(others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)
In what extremes? "Extrapolate this forward through five hundred years of exponential population growth that is not in evidence"?
Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute. Those dynamics have doubtless changed to some degree. But, if I had to commute daily to the nearest large city, I'd seriously consider living there. But I don't have to so I live rurally/exurban or whatever you want to call it.
For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules.
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
I guess.
I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much.
I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree.
Of course, different people have different preferences.
Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.
Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.
> Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute.
Commute time has been 30 minutes for a large portion of human history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.
I don't really disagree. One hour each way starts to seem like a lot. 30 minutes isn't walking next door or downstairs but seems pretty doable in general. Even within a large city with decent public transit, it's not hard to get up to close to a half-hour commute to get into an office. Most people who don't work from home don't live a 5 minute walk from their workplace.
Historically people had to work on a farm! The vast majority of the historical population lived close enough to their fields to walk to it every day. Sure Rome had a million people 2000 years ago, but that was only possible because many many millions of people (often slaves and thus not seen much in history) who didn't live in Rome and produced a surplus of food.
> to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else
Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.
i live in the midwest and the core of the city is dirt cheap. people don't want to live here because of the crime and vagrancy. it's a foul atmosphere.
i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to.
the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ...
it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target.
i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.
i, too, live in the midwest. the core of the city is cheaper than the suburbs.
i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
i agree it's overestimated, and it's not "as bad" as many believe it to be. but it is worse.
i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.
am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.
there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.
The "yearly pizza shooting" is as absurd to some people as "the town rapist" would be to others.
There doesn't seem to be anything mandatory about cities having proportionally more crime.
There’s definitely some of that. Relatively in most places in the US, it’s safer now than it has been since the 60s.
But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.
Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.
So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
Surely that’s just because people go to drink in the city center? 1 out of 1000 violent drunks sounds like a pretty reasonable ratio.
I don't think you have an accurate and full understanding of the issues plaguing some areas of American city centers. I can't even recall the last time I saw a person who was drunk in public causing a serious issue after leaving a downtown bar. It just doesn't happen. Besides, you don't need to go to the city center to get drunk, we sell full proof booze in the supermarkets here.
People go to the city center to buy their fentanyl and their P-2P supermeth, shoot up, and zombify the city streets. I see that on a daily basis. If you are not familiar with this phenomenon, go to YouTube and search for Kensington, Philadelphia. Most American cities have similar areas, For example Pike/Pine in Seattle, Tenderloin in SFO, and Skid Row in LA, but the scope of the situation is of a different magnitude in Philly.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kensington+phil...
I've seen hood rats specifically camp out near the bar to find marks to steal from, though. In that sense the bar can congregate crime.
If that was the case, you wouldn’t expect property crime like motor vehicle theft to follow a similar trend, but it does. A very large chunk of the crime is gang related, and there is no gang violence in the suburb I live in.
Bars are also disbursed all over not just in the city center. We have bars here, and they produce essentially zero crime.
But even if all of the crime was alcohol related, all of the crime isn’t occurring inside bars.
People aren't statistical machine, they make judgements based on their life experiences. I've lived in at least half a dozen inner Midwest cities in the ghetto poor cores and I would describe the experience as basically "stay strapped or get clapped hellscape." People trying to rob me at gunpoint (yes happened), stealing my bikes and whatever they can find outside, testing you and sizing you up to see if you're a good mark, etc etc. On one occasion I got a flat tire and the gats immediately came out once they saw my white face; I guess they respected the fact I decided to fight back with my hands because for whatever reason they decided not to shoot me.
So yeah maybe the statistics say something else (I wonder how many people like me just don't report crime -- the police do nothing in such places) but I'm not eager to relive that experience.
That said your immediate neighbors in these areas can be incredibly nice and protective of each other as a survival mechanism, because everyone else is quite literally out to get you.
This story just doesn't add up.
I like to put it this way:
The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets.
I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.
Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there.
I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about.
Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.
> I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." […] This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.
I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate.
Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
> Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
Over time, real estate just is inflation - if it's more than inflation it eventually ends up infinitely expensive and unaffordable, if it's less than inflation it leads to cheap-as-free.
Arguably the second is more desirable from a human standpoint - but the first is where financialization leads us.
In the US the city is not a safe place for kids. Great for the 21-30 year old crowd (and older folks that didn't "grow up") since there are many great bars and parties, but there are no kid friendly places. I know several people out here in the suburbs who loved city living until they had kids. One kid under 5 isn't too bad, but as soon as the kid is school age you look at how bad the schools are and you get out thus ensuring nobody will try to fix the problem.
A large problem in discourse like this is relative terms. Specifically what people consider to be "city" or "urban" vs "suburban" vs "rural".
I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.
And part of the problem in the US is that the US census has a very binary definition: urban and rural. Myself and two neighbors live on about 100 acres (not counting adjacent conservation land). We're considered urban. because we're about an hour drive of a fairly large city.
But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.
That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids. (Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.
No kid friendly places? Like parks, museums, their school (I admit public school quality can vary enormously in urban areas in the US), bakeries, candy stores, etc all within a 20 minute walk for me? If all one sees in urban areas is bars and parties, maybe it is the people that leave that don't grow up.
My daughter has slept under the shark tank at the aquarium as well as with the mummies at the local cultural museum. The local university runs summer camps for everything from engineering to gymnastics. The Museums run programs, too. Her grade school has a thriving parent community because the parents stand together when school is let out instead of forming a long line of cars, I've made new friends myself this way (the number one complaint I get from parents that do move out is that they know no other parents in their kid's school). Because I walk everywhere, I don't ever deal with traffic.
I'm not saying it's perfect, either. Urban areas vary a LOT, including within any single city and within the country. My child's been directly exposed to poverty, homelessness and mental health issues, etc. I'm comfortable enough to explain the complexities of this to her, but some people would rather not.
This is not to criticize people who want to live in a rural or suburban life. I grew up in a small town and got myself out of there very quickly, mostly because I felt isolated and trapped growing up. But cities are very much places you can live in, kids and all.
Which city? IMO having public transit and good sidewalks would be amazing for older kids in the 12 to 16 range. I grew up in a small suburb, connected to the world only by a busy 40 mph street without sidewalks. I was basically trapped at home unless I could convince my parents to take me somewhere until my friends started getting cars when I was 16 or 17.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
There are a lot less kids as a % of the population. My mom growing up in the baby boom had to stand in the aisle of her school bus (something safety doesn't allow anymore), but if she got on the bus just 4 blocks sooner she could have got an empty seat! These massive numbers of kids don't exist and so there isn't much to play with.
My kids are happy that the corn fields around our how turned into a subdivision just after we moved in because now there are kids to play with. However only about 1 in 10 houses have a kid (some have grandkids over on weekends - I didn't count that, and others were the kids live with the other parent half the time get counted half).
My suburban neighborhood has ~100 houses, and only two of them (besides mine) have children in them. Lots of grandparents, though, who briefly have children over around holidays. The landscape is dotted with parks but they're all pretty much always empty, except for the occasional adult exercising or walking their dogs. Our local school district is spread out over a huge swath of suburban land, likely because there are just not enough kids.
It's probably different in the city, where presumably more people are parent-aged. Almost all homeowners I know out by me are over 45 and their children are adults by now.
Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring. This was supercharged in the 70s. That’s no longer the case. People have endless, on demand entertainment inside now.
This. I do remeber as a kid in the 90s, who was among the first who got a confuser at home - at age 5..6 I remember actually being pulled to my apartment, to play all those DOS games I had (didn't have game console, but a pentium PC, with windows 95/DOS). At some moment, I remember even being thrilled to spend my time playing jazz jack rabbit or something of sorts, instead of going downstairs to my apartment block yard (was living in ex-ussr space) which at the time was full of kids playing. It is not anymore. This memory makes me sad now, what a waste of childhood. At least, I got to experience, playing with sticks and stones with other kids, and navigating DOS file system as a 6 year old.
I had similar experiences (post-communist country), but I was a bit older, got my first computer at age of 9 (Atari 65XE, replaced with C64 2 years later).
So I got a bit of childhood before receiving those (pretty scary stuff if I think about it - exploring holes that looked like trenches, that were dig up by workers to put water pipes in them, or exploring an old, ruined house) - living in a typical communist-era block of flats community.
But a year or so after receiving computer I started spending less and less time outside and more on computers, basically making me socially isolated except my two closest colleagues. Nowadays my two daughters are more social than I am, but I like computers too much.
I think back of my childhood and playing the usual games like hide and seek with at least 10-12 other kids around my building and occasionally I'll slip into the "kids these days" thoughts. And then I realize I had something no kid these days has: massive amounts of boredom.
There was nothing in the house to make me want to stay in. Nothing like a console or PC, best thing were books on days when going out would be deadly (exceptionally hot or cold). I was going out by necessity, initially knowing and as I grew up hoping that some other kids will be doing the same. And from that large pool of "random" kids I'd get very close to a few, become friends and then have some more on-demand negotiated fun instead of opportunistic. This lead us on hundreds of adventures anywhere we could physically go for it.
Before we even consider how walkable or dense a city is, how safe, how permissive modern laws are of letting kids just be, etc. the questions is, how many kids or parents stop short of running into any of these problems because the kids have all they think they need inside some type of electronic device?
So how do we get out of this mess? Because now, as an adult, I see no value in those electronic gadgets, videogames, especially at ages <16yo. Do we create laws and ban all of this? The democrats among us will scream and shout. Leave it to "each family's consideration" and we'll get the lowest common denominator scenario.
There is huge value in being acquainted with computers at a young age, especially if they end up in STEM or some white collar job.
This was true but accidental when "we" were growing up, because if I wanted to play a game on the family computer, I had to figure out the right drivers and suchwith to make it work.
"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.
As to continue my anecdotal story, I could safely say that all of my interactions with computers up until the age of 14 were purely gaming with occasional drawing in ms paint. Even so, at the age of 14, I did manage to create a simple html web page, and install a php based web engine, those actions were barely conscious, just following some tutorials in my mother tongue. Only at the age of 17 I made some first real steps into using computer to compute, write first simple programs, and began to be able to understand how it actually works. I'm pretty sure, that all of the time I spent with computers before 14 contributed less than 0.1% into "getting into STEM" and that learning English, reading actual books, spending time in extracurricular classes did way, way more. But then again, that's just my personal experience. Though I believe, it's of many.
There is no value. You can learn programming in months and that’s if it is even a real job in a couple of years.
infinite tiktok scrolling != "being acquainted with computers" in the way you are stating here
As a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was FORCED outside by my parents. The same was true for other kids in the neighborhood. We were told that chilling indoors was not an option, so get outside and be back by the time streetlights come on or at least call to say where we were.
My friends and I got yelled at for doing anything fun outside, and we couldn't go beyond our yards. Then the neighbor kid chased my friend with a knife and we really couldn't go anywhere until the little perp got committed.
This is key. As a kid I still wanted to play sports outside because the sports video games were pretty limited
> Even in the early 2000s people were forced to be outside because the inside was boring.
The inside wasn't boring so much as parents didn't want their kids inside and requiring attention or supervision. TVs, tables and gaming consoles means they can be inside without this burden, so it became an easy default.
Me and my friend in the 90s dug a fucking HOLE in the back yard because we were so bored. We got it down to about 5 feet, probably just enough to be dangerous.
This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.
Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?
It'd be better if there were better 3rd spaces, sure, but hanging out at the mall with friends is still better than sitting at home watching reels
I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges.
It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.
Far better to be out on your bike, exploring a wood, climbing trees, and possibly disturbing a very grumpy badger.
The mall - breathing plastic fumes, looking at overpriced plastic toys, summoning your parents for your every whim.
I know which I'd want for my kids, should I have any (too old & ill now).
We did that too, but the mall was also a good time.
Since we couldn't drive, parents had to drop us off and then eventually come pick us up again.
> the mall was also a good time.
Oh well, not for me. I am/was a UK project manager who spent far too much time in the malls around Princeton NJ, where we were working. I had no choice because I don't drive, so I depended on bossing my lead developer about to get me places (sometimes worked) - and god how she could shop. I just prayed that the malls would have a bar - mostly not. But I would still hate malls for their horrible atmosphere.
It's not a choice between A and B. Right now we're predominantly going with C - you have little direct contact with friends, you have no mall, you exist primarily on social media developing mental illness through all the algorithmic maladies and the ones associated with constant social performance. Or D - isolated entirely from anyone but parents, socialized secondhand through media/games.
there is hardly anything kids can do in China, one of the main reasons why I moved away after my kid was born (besides dangerous toxic food and air)
while here in Europe I have within 10 minutes walk like 3-5 playgrounds for kids to play, in China I would have 0 even if we walked for half an hour, there are literally no playgrounds for kids at all, you will find exercise equipment for adults/old people in parks, but NOTHING for children and then they are surprised why people don't have kids in China
the fun with kids in China is meant to go to mall, pay fee for some amusement park and let kids play there, same with any other kid oriented facility, come, pay ticket so kid can play, but no public playgrounds, heck it's even difficult to find public football/basketball playgrounds, again in Europe I have at least 2-3 basketball courts around 10 minutes walk from home, in China impossible
been there last summer already with bigger kids and they had literally nothing to do when visiting in-laws in their miniscule 600-900K town (Beijing suburbs), we found some kids amusement park in walking distance at the end of trip, but nothing to do anywhere, they could walk to park where there was nothing to do for kids, so only time they could do something interesting was walking around Beijing, checking sights, maybe playing pingpong
> able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous.
A lot of small towns, even in the US, offer such things. Towns far from being a city. It should be more common though.
> But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car.
It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning. It's not that there is nowhere for you to exist without a car, it's that there is nowhere for you to exist there at all, and you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.
If you want to build a cafe or an arcade or a hackerspace out in suburbia, can you? That's not even about density. If you could put those things there then people would and there would be something kids could walk to. But everything other than residences is banned, so of course there is nothing else there.
> It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning
> you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can.
I hear your point but I think your causal model is misguided. It's two different things augmenting each other, not "one is a more primal cause than the other" (in my opinion, anyways). Like yes road diets in the suburbs won't 'solve' the problem by themselves, but the impact of the zoning changes you're pointing to may also have the impact of reducing car dependency in the area (although not guaranteed, I've seen USians drive even just half a mile). Cars collapse distance, and zoning policy eats up those gains greedily. SFH zoning spaces everything 10 miles apart, so all the residents buy cars because there's no alternatives. It's multiple threads reinforcing each other; I think if you dig into the ""trendy"" anti-car arguments you will find a lot of backing for mixed-used zoning policy as well because both types of changes are needed at once.
As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better.
Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space.
Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention the savings on your energy bill.
I want my streets to feel alive!
In most of the US, only single family detached houses are built (by law), which makes things spread out enough that people will want to drive. To address that, businesses are required to have a bunch of parking space. The end result of that is that, outside of a few places built before these rules took hold, living near amenities means living by parking lots and car traffic. The kind of street that "feels alive" is basically just precluded by rules that facilitate a car-first way of getting around.
Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space.
I get that it is low density, but not that low, and there is some money to spend in such areas. They would do good business.
> Surely there could be small shops and restaurants dispersed at walking distances that don’t require parking space.
I know it sounds insane, but no, in many places, this is not possible.
My city, Austin, eliminated mandatory minimum parking in 2023, and was at the time the largest US city to do so https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/austin-minimum-parki...
I know of at least one business in my neighborhood that died due to these rules. They needed to expand to make the business work, but doing so would require that they buy even more land, in a fairly dense neighborhood, and turn it into parking.
Oh I understand that it is a regulatory constraint. What I don’t understand is why the regulations aren’t changed. Who is benefiting?
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be better for everyone, both in terms of business and living standards.
People who primarily drive don't think through the second order implications.
I have been in the car with someone more than once, looking for parking, where they re-invent the idea from first principles. "Ugh, we can't find a spot, why don't they require this place to provide enough parking?"
It was a tremendous political fight to get these sorts of reforms through. People get really upset when they perceive you as taking away their convenience.
There's definitely plenty of suburban development in the US that could support small neighborhood businesses without parking spaces, but in the overwhelming majority of the country, they're literally not allowed to exist without special permission.
In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).
Even where it's allowed (which is more places than you think, look at zoning maps) and some places where it's not (variations exist) the places that do pop up usually die.
It takes serious dedication and time to turn a culture around, throwing in a few "desired third places" isn't going to cut it - at least not before the rents become too much to bear.
The whole parking thing is just so weird. Looking around my neighborhood, every house has a two car garage and enough room in the driveway to park either 2 or 4 more cars. But somehow street parking is at a premium.
Suburbia = New developments, not inherited through generations of family
New developments = You buy your land plot, you don't inherit it
Restaurant or small shop = Very small profits
Restaurant or small shop outside city centre = Even smaller profits
Very small profits = Not a good investment of time or money to build restaurant or small shop in suburbia
Compared to:
Inherit restaurant in European town = No rent or interest to pay
Inherit restaurant in European town = No cost to build restaurant
Inherit restaurant in European town = Mortgage the building to borrow money for reforms and investments.
> They would do good business.
Then why aren't you opening restaurants and small shops?
It's some kind of perverse regulatory capture by landlords with the self-destructive assistance of homeowners. Actual urban real estate is preposterously expensive, but the only reason it stays that way is that you can't create more of it, i.e. put urban developments in high demand areas that are currently suburbs.
The landlords who own the urban real estate correctly deduce that allowing more to be built would lower rents. They then convince suburban homeowners to go in with them on preventing that from happening, even though it's not really in the homeowners' interest, because rezoning would reduce the value of housing (i.e. price per square foot) but increase the value of land because you could build more housing on it. The urban landlords are the only losers there, because they have a high ratio of housing to land, so they want the housing to be expensive rather than the land. The ordinary suburban homeowners, by contrast, have a high ratio of land to housing, so they benefit from making the land worth more, i.e. allowing more to be built on it, but are bamboozled into wanting the price of housing to be high and therefore oppose urbanization.
You also get a lot of rubbish arguments about "induced demand" which try to imply that building housing would raise prices, when what it actually does is raise prices in the area immediately surrounding the new development (because people like new developments) while making it more affordable in all of the places they're moving from. Which is then used as an excuse not to do it, even though it improves affordability on net while creating more of the areas people actually want.
Something similar happens with commercial space. The landlords want it to be scarce. The argument used in that case will be something like "businesses will buy up houses to build Starbucks" or "it will make traffic worse" as if they wouldn't happily give you a Starbucks and a dozen new housing units on that piece of land if you'd let them, and as if traffic gets worse instead of better when people are closer to things and therefore drive fewer miles. But again it's really the landlords with the limited land that is zoned for those things trying to keep anyone else from getting any, and the other arguments are just the kayfabe because "we want rents to be high" is unsympathetic.
I do understand why it is kept as low-density, that makes sense. But why not allow intermingled small shops, family-friendly restaurant/bars, schools, sport facilities… Surely they would make the area more desirable?
I read that the banks often set minimum rents on the commercial real estate built or renovated with their loans. The minimum is too high for most any business to be profitable, so you see a series of failed attempts until a big chain like 711 or Starbucks rents it. They still don't profit and just close the store but keep the rental because longer terms usually. Not sure why the banks have this incentive.
A pet shop in a strip mall closed a few years ago due to a rent increase. The spot has been empty since. I really think there needs to be some reverse market incentives. No tax breaks on empty space if you can't show you're making honest effort to rent it out, and progressively lowering the cost of rent to reflect the lower property value.
If it's actually a market, it should go up AND down. Otherwise it's just a scam.
A lot of this boils down to decades of compounding preferences. Americans were taught that their birthright is to live in detached homes in low-density areas. The density is seen as a negative, yes.
I don't get it either.
There isn't resistance. It comes from development patterns.
A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.
I am sure that they could better maximize their returns by making room for local businesses and increasing the appeal of the area. And who says that a house will be worth more than a shop?
It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.
You need about 10 houses per shop (anyone with better numbers? this works for discussion but it is likely wrong). However everybody needs many different shops and so it isn't a case of 10 houses 1 shop - since you always need to go elsewhere anyway wouldn't even think of the local shop when it would do and so they fail. Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.
Shops do better when clustered together. People combine trips and so if they need to go one place for any reason that will often enough "drop in" to a different one.
All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!
> 10 houses per shop
Broadly speaking, that sounds super low, and it also doesn't echo the business density I typically observe. I think even for lifestyle businesses you need hundreds of homes actively using your services, maybe thousands total. Suppose you really could live off just 10 houses; you'd need something like $2400/yr/person in revenue at 100% cash operating margins to turn it into a reasonable income (which, given your risk exposure via rent, capital, etc, I don't think most people would start a business with the intent of the owner making less than $60k/yr in income, perhaps scaled down in much smaller, cheaper towns). There aren't many kinds of businesses where I spend that much money, and those definitely don't have anywhere near 100% margins. Just right off the bat, 100 or 1000 feels closer to correct than 10.
Most small businesses have fairly low margins. Even when you factor the cost of owner labor at zero (common for "lifestyle" businesses -- splitting it out this way so that we can look at COGS and then compare to a single family's income), you might see 10-20% cash operating margins for various shops, cafes, restaurants, 5-10% at groceries and pharmacies, 20-40% at bike shops and gyms, and 50%+ at barbers (details, especially for higher-margin industries like barbershops, depend a lot on the exact terms of rent and local tax laws, but this is a halfway decent ballpark).
Let's run some numbers.
The average person waits 2 months between hair cuts. Let's assume a moderately expensive cut at $40. The owner keeps $120/yr/person, or $300/yr/house. In the sort of town likely to have $40 be a reasonable baseline haircut price, $60k/yr is probably the bare minimum you'd want the owner to make to call this endeavor successful, especially when you factor in the increased financial risk they're taking on, so you need 200 homes actively frequenting your establishment in particular.
The average grocery bill for a single person is $300/mo, or $750/mo per household, of which the grocery store owner keeps $37.50-$75/mo, or $450-$900/yr. You need 66-133 homes frequenting that establishment in particular to keep its lights on, but I'd argue $60k/yr, while low for a barber or hair salon, is extremely low for a capital-intensive business.
Suppose you have a local cafe or bakery you visit every weekday on the way to work, or maybe every weekend on your morning walks. You spend $10 on a couple nice croissants, a single stuffed croissant, or something to that effect -- averaging the two customer types together, you spend $5/day, $1825/yr, $4562.50/yr/house, and the bakery keeps $456.25-$912.5/yr/house. You need 65-132 homes actively supporting that business. If you have customers like me who basically only stop in to the bakery when extended family is in town (preferring to cook my own), I might slightly bolster the grocer's margins (not a ton if I'm just buying flour, yeast, butter, and salt), but you need 1249-2500 homes like mine to support the bakery.
Retail shops (bookstores, local artwork, etc) have a pretty dismal outlook too. Used books are dirt cheap, I don't read as much as I used to (picked up other hobbies like playing the piano), and I do a lot of my reading online nowadays anyway. I spend maybe $100-$200/yr on books. I think that's above average, though I don't really know. The bookstore owner keeps $10-$40/yr though after rent and other expenses and needs 600-2400 homes filled with people like me (and who also don't share their books) for its support structure.
Instead of looking at rough estimates based on profit margins and usage, you can look at towns you understand reasonably well. One county I know of, for example, which does all of its business in a single, central town, has around 15k people, or 6k households (or if we're just counting the town population itself for some reason, 1200 households, but I think that's a significant underestimate). It has two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two music stores (instruments, lessons, etc, and another store outside of town), 15 restaurants (and another 5-10 in the rest of the county), and three pharmacies. Depending on how you slice and dice the numbers, it takes 400-3000 households to support most of those businesses, and 48-400 to support various kinds of restaurants. When factoring in just the county population, it's 2000-3000 households for normal businesses and 240 for a restaurant.
You are not running the same numbers I am. If there are 1000 houses I'm claiming there should be about 100 retail shops. That people only get a haircut every few months is why those can't spread out.
That sounds plausible. If you're talking about total shop count of any kind, then as a conversion factor between my numbers and yours we're saying there are 20-100 types of shops people visit with any regularity in a year. That sounds about right.
Problem with insulation is that it kills off all sound, not only noise. For example people might actually enjoy the sound of wind blowing leaves, squirrels running around or an occasional car driving by. There are devices generating natural noise for Passivhaus because its insulation is so great that people starts to feel eerie.
That's easy to say if you'd never had to live in a slum, but constant noise actually has negative health effects.
Apparently all cities now are slums?
Us plebians don't live in expensive NYC penthouses.
All urban living situations that are not NYC penthouses are slums?
As someone who has lived in NYC, yes. The vast majority of housing in NYC is slum quality at insane prices
Even in the nicest apartment I ever had, I still had to listen to my upstairs neighbor scream and beat up his wife.
sounds like a sample size/bias problem to me. maybe you're just drawn to slums?
Ah the libertarian solution. "Just stop being poor"
lol, no--you just made an unsubstantiated (and stupid) claim that any apartment that isn't an NYC penthouse is a slum, and i countered that you can't use the limits of your own experience to reliably define what the world contains
That’s a false dilemma if I’ve ever seen one. As if those are the only options - that’s just silly defeatism and reductionism!
> I want my streets to feel alive!
Most american suburbanites completely disagree with this take. They want their street to be quite and devoid of people. I think this is largely because there is no recourse for anti social activity in the US. People who have spent a lot of time in cities start to notice that anti social activity doesnt really get stopped and many decide it would be better to just not be around outsiders who could annoy them so they enact exclusive zoning to minimize interaction with people they dont know.
Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance"
Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?
I lived in Manhattan (NYC). Walked a mile at a time (or more) without thinking about it. To/from work, in cold, in rain, etc.
Now I'm in NYC 'burbs. The train is 1.1 miles from my house. I walk that distance on occasion but not often. My wife drives to/from train most days.
Town is also 1.1 miles from my house, near the train. My daughter is about to be 8. I'm not far off from letting her wander into town on her bike (or on foot), but it's anywhere from a 10/15-25 minute journey depending on how fast you walk/bike and how often you stop.
I also live in what feels like a dense suburb. Many houses close to each other. Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8
So, I think there's a difference between nothing to do and it's "close" - whatever that means to you, and there's nothing to do and it requires a 30 min car ride.
Those latter suburbs aren't far from me, and I grew up next to one good example of a suburb w/large houses and nothing much else (Dover, Massachusetts)
How far people are willing to walk depends quite a bit on what they are walking past. Lots of people will walk through an area of shops, cafes, etc, fewer will walk through an area of house after house after house, almost nobody will walk through an area that is one long concrete wall.
> Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance". Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question?
It may partly be psychological: in 'the city' there is human activity and you do not feel isolated, and you feel part of societal activity.
> I also live in what feels like a dense suburb. Many houses close to each other. Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8
LOL: have you noticed the lack of sidewalks? Here are some examples of what is a "streetcar suburb", which was developed in the 1890s/1900s:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb#Toronto
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto
A good portion of these houses were built before the car was invented, and while many folks park on the street (you have to pay for a permit), there are also lanes and garages for many of them. A couple of schools with-in walking distance, banks, churches, library, shops, etc.
Sidewalks are missing there but there are plenty in town.
I used to live in two of the streetcar suburbs: Newton Ma, and Brookline Ma. They are indeed more urban than suburban in many spots, but again, proximity matters. Those places feel more urban when you live near the MBTA Green Line (the streetcar) - let's say within 10 min walk.
It depends on the infrastructure as well. I'm about a 7 minute drive from my local commuter rail but it's essentially unwalkable as that 7 minutes is basically along an interstate. I do take the commuter rail if I'm going into the city 9-5 on weekdays but that's very rare.
Right.
I find this whole topic reductive in general. Specifics matter quite a bit. I don't disagree with some of the article but it feels very gloomy compared to suburban life I see around me.
Yeah, it depends on your definitions I guess. I'm certainly not in classic suburbia. I think ESRI says I'm in an exurb. In any case, I'm certainly not walking anyplace except down to the river or to a couple adjacent neighbors or conservation land within a 100+ acres total. Where I grew up was similar. This is considered urban by the US census by the way.
Sounds anything but urban to me!
It’s more rewarding to walk 2-3km when there is a lot of things to see/do compared to walking 1km just to get to the station in a lonely walk. Just having/seeing people walk along/across you makes a world of difference.
I think walking VS driving is also about convenience.
In the example we're replying to, the shared suburban street has a marked median (implying medium traffic), minimal shoulder, and no sidewalk. While the houses and foliage are very nice, it feels a little unsafe to walk on. Presumably the train station has nice parking, so driving is quick and easy to do. Choosing to walk in this case is more for leisure or for exercise.
In the city though, driving is a whole other thing. Storing a car and finding parking just to go 1 mile is a huge pain: it's much simpler just to walk it. Walking in this case may be for leisure and exercise, but it's also for convenience.
Right.
That train distance is ~20-25 mins walk.
So, I save some time driving - and use that time elsewhere.
Also, putting aside dense cities like Boston, NY, Chicago - I think most folks wouldn't describe many others in the U.S. as walkable.
LA? Atlanta? There are pockets of course.
I think you're right about people in proximity along the walk. Always liked that about Manhattan.
But even in Manhattan, I didn't regularly stop to chat with strangers. Maybe I stopped to grab coffee along the way. To your point, plenty to see and do along the way but I was often moving from point A to B - just like the 'burbs.
When I walk to/from train or town now I usually listen to something on my AirPods. Happy to do it without them but not a terrible way to spend the 20-25 mins.
> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
This is an important point. In my hometown, I spent a lot of time playing in vacant/double/unused lots. Those lots are all gone and have been turned into parking lots or mini-McMansions. It breaks my heart every time I visit my parents' house and I see that our old soccer, football, wiffleball field and all of the trees we used to build forts have been replaced by cheap houses whose lawns are covered in a rotating cast of inflatables.
I can't fault the landowners for cashing in on their spare property but it would seem that the town could do with more localized parks. If anyone has been to Alphabet City in NYC, a lot of vacant lots were turned into community gardens and they're incredible little oases to stumble upon and relax in for a few minutes. I wish the town had had the foresight to do this with some of the aforementioned lots.
This is a major aside but another major change is that >50% of the trees which used to dot my hometown are gone. They either fell, died or got in the way of the power lines and were not replaced by the town or property owners. The streets all used to be covered in leafy canopies, everybody's houses were a few degrees cooler and all of that wood prevented a lot of the noise pollution from the Metro-North and I-95 from making its way through.
"Nothing to do" is not how children think. They're new to the world. Just roaming around a neighborhood freely is a lot of "things to do" for them.
Having exciting destinations helps, but children are perfectly capable of making their own fun.
Whether that can compete with the modern day "pre-made" fun of YouTube, Roblox and the likes though? That's a different matter.
Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.
Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children.
Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays.
But the children friendly aspect of society described above is 100% true. It hasn't degraded at all compared to when I was a kid.
I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why.
I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept in the living room. Sure, it’s not perfect, but people did it. Same story happened in villages, and even it was the standard for some time.
So, whenever I see this argument I say we’re too posh in thinking it. There are different less comfortable ways to start a family and have kids, we just don’t want to do it.
For reference, now in my country everywhere new apartments are built (overbuilding the main city in the process, but different topic), yet prices are still soaring especially relative to the average salary. So same issue of high prices like everywhere.
Yet no one here thinks about the other option. The same argument from the linked article applies - too much comfort.
It's not just a matter of comfort. If you have no housing, you have a monthly recurrent payment to make, where failing once makes you homeless.
Will you be able to afford it next year? Next decade? After retirement?
Removing that permanent threat of ruin is then the priority. It has to be solved before children because once you have them, that's a an extra economic burden and you won't make it out with that extra weight.
The generation that lived through that, the next generation does not wish to live through it, as alternatives are "available" now (at least on paper). Those kids who grew up in 50m2 with no privacy, and at the same time absorbed western TV, where 300m2 detached house is a base in every show - formed their dreams towards that. This is why everyone is delaying family, because the image in their head is that to be truly happy, this is what you need. Very few people, living in those tight conditions grew up to be happy about their childhood.
Is it hard to imagine that younger generation wants to live better lives? They don't want to suffer like their parents did. They are already fed up with all the bullshit that the current generation of politicians leaves to them to figure out?
What is this argument, "too much comfort, too posh"?!
> Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront
Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".
As someone living in the center of Barcelona, i might have to come over to Galicia in the future. Hows the public schools in general, similar to here in catalunya i assume. Buying anything around here feels like a half million investment and its not wort it.
The kids get to take a couple of classes in Gallego instead of Catalan, but otherwise I don't see too many differences.
Fair warning, that if you want to live in a city, while Vigo and A Coruna are cheaper than Barcelona or Madrid, I don't think its that stark a contrast - my friend was buying in a rural village, an hour from Vigo.
I think that most of western Europe is fucked in that sense. Previous generations piled up a ton of debt and so now there is no breathing room for subsidize affordable housing, parenting benefits, ... . Add to that that you need 2 salaries to live, that you must study until when you are 25+ to have a degree, that you don't want to have a baby just when you career is starting, that housing is extremely expensive, that you need to save for your pension because clearly the pension system will be drastically neutered in the future due to the above mentioned debt, ... . Basically, there are a bunch of factors that stop many many couples from having children.
I'm Italian so the situations is similar if not worse back at home.
Sounds very similar to what is happening in the US.
> House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair.
This is very bizarre to me. I never once thought about a chair as a child. _If_ you got tired you just took a seat anywhere or just laid down.
An empty lawn was the perfect place to play any number of things. Even better was when 2 empty backyard lawns connected and there wasn't much/any landscaping for some really big activities.
While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.
But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.
You think malls didn't have security on the past?
I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)
Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.
Also you'd take your bicycle and pretend it is a motorbike, hacking stuff likw mounting a playing card to the seatstay so it hits the spoke and make revving sound when you accelerated or looking for planks and construction material to build ramps
> Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be.
We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.
There are major US cities where this is not the cae. Atlanta is an example. I've lived there without a car, but as a single man in my early 30s. It was not easy even for someone committed to the task. Even in the most "urban" parts of the city there are very few stores within walking distance, very few people on the street, and the distances are huge. Public transport (how kids in cities get around) is terrible. A kid might be able to walk to a park were he/she to live near one bit almost no one does.
Yeah I get that, the point I trying to (snarkily) make was that we have control over where we live and raise our families. People often opine about the wonders of urbanism but then move to the suburbs!
But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).
I live in what passes for a walkable residential area in the south us. A 15 min walk to a street with shops and restaurants. You meet people on the way. But the weather is definitely a factor. It bounces around freezing for a month or three and bounces around 100F for another five. That leaves the final ~5 which are torrential rains interspersed with lovely weather.
It's not really true. Almost every neighborhood in Atlanta has a cluster of shops or food hall kind of thing to walk to.
It's true that it's a massive lifestyle leap to go to no car. But walk to the park. Walk to get ice cream. Ride bike to school are all easily doable in atlanta.
It's certainly true in Atlanta. That "cluster of shops" can be a long way walking (10-15 minutes) from where one resides. It's small, incomplete, inadequate, etc.
I grew up in Atlanta proper, so know the city well, and later, by choice, lived there for a few years as an adult without a car and it was genuinely complicated. I chose a place to live near my place of work (near = it was 30 minutes solid walking). I had access to a supermarket (15 minutes walking), two (!) transit (MARTA) stations each at 15-20 minutes walking, and several bus lines (none with frequency greater than 30 minutes nor standard deviation less than 20), as well as the "cluster of shops" to which you refer. It had a bar, a few restaurants, a laundromat, and a drugstore. For real shopping other than food I took MARTA to a mall. My morning walk to work around 6 o 7 am required crossing a street used by prostitutes and drug dealers. They didn't bother me but the cops were suspicious of me for being there on foot and more than oncee I had to avoid cops with guns out chasing someone down.
People there generally considered me nuts for choosing to live this way.
I remember fondly that on my way to work there was a street full of pecan trees and at the right time of year I could get a handful from the sidewalk (there were sidewalks!).
When I was growing up (true, this was a while ago), again in the city proper, the nearest park was 3-4 km away. I went there by bike and played pickup basketball or went to the public pool, but it wasn't exactly nearby, and it wasn't walkable. Ice cream bars could be bought at a convenience store several km in a different direction. The bus stop was near the park and the bus came every 50 minutes, with considerable variance. On it it took something like 40 minutes to get to a MARTA station. A single to and back trip on public transport could easily take 3-4 hours in total so I didn't do this often. My school was around 12 hilly kilometeres away, a bit longer if one avoided the interstate. Biking there required riding on heavily congested roads with no shoulder and dealing with drivers completely incomprehending of cyclists and later crossing 8 lane roads and facing considerable danger the whole way. It could be done and I did it, but it was not particularly safe as there was no way to get there without dealing with rush hour traffic accessing the interstate.
I vaguely remember that there was a store within walking distance that sold automobile tires ...
There are some places in the US--probably Manhattan most obviously--where there's a culture that doesn't have the expectation that you have a car. But, while people living in most other cities can basically do a post-university lifestyle without one even in cities with relatively good public transit, a lot of their friends probably live outside the city, a lot of activities depend on cars, etc.
I do know an adult couple in SF who gave up their cars but I'd observe that they rely on Ubers and various rentals a lot. I don't think I know anyone in the Boston/Cambridge area who doesn't have a car. Of course, they exist but I don't know one.
Parts of Atlanta are certainly walkable today. Midtown or Buckhead would qualify.
Where is this? Our dream is to live in the city for independent access to amenities and frequently visit the woods. I have the economical means for this but the city is not the thing people say. As an example, Taipei had zero traffic deaths of children under 12 in the last 3 years. My San Francisco neighborhood alone has had 2 and Taipei has more kids.
Those were for accompanied children because San Franciscans adapt by helicoptering their kids to keep them from dying whereas I saw unaccompanied kids in Taipei everywhere and Taiwan is a basket case for fertility with a 0.7 TFR.
If we move out of SF it will be because the compensatory mechanisms required to keep my children alive here will overwhelm their freedom. But if there are cities of the Asian or European form here where children under 12 can independently move around then I’d love to know from someone who also has children in such environs. Often, online, people provide advice on this subject while being childless themselves and that’s not useful to me.
I've been priced out of these areas. I'd gladly move back in town if I could afford anything closer, but I can't. I make quite higher income than the median, so I'd be extremely surprised if this was NOT the rationale for many others.
There is a shortage of places for your kid to sleep at night though, as reflected in housing prices. It is especially bad for families because new apartments are often studios or one bedrooms.
In most US cities the kid friendly places are the suburbs not the urban centers. Those suburbs require a car to do anything, but all the kids live there, and so all the things kids do are out there too.
I’m sorry, but so few of these urban environments are affordable with good schools. I lived in Philadelphia and we chose to leave when our son was young because the schools generally aren’t good (most don’t even have libraries, but this is a whole different topic), the green space barely exists and isn’t maintained, and I’d never feel safe with my kid taking the transit.
NYC and Boston seem like the only east coast options and those are very expensive. What other options are there on the East Coast?
Philadelphia is absolutely an option, but it depends on the neighborhood. Eg if you live in the penn alexander, greenfield, or meredith catchments you have a great elementary/middle school and there are lot of kids of late elementary/early middle school age moving around the city independently.
I live in west philly and it is great: the park is excellent and lots of kids safely go there by themselves, the local school is very good. Transit (specifically the trolley) is good and safe.
Happier? In a city? Have you been to big US cities? Angry people, crime, homeless, mentally ill people, lack of police.
Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!
It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person. I think urban people are just so desensitized to it its hard to understand how big a deal it is to people who have never experienced that.
There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids or the general lack of unlocked freely available clean bathrooms in businesses.
It's also shocking to have someone roll coal or call you a gendered or racist or homophobic slur in the country because you look a little different.
Or seeing the expansive yards filled with decaying cars, appliances, and other metal scrap.
Both urban and rural life have people suffering from poverty, mental health issues, and drug addiction. It just looks different.
> It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person
Is it? I never struggled with this, been yelled at countless of times by crazy people on the street, both growing up in a very rural area and now living most of my adult life in a metropolitan area. I don't think it's much of a shock to most, we know there are mentally unwell people out there already.
> There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids
What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.
> What? What kind of city would limit the age of who can use the bathroom? Sounds bananas.
I think this was another comment about homelessness, not an implication about the law.
Hmm, in what way? How is homelessness related to public bathroom besides the fact that homeless people use public bathrooms? Not sure how that's related to the age of the person using the bathroom, but surely I'm missing something here.
They are saying that homeless people are scary or messy. Or that drug use happens sometimes in a bathroom, etc.
Obviously, this attitude is born from some incorrect assumptions, but it's a pretty standard feast from folks out of town.
So homeless people use bathrooms to do drugs and somehow that means there is a age limit? I'm sorry but this makes no sense, how are they at all related? Why would it matter what someone does before you use the bathroom, it's not like drugs stick around in the air and impact people entering the room afterwards...
The last time I was in a major city with my kids I went to a major, nice park. They had to use the bathroom. There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.
There is absolutely no reason to tolerate this in a civilized society, and it’s completely unheard of in the region I’m from, a major culture shock - along with the attitude that I should just get over it.
> There were ample bathrooms but every single one of them was filled with human feces, covering practically every surface, and littered with needles.
What the hell? No offense, but was this in a slum somewhere or something? Not saying it doesn't happen in other places, but I think I've came across that once in my ~35 years, visiting countless of public bathrooms, cities and towns, admittedly mostly around in Europe, South America and Asia, but still...
I don't think that's a "city" thing, that might be very local to the specific city you visited, or the specific area.
>Have you been to big US cities?
Yes, I live in one, and it's a city that often gets used as the poster child for urban crime.
I don't feel in danger. What I am most worried about when walking with my kids outside is them getting hit by a car.
This is funny, as it almost doesn’t pass Poe’s test.
I also find people are much angrier and misanthropic in the suburbs and exurbs as they spend their entire days in metal death cages that dehumanize everyone around them and turn every interaction into a confrontation.
Guess that misanthropy hypothesis gets another check in the anecdata column.
I've been in my city (Seattle) for 40 years. Homelessness has increased faster than population growth. Crime rates are way down. Like half what they used to be.
Mental health is down everywhere, nationwide, and we spend an absurd amount of money on our police.
I love it here, great city. It's not perfect, but I can't imagine living elsewhere.
No one wants to live in cities any more. They’re too crowded, housing is too expensive, and the traffic is too bad.
>Happier? In a city?
Yes.
>Have you been to big US cities?
Whoever said anything about the US?
If you actually look at US statistics, per capital crime rates are often higher in rural areas than urban one. Just, you know, more people in cities so bigger numbers.
It’s not just innocent ignorance of statistics. There’s also deliberate lying in mass media, both for partisan political goals and simply because sensationalism attracts eyeballs.
Rural people are absurdly scared of own imagination. And if urban people talked about rural areas the way they talk about cities, we would get 234 think pieces about how inappropriate and out of touch it is.
Idk, I’ve seen Deliverance, plus all those horror movies that start out on some desolate road in the woods at night. Seems likely a fair depiction of country living.
No thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
Rural people have all been to the cities and seen what it's like with their own eyes. There's no mystery.
You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
We didn’t need things to do back then. We would usually find something like playing wall ball against someone’s house. What we need is kids who respect other people’s things, neighbors to not be crotchety, wide open spaces and trails would be nice.
I know the discussion of urbanism vs suburbanism is a common topic on HN, but I don't think suburbs themselves are the root issue here.
When I was growing up in the suburb, there were kids outside all the time. Yes, some friends lived across town in another suburb, but we just biked there instead of walking.
Now when I visit that same suburb, there are no kids in sight. I still see adults of parenting age, so I assume there are still children in the neighborhood, but they're just indoors. The density of the town didn't change, but rather people's attitudes towards where kids can and can't be seem to be what changed. I also suspect the declining birthrate and having fewer kids is contributing to the problem too.
Surburbia gets a bad rap but you can have your burbs and something for kids to do. You need regular buses or trains, footpaths and parks with skateparks etc. My preteen kids get a bus up to (checks map...) 20km away.
It would be cool to live in a very dense Tokyo kind of place though. Tokyo is like a playground it is awesome!
yep, zoning and the gerontocracy. we should reweight votes based on age
Suburbs are fun as a kid if the parents are chill. Some of my best childhood memories have been roaming suburbia like a pack of dogs with no regard to anyones property lines. Places to sit? Kids don’t need that. We are content with some bushes by the drainage ditch with some standing water to throw rocks in. Yes, this happened in internet era too. If you had friends, those are way more fun than web surfing alone. We never even grew out of that stuff. Transitioned right out of games of tag in the woods right into smuggling beer into the woods.
Suburbia is the creepiest thing known to man.
This is something that could only be said by a sheltered suburban kid
My family grew up in communist Poland. In the kind of neighborhood with those ugly grey buildings.
Well, say what you want, but the communists knew how to build neighborhoods.
Between all buildings there was always a 30-50+ meters green space with benches, places for kids to play, walkways, etc.
I remember in the early 90s how lively and safe it was. People spent a lot of time of the day outside. Grandmas had their benches, looked the kids, play, adults would gather and have a drink, etc.
Today? It has all been swallowed by cars. As progress and money came the entire neighborhood has been swallowed by cars. Kids are confined in a single area. You rarely see people outside. People sit at home.
For reference, this is my old neighborhood, albeit the street view is a decade+ old (half the areas are from 2013 because since then entrances to cars have been gated and are only for private cars), but if you stretch the imagination and try to put people around and benches and kids playing areas you can get the sense:
https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81596...
Americans used to drop off their kids at the mall but apparently even that's gone?
Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.
Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.
Suburbs are still like that. However each one is different. The block bbq always only happened because someone living there arranged it. Not every suburb had that person and so not every one had a block bbq. Likewise, kids play together when they are of close enough age. My daughter has lots of kids to play with, but my son just a few years older is frustrated because there is nobody to play with - it is completely chance that a bunch of 9-11 year old girls live in my area and few boys.
As a GenX kid who was pretty much literally "raised on hose water and neglect", I find it incredibly hard to relate to modern parenting (disclaimer: I don't have children). I had SO much freedom to roam around and do stuff, and half the time my parents had no idea where I was. Once I got into bicycle riding, I'd jump on my bike and go miles and miles from home. And there were no ubiquitous cell phones back then, so if your parents need to find you quick it was pretty much "call all the other parents and popular hang out spots and ask "have you seen Phil?", and/or jump in the car and start visiting the spots they knew I frequented.
Was there a measure of danger to allowing a 12 year old that much freedom? Sure, probably. But to illustrate something that lines up perfectly with TFA... the worst thing that ever happened to me or any of my friends during this time, was when me and my then best friend were riding our bikes on the road between our homes, and he was struck by a car.
Were we ever worried about being kidnapped, or any of that crap? Hell no. That's not to say it couldn't have happened, but that wasn't on anybody's minds back then (I'm talking approx 1984 - 1990 or so).
That said, if I were a parent today, I think I'd be somewhat scared to give my kids the same amount of freedom I had. Which makes me a hypocrite I guess? Maybe I've bought into too much of the prevailing media narrative stuff myself.
That said, if I were a parent today, I think I'd be somewhat scared to give my kids the same amount of freedom I had.
Why? Stranger kidnappings are down since you were a kid. What media are you consuming and what is it saying? "if it bleeds, it leads" has long been an adage that the news talks more about violence than other things, so take the volume of violent stories with a grain of salt.
I think when you are a parent, you also understand that other people in the community are watching out for stuff like this, whether they have a stake specifically in your kids, or keeping your community a nice place to live. Other parents, the guy at the corner store, older siblings, the coach at the basketball court at the playground, the teacher who lives in the neighborhood, etc. It takes a village and if you aren't going to school or other community events, you can lose sight of the village that's out there.
Why? Stranger kidnappings are down since you were a kid. What media are you consuming and what is it saying? "if it bleeds, it leads" has long been an adage that the news talks more about violence than other things, so take the volume of violent stories with a grain of salt.
Sure, and of course I know all that. But here's the pernicious thing about it... even being aware of something like "it bleeds, it leads" doesn't automatically make you immune to some degree of subtle/unconscious influence. Active effort can combat that, and I'd like to think that if I did become a parent that I'd be able to make that effort and make the right decisions. But I have no doubt that there would be some nagging doubt in the back of my mind.
And to make it a little bit more real... I'm still an avid cyclist to this day, and I'm acutely aware of the dangers of riding bicycles on the road. Especially in the era of distracted drivers who are "texting and driving" and given how vehicles have gotten larger when many road have not necessarily gotten correspondingly wider. And proper bike lanes are still rare in many places. So yeah, if my kid said "Hey, I'm jumping on my bike and heading out to Bobby's house", I'd have some trepidation just about the possibility of them being hit by a car... no "stranger danger" / "chester the molester" stuff required.
That said, I'd be worried about an adult doing the same thing, and for the same reasons! I can even fully acknowledge that it may not be a rational thing to engage in road cycling these days, but I still do it myself, so... what can ya do?
I can think of so many reasons but the biggest I think is the reduction of community. - When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all. We had school fates and lots more community gatherings. - Dads didn't work as hard. Half of them would be at your soccer practice at 6pm to hang out - Parents were on local sports teams together or other social groups as well - You did most of your shopping at the local shops, you knew the people that lived in the suburb. You ran into them picking up the newspaper or at the local video rental place. - My mum always joked that I couldn't get away with anything because someone would see me and it would get back to her some how. - There were some wierdos around sure. But the whole suburb was on the look out for the kids roaming around Then there were other things like just that cars were smaller. A kid on a pushie would be as high or higher than a person driving around in small sedan. I don't think I would let my kid play on the same street I spent 90% of my time riding my bike or playing with the other kids in the street these days. They'd end up underneath a giant landcruiser or ford ranger/hilux in no time (and they are smaller that the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big) I know some nordic countries are still a bit like this. But I'm talking about a car centric Sydney (Australia) suburb in the late 80s early 90s
I grew up in a suburb like yours. I'm raising my kids in a suburb that's by and large the same.
The biggest difference, imo, is the number of families.
I lived on a small street with a cul-de-sac. Maybe 35 houses or so. At least half had kids aged 0-15.
I now live on a street about the same size with my kids. There is one house with ~7-10 year olds, two houses with 3-5, one house with a couple of teens, one house with a baby.
Nothing else really matters, you can't expect kid communities to self generate at these densities.
This is my current experience, too. There are a lot of "empty nest" houses on my street. Wouldn't it figure that those people are all upset about the apartments that are being built in the neighborhood which are all being scooped up by young families ...
How old were the homes when you were a kid?
They were all new-ish builds at the time, built a couple years before I was born.
- When I was a kid mums worked part time or not at all.
This is a big factor. Although the gender side of things is kind of loaded, it used to be broadly the case that a two-parent household would often have one primary breadwinner and one home-maker. Nowadays, both parents need to make money which means that the 'home-making' needs to be done after both parents have finished work. So at 6pm, you're cooking, not hanging out at soccer practice. After that, you need to do the washing up, hang out the clothes, etc. There's just less time for leisure. On top of that, there's a lot of folks (probably some of them reading this comment) paid very well to keep folks indoors consuming, instead of outside meeting people.
So, going even deeper, maybe there's need for two incomes nowadays to be able to keep up with the lifestyle of a house in the suburbs?
Absolutely yes, but there's a bit more nuance than it seems. For example, 40 years ago, most families had one car, no computer, no mobile phones, no Netflix, DoorDash, etc. Houses are bigger, foreign holidays, expensive white goods, etc.
On the other hand, property costs have definitely increased massively. Folks are having kids later and less frequently, so there's a higher percentage of dual income couples looking for houses. Lenders are prepared to offer more to dual income couples, then house prices adjust, and suddenly, you need to have two incomes to buy a house. Then when it does come time to have children, you need the second income to pay for child care, and there's not much left over afterwards.
Higher household income doesn't necessarily have to mean higher property prices. It's a factor, but that's only one half of the demand/supply equation. Long term, the price of housing is driven by how much it costs to build more.
Good point. Building more housing is indeed part of a possible solution, although it’s hard to convince folks whose mortgages are baselined on inflated prices not to oppose building more.
Realistically, I don't think most people think that way. ("Don't build that apartment! The resulting increase in the local supply of housing will decrease my property value.") It's more that they don't want to live next to whatever is being built or don't want the character of the neighborhood they live in to change.
Which is somewhat understandable, but there's a balance here between the rights of existing residents vs the property rights of the owner of the property being developed (and future residents thereof). There are also regulatory burdens associated with any legal processes intended to give more rights to existing residents.
Salaries are the lowest they have ever been proportionally to tributes demanded.
Those tributes being mortgages, income taxes, and sales taxes, among other things.
Theres is only one system of government in the industrialized world: feudalism.
I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined.
When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was good and you could kick a football and ride bikes out there safely. When I visit now, there are so many cars that it's sometimes hard to find a park. I would guess the bulk of it is residents who don't want to shuffle cars in the driveway or have their garage full of other stuff rather than the cars.
I would not want my kids playing out there unsupervised.
I agree. I'm in Sydney and certainly the next phase of development going through my suburb is duplexes. Suddenly you've doubled the amount of cars on the same block, and the garage is 50/50 used for one of the cars or not.
Same here on all counts.
Garages in duplexes typically are not big enough to fit an average car comfortably.
Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there used to be.
In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.
It's more cars per person yeah - more people working per household, more car dependency, and cars becoming cheaper.
I think that at least partly it's the consequence of the very same safetyism. If I look at my generation (in my sixties), we still start conversations with strangers, especially if they are our neighbours and things happen between us. But it doesn happen't between people in their thirties any more. And if I look at my students (highschool and college level), then for them it's very alien and even afraid of situation where they have to. Why? I guess they were not allowed to practice and explore this.
> Why?
In addition to not having practice as you said, my thoughts:
1. Camera phones and social media have trained all young people to be aware that anything they say or do could be reported on
2. A lot more overt moralizing about power, gender, and race dynamics by young people makes people hesitant to interact outside of their group
3. Racial and cultural diversity have increased, and people don't reach out across those barriers as freely and easily as within their own homogeneous culture(s)
Probably these too, but if I compare mu childhood (sixties) and society today, the experience kids got/have are in especially sharp contrast. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable.
It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting. If I look at my students (highschool and college level), most of them are absolutely terrified to interact with people very different than they themselves. A single difference is enough to keep distance, dump relationship at all. They are not used to it at all.
> the larger trucks that are in the USA which are scary big
Yeah, big trucks have started showing up in Norway too unfortunately, it's making it much harder to keep our environment of freedom and responsibility :(
https://cdn.masto.host/federatesocial/media_attachments/file...
Where I lived we knew a few neighbors but didn’t really interact every day or feel like they would watch out for other people’s kids.
That didn’t stop me from biking and exploring all over from age 6-7, which seems unthinkable now. I think it was mostly just more risk tolerance and less flashy warnings about danger. Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
Your suburb sounds nice but I guess Im just saying that level of community wasn’t necessary for kids to have freedom.
> Like my dad biked around the same block so why not let me and there was not much more thought given to it.
I’m convinced that’s more of the explanation than we realize. Adults in a lot of places move about almost entirely by car and often look down on other modes of transportation, to the extent that having your kid walk or bike while you have a car in the driveway seems wrong, like if you shopped at Whole Foods for yourself and fed your kids on gruel.
From the age of 5 in my town everyone would just let all us kids out to play and we'd just come home when it was getting dark. There were no cell phones. We didn't even have a landline until I was 12. I'd walk the mile or so each way to school. Some days I'd get treated to the bus fare but I usually just spent it on candy and walked home anyway :D
Another aspect for sure is that parents did not think as much before too. Kids were given much more freedom while parents should probably have kept an eye on them a little more. I knew of countless domestic accidents that would probably not happen nowadays. Sure that made kids experiment more and all but we ended up with more dead kids too.
The data doesn't necessarily bear that out. Yes, childhood accidents have declined, over a similar time period that childhood freedom has declined.
However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements. Cars are far safer now than in the 70s, so are kitchen appliances, electrical outlets, playground design, etc.
And at the same time, child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
What data measures "childhood freedom"? That sounds more like conjecture.
You can lookup the studies on loss of 3rd spaces and the relation to mental health in adolescents (and adults, albeit to a lesser degree). This is pretty well-trod science
Well trod doesn't mean good. Social science is notorious for bunk. How many can actually support a causal relationship?
> However a hefty portion of that accident reduction is attributable to other safety improvements.
very hard to differentiate between product safety improvement and attitude change of parents, because both are co-factors. There is no good way to dissociate one from the other.
> child suicide rates are way up, which research attributes directly to the decline in independence.
and brainwashing
> and brainwashing
Kids are brainwashed to commit suicide at scale? Could you elaborate?
I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.
My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v...I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design.
"Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well.
The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
The article cites the huge drop in children's mobility in England since the 1970s. Planning here pays more attention to making it safer to walk than it did in the 70s. The numbers show it is far safer. We still have that decline. Does that not show it has to be a cultural change in parenting?
It does seem like it. However, there's the game theory problem/positive feedback loop where each parent who defects and drives their kid makes it more dangerous for all the other kids who are still walking; iterate a few times and everybody has defected and is worse off than before.
Perhaps it was culture, but the above loop only needs cheaper cars and more income, both things present in the 70s as the effects of WWII wore off.
Its far safer to walk than it was in 70s despite more parents driving their kids around but we still have kids walking less. The feedback loop is possible, but its not what is happening.
I think its linked to a general feeling of safety. I live in a village where people feel they know each other etc. and lots of kids walk to school. Kids in cities are statistically as safe, but the atmosphere is different.
Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
Americans and their cars are simply insane. Most cars here in Europe are, well, cars. Still dangerous tons of fast moving metal bullets, but in the US cars are essentially designed to efficiently kill children. The hood of many cars is so high that you ensure to hit the kid's head in an accident. And people drive these huge tanks in the city where there is zero need for them and they are just impractical in every way because you compete for limited space.
if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them.
they aren't tall enough to roll over the top, even a smaller sedan.
being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
> if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them.
That's not true. Obviously if you hit a child on the highway with 100km/h that child is gonna be dead. But when you're going 30 in a residential area and suddenly there is a child in front of you car, so you hit the break slowing down to 15km/h it makes a huge difference how your car is build.
> being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
Safety doesn't work by just teaching the weakest part to protect themselves while allowing everyone else to build more and more deadly machines. This car centricity that puts the blame on pedestrians for daring to walk in the sacred car reserved area that separates everything from each other is exactly the problem.
These huge trucks are dangerous for absolutely no reason and they also take away insane amounts of space for no reason. They make everyone unsafe, destroy the planet and make cities shittier.
You don't know what people use their trucks for.
They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods?
There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.
I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.
It's called living, which has become insanely safe compared to what it used to be only a generation or two ago.
Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.
Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.
Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.
That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.
Living isn't putting your childhood self or your kids into mortal danger on the regular. There's quite a gap between unsupervised kids doing reckless stuff and knowing putting your kids out into a world not built for adult pedestrians, much less child pedestrians.
My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.
I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships.
I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.
I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.
I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUX6LABCEA
I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.
I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI
Now I'm actually really careful about any type of spills or grease in my kitchen even though I rarely move around big pots of boiling water.
I don't really understand how being scared/traumatized by videos of bike accidents will increase that child's visibility.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
> Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
> The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.
> It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)
Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.
When I was in China I got nearly run over walking on green light because someone decided they were in a rush and run a red. It's apparently socially acceptable if you have enough money to afford the fines and you honk your horn while doing it. Unregulated crossings are another level of rolling the dice.
Not a noticeable problem because they are Chinese and there are so many of them it doesn't matter if 4k die while trying to cross at crosswalks?
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/how-dangerous-are-china...
How does it compare to other countries, though? 4000 is high, but it's out of 1400000000.
i agree with your latter point but i must state that kids probably should be scared of being squashed by american blimp trucks
I don't think you need to show videos, but definitely discuss street safety with your children when they are young. Possibly several times at different ages.
When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.
I walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
About a block away from me is a private community pool that is highly used during the summer. Across from it and another block down is a park with some trails. There is a cross walk between them, but there is no lighting for it. Basically no one ever stops at the crosswalk when they see pedestrians waiting. It's a steady stream of cars just flying by at 35-40 mph. It's to the point where I don't even want to stop for them because I don't trust the other lane to stop and I don't want to "encourage" pedestrians to walk out because they see me stopped but the other side won't respond leading to an even more dangerous situation. I've even seen cars who stop get passed on double yellows because who would dare slow down a car driver trying to get somewhere. Crazy that two such popular community features are separated by thousands of pounds of steel flying by without a safe way for kids or even families to get across. To reach a protected crossing, you've got to walk about a mile in either direction to reach a stop light intersection.
Maybe show that to drivers, too, every time they have to renew their license.
Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car?
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...
You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
Where I live, overtaking at a crosswalk is illegal because of that risk.
If every driver abided by traffic laws at all times we would have a lot fewer accidents.
If you’re breaking the law it’s harder to call it an accident.
I would live for this to be the answer - it’s definitely helpful, but I know a number of people who have made eye contact with a driver who has then proceeded to drive directly into them. I’ve had near misses like this too. It’s hard to imagine until you’ve experienced it, but incredibly scary to see someone who is looking directly at you and still somehow not reacting.
Both scar(r)ing them AND telling them to make eye contact seems better to me. People don't appreciate low-likelihood or abstract risks. I bet children appreciate them even less than grown-ups. They've never witnessed someone being hit by a car but they've witnessed thousands of people NOT being hit by a car. How do you think they would really internalize the rule to make eye contact without any evidence? Hell, even I'm more likely to make eye contact with the driver after yesterday's spike in my heart rate, and I'm not 5 years old
In my experience, the practice of eye contact is natural and generally pretty effective. "I see you, you see me. Acknowledged."
Drivers will still hit people who make eye contact. But besides that, this doesn’t help much if your kid is a runner.
Or drivers could look where they're going.
It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers appear to not register blindingly obvious objects in their path.
Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.
In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...
Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.
Yes, but as a pedestrian, do you want to bet your life on that?
And slow down too.
or maybe drivers should stop being reckless and dangerous
Suggestions should remain in the realm of the possible.
I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.
No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.
It's important to have good sound engineering along with the lights.
* https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close...
* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38
They have cross walks that have lights when pressed, but not traffic lights, just the warning orange ones.
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n
You might see if he would be OK with a flag on a stick attached to the back wheel.
As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater).
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car.
Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)
If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.
I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.
We have trucks, but almost no one has a truck as a family car because they are expensive and inconvenient.
They are here too... we just have this epidemic of abject stupidity.
So should the driver be watching out the windshield, or starting down at the screen?
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier.
I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
Small nitpick, abs isn't there to reduce braking distance, it just prevent someone who panic brakes from losing the ability to steer. Technically it even increases minimum braking distance a bit, but if someone is locking their brakes up anyways they were already incapable of achieving that peak braking performance because you need to maintain about 10% wheel slip and most drivers are not practised race car drivers.
40 years ago there was ABSOLUTELY ABS.
ABS in aviation goes back to the 1950s in planes and the late '60s in cars.
But what percentage of cars on the street had it. I understand it existed but not even disc brakes were nearly as ubiquitous as they are today, let alone electronics control of them.
They came in pretty quick. They were standard on every Cadillac and optional on many Fords by 1971, for instance.
Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier.
It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
The chart there is certainly worrying but it lacks a per 1000 column (but does include it in this quote, "The rates of pedestrian crash deaths per 100,000 people are highest for people ages 20 and over.").
Population is up but less people are walking (probably). Is it more dangerous to be a pedestrian now than it was at some point in the past? That chart doesn't have that information.
You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.
> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs
This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard.
And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?"
All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.
Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted
I don't believe people keep their kids 'safer' because they think the world has become more dangerous.
It's slightly taboo, but I think people protect their kids more now because they are more precious to the parents. The average number of children per mother has plunged in the last 200 years, and investment required in them per child to get them to child-bearing capability is much higher also. Child mortality has dropped like a stone, so any harm coming to children is much less tolerable.
Parents have so much invested in their children - and so few of them to "spare" - that they get far more protection than before.
I'm 55. Growing up in Florida in the 70's and 80's, I was outside for hours at a time. I would wander in the woods, following streams to their source and actually mapping the entire forest (I still have the map). I rode my bicycle all over town, by myself and with my equally adventurous friends, getting into all sorts of dangerous things. I went fishing by myself, literally dodging moccasins and alligators. I'd clean the fish with a very sharp knife when I got back. I still have scars all over my body reminding me of all the trouble I got into.
Damn, I'm glad I got to grow up then.
I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.
In Norway my children sometimes came home from primary school (ages five to twelve) with notes saying things like:
"We've planned a trip to the woods for next week, it's expected to be minus twenty Celsius so please make sure they have appropriate clothing, hats, gloves, boots. Also we will have a fire so make sure they bring some sausages and a hunting knife so they can cut sticks for the fire and to hold the sausages over the fire."
No. 2 son came home with a plaster on his arm after one such excursion, I think when he was about ten, and explained that one of his friends had been careless with his knife. There was no drama, the teacher carries a first aid kit for precisely this scenario, his friend was firmly told to not be so stupid, and the teacher used it to explain to the class why knives need to be properly handled.
In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them. Seems pretty reasonable to require that to handle something that could kill another person so quickly, easily, and even by accident.
Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.
My 5yo got plastic kitchen knives for her birthday which, while pretty dull, are still good enough to go through zucchinis.
A test wouldn't work here as she can't read yet (not full sentences at least).
> In the 90s I was taught knife safety before being given blades. Had to pass a test before we were given them.
You can teach kids how to safely handle and use blades. This reduces -but does not prevent- accidents... and some kids will handle them carelessly despite the training. [0]
In other words, the fact that a kid on the trip was cut by his friend doesn't mean that there was no blade safety training prior to the trip.
[0] Source: In another life, I used to teach kids these sorts of safety courses.
I accidentally had a pocket knife in my backpack after a camping trip when I was a kid 20 years or so ago. Being a good/naive kid, I told the teacher. Luckily the teacher was cool and said just leave it alone and we never had this conversation. That could have ended very differently with no tolerance policies starting around then.
In high school, many kids had rifles and shotguns in their cars to go hunting after school. Then we were old enough to keep our mouths shut haha.
The high school I attended had a shooting range once upon a time. It was expected that the kids would brings their rifles to school to use it.
How times have changed.
Sad.
When I was a child, I always had with me a multi-tool Swiss army knife, including at school, because I was very frequently building various things, or disassembling others to see how they were made. That early experience was very influential in becoming a successful engineer.
Decades later, as an adult, I was astonished to learn about the so-called "no tolerance" policies of many US schools, where the possession of even a small knife or even of less dangerous tools may be a reason for severe punishment.
Obviously, as a child, starting with the second day of school when 6-year old, I have always gone to the school and back, every day, alone, even if initially that was about a half hour of walking and then the later schools required long commuting by public transportation. Also none of my colleagues have ever been brought to school by someone else, and like me they did not have any contact with their parents since morning till late in the afternoon. All this was considered normal at that time.
>colleagues
Northern Spain? (Maybe francophone Swiss? Southern France? Belgium?)
(Pardon me for being presumptuous)
Imho school admins need to have skin in the bullying game. Bullying seems to be a natural (=inevitable) outcome of kids exploring social status outside the normative system of rules. I have always been fascinated with how bullies justify (sometimes "subconsciously") their own behaviour, and how these justifications mirror those "adult" rules..
An administration that shows the kids it's willing to place _its own status_ at risk might earn their loyalty.
(By contrast, the American edu system you speak of prioritises maximising its own safety hence the -ism suffix)
I'm hunting for real world examples of such. It seems that you might have encountered them!
Yeah, European.
When I was a child, bullying happened, but it was infrequent. Teachers would punish it severely if reported, but snitching was considered rather shameful, so it was more frequent that bullying was handled by the weaker bullied children teaming against the stronger bully.
Mobbing: weaker children teaming to bully a stronger child
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing#Development_of_the_con...
European concept with an explicitly English label, from (the eugenicist) Konrad Lorenz "so-called Evil"
Good for you!
When I was a boy I wanted a pocket knife b/c a friend got one and I saw it as useful. My Dad vetoed that until....I joined the Boy Scouts! Mom paid for a new official BSA knife along with the uniform. I promptly cut myself once with the knife, despite warnings from Dad. Doing so is a rite of passage for a knife-owner, I believe.
Fast forward to today. I've almost always carried a pocket knife and found it enormously useful. For my ~30th birthday my Dad finally bought me an Uncle Henry's 3-blade pocket knife about 3" long. It is finely made, always sharp, but difficult to fiddle with and not really very practical. I think of it as his acknowledgment that I am ready to carry a knife!8-) I'm glad I didn't have to ask him for a penis, though!
That little knife always sits atop my file cabinet. Someday I'll pass it along to someone else to perplex them. And I carry a folder of my own choice in my pocket.
I think you’re a great grandparent and gave my son the same thing at 10 plus encouraged my daughter to practice knife skills whenever she can with appropriately sized blades and powerful shears. I can’t imagine nerfing the world for kids that age and then expecting them to learn how to gauge risk appropriately a few years later when they start driving and taking on major decisions. I do understand keeping the knives out of school, but that seems like a simple oversight that should have no police involved unless actual danger occurred.
Here in Norway, my third grader gets to take a "scout knife" on school trips, we sometimes get pictures from the teacher of the kids sitting there sharpening sticks which I guess they use as swords or something because it's always too wet to barbecue.
That has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with "safety" being a magic word that gets way to many people to turn off their brains so the school is using as a pretext to enforce capricious rules and basically teach the kinds "do what the system says, however stupid, or else".
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
Do you have kids? Did you let them grow up the same way?
I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Yea, the problem isn't that we don't want to give kids the freedom we had as kids. The problem is the nosy public that won't mind their own business and instead call the cops when they see someone out just playing. Not willing to risk involvement with poorly-trained, amped-up, armed law enforcement.
I remember one vacation to Paris as a kid, maybe 12 years old. There was a science museum I wanted to see, so my parents stuffed a bunch of Francs into my hands and wished me luck and shuffled me out of the hotel room. You have to learn these skills at some point. I had a thoroughly lovely day pressing random buttons on random exhibits and I can still remember it all clearly now over 30 years later.
I'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
One of the most underrated things about living in a Western country compared to say India is that your 13 year old daughter can ride a bicycle to field hockey practice without ending up in a snuff movie.
> My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
Don't know where you're from, but where I am people love to state this but it's almost never true. Much like how everyone thinks there was some kidnapping epidemic in the US in the 90's which started the whole stranger danger junk.
I was told my kid would have CPS called on me, the cops arresting me, etc. due to the freedom I gave him at a young age. Sure the cops came around once in a while to check on things due to a busybody neighbor but not much came of it. I always knew where he generally was, had reasonable explanations over why I was letting him do what he was doing, was never high or drunk when the cops showed, etc. Yet if you asked any of the other parents in his classrooms? They would have bet money in the other direction and would have been aghast at what he did on a daily basis alone.
Yes, there are horror stories here and there when everything goes off the rails. I was prepared for such a fight if needed.
Luckily there were a couple kids in the neighborhood who had parents who were either not present or somewhat like minded. So he still had a few compatriots not utterly cowed by the Karens of the world to go get into (and out of!) trouble with.
Two daughters, both born in the 90's. Yes, I encouraged the same kind of freedom, but they weren't quite as adventurous as their dad. I thought they were a bit more adventurous than most of their friends, though.
A large part of the protectiveness of children is about the fertility trend. Parents with four children think about safety very differently than parents with probably ever only one. I saw this on my home street growing up. The girl next door was an only child who her parents hovered over relentlessly. When I was ten, with three brothers, and told mom I was going exploring, she made sure I had a quarter to phone home if my bike got a flat and told me to have fun.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
I can't help but think that thee's some sort of tragedy of the commons type thing going on here. Probably the wrong metaphor. But: it seems like a lot of what the article is getting at is that we can all intuitively agree that the population of children in society being more independent is good for a healthy society (or not just intuitively I suppose, he backs it up with mental health data). Any given parent can know this. But even if you know it, can you knowingly accept doing something that causes a 1% chance of losing your child in exchange for a 99% chance that they'll grow up better off? It seems most parents can't.
then why did every previous generation of parents do it?
most parents can, its just illegal now.
I call bullshit. The parents that WANT to let their kids roam free are stymied by "helpful neighbors", aka busybodies who simply will not let kids be alone.
I've seen it too many times: CPS or COPS (!!) called on children "unattended" outside -- even when it's really obvious their parents are watching through a window. Let's ALSO not gloss over the fact that CPS & police are used by neighbors to harass each other.
Let's say the simple truth: *US Culture is a literal abomination and its getting worse not better*
I think parents just have more time and energy to devote to an only child. Consequently they pour all of it into that child. Three kids? If they don't die or end up in prison, you've succeeded. (that last part is a joke, but the overall idea holds I think).
I suspect there is some sense of the kids helping each other and looking out for each other. It may not seem like it at the time lol.
The classic phrase is "the heir and the spare".[1] That's why Prince Harry's bio was titled "Spare".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heir_and_spare
Yeah, as an only child it's a weird burden to be the guy who makes or breaks the whole bloodline. No pressure right ;)
But that pressure is on the parents too. There's this weird two-way feedback loop.
Single child household has made parenting culture neurotic. Because if you screw it up it ends your entire bloodline.
But the neurotic attitude makes child rearing feel like such a burden, people can hardly imagine doing it more than once...
I am told this attitude does not produce beneficial outcomes in the children either. Apparently people grow up healthier when their parents are relaxed.
I'm not sure if single child households have done this to parenting culture as much as neurotic culture/economic incentives have pushed single child households. When everyone is competing it makes sense to focus on one child as you don't want your child to be at a disadvantage vs those who can spend on tutors/extra curriculars/.... It's a problem in Italy and some eastern countries, a bad and anti-social evolution in my opinion but I doubt it's going to change.
People used to knock out children as a social security/insurance policy for old age, or to work the farm as they aged. The rise of the welfare state(s) in urban societies removed that need.
This feels like assigning intent where economics is more correct: your priority is your children, but if you have three then by necessity you didn't multiply your attention or time in proportion.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
people still think about bloodline when having kids or when caring about safety? I would think that would be the last thing to worry about with kids safety.
They are wired by biology to think like that, consciously or not
Well they tried to minimize the number of kids until they hit middle age and suddenly want to maximize the number of grandkids. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that ;)
Eh, I don't think that's it. I come from a two-child household, and our parents weren't particularly precious about our safety in the neighborhood in the 80s and 90s. I knew plenty of other two- and one-child families that were the same.
But, Japanese, Germans and Polis are not that overprotective and dont have many children. If it was about fertility, you would see countries with low fertility all move toward overprotectiveness.
But, that overprotectiveness is very much an American phenomenon - exported a little but not that much yet.
Definitely some truth to this. I'm the oldest of five. Most of my friends when I was little seemed to have older siblings and they could do what they liked while my parents hovered over me a bit more. By the time my youngest sibling was born that completely changed. My little brother was allowed out with us pretty much as soon as he could walk!
Which parts are not a joke? If someone asked you who your main child was you’d be able to answer?
>Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s.... The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.
This is the step that otherwise smart people fail at.
"We were afraid of danger X so we did Y to prevent it and turns out it was a waste because not only did X not get worse, it got better! To heck with Y!"
And don't consider, maybe, things got better for that reason?
This is "only sick people take medicine" logic.
If you're tempted down this line of thinking you need to consider: If nothing had changed or they got worse, would that have been the expected results? What then would be the expected outcome?
Comparative analysis at a minimum, not just to other societies with different norms but attempting at least to find pockets that didn't change as much or as quickly, what happened there and in other sub populations where factors varied.
Otherwise you're just someone complaining how things used to be different, better in any way that fits a narrative that makes you feel comfortable or righteous or whatever.
so are means. Mean reported crime dropping in urban areas does not mean that things are adequately safe. having x% lower chance of getting mugged in the hood doesn’t mean that your kids can ride the bus alone.
Urban areas in the 90s , in projects and ghettos were basically war zones in terms of murder rates. They pushed the average murder & violent crime rates off the charts. Those have come down, but that doesn’t mean that the cities are now safe for 5 year olds to walk around alone.
Compare moderately sketchy parts of LA to Tokyo or Helsinki and tell me which one feels safe and which doesn’t . You can tell yourself “LA is so much better than the 90s” but you still won’t feel safe in the same way.
Precisely this! Too many confounding variables to look at such a surface level, a few high-level population wide stats. Nothing is that simple, nothing is clean in this sort of thing. Messy, interrelated factors, and you can chip away at the question bit by bit to reveal things but that is what it takes, not this do-it-with-vibes approach that's been around long before agents started taking prompts to code.
My hope is that agentic analysis that does this tedious methodical chipping away, comparative cross referencing of seemingly disparate datasets, will help shift society the tiniest bit away from law & policy making via hot takes that make even the well intentioned fall on their face with poor reasoning and the more cynical wield ambiguity a cudgel of control by any emotion they can incite, usually not the good ones.
Let’s see how it goes. I don’t think safety is properly being measured. Much like you can’t measure a beautiful property or a delicious dish. It has to be experienced.
Moreover, AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.
> When I tell people these numbers, the usual response is some version of “the world is more dangerous now.” It certainly feels that way. The only problem is that all of the data we have shows it’s much safer than when you or I were wandering the streets. Violent crime against children has fallen steadily since the early 1990s. Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today.
Could it be possible that we're confusing cause and effect here?
You could defintiely argue abductions and crime have reduced because there are fewer opportunities (because we keep the kids safe). But that still doesn't mean you can conclude the world is MORE dangerous.
Well, you could conclude the world is now more dangerous for any kid let wander - even if fewer do, and even if the observed average risk to any kid is lower (given they are allowed wander a lot less).
I don't want to be on the 'overprotect kids' side of the argument, but I'm not sure the numbers argur cleanly in one direction or the other.
I also often think of selection bias whenever anyone says "I was allowed do a lot more and we were fine" in the context of child safeguarding; because it also sounds like a lot of kids were abused in the past, who don't speak up in that conversation.
I don't know. I worry I overprotect my kids, but I also am not sure how to price in small risks of massively negative events. I think that's the crux of it for parents - trying to weigh hard tradeoffs.
The issue is not only on the parents side. For years my daughter walked on their own to their primary school. But same school didn't allow kids to leave the school unless a parent/legal guardian or person allowed by them would show up. I was ready to sign a paper but they refused.
Regarding leaving the front yard, there are so many communities/streets with lots of interdictions like prohibition to play with a ball, this is ridiculous. Yes kids are noisy, I know I have a small football field next to my office where kids still hang out after school and play until way past sunset. They are still less noisy than traffic and they bring life to otherwise boring neighborhoods.
The article is confused. The opinion is, it's so much safer _now_ than it was in the 1970s, it makes no sense to restrict children's wanderings.
But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
"We have so many fire-safety rules in the building codes in Seattle. But get this: we haven't had any major fires since 1889! It's obvious we don't need these rules!"
It's true there is a cost to restricting children. But let's be a bit more realistic about the tradeoffs.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?
> But the article doesn't consider whether restricting children's wanderings is the REASON it is so much safer for children now.
The article considers exactly that.
> Similarly, in an international study that looked at 7 to 15 year old children across 16 different countries they found that most english-speaking countries were in the lowest autonomy tier (12th- Ireland, 13th- Australia, 16th- South Africa). Americans weren’t surveyed, but countries like Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Denmark scored the highest on autonomy.
These countries are considered because they would generally be considered roughly as safe as one another (generally safer than America). These countries are the counterexample to your hypothesis: you can simultaneously have safe and independent children.
This article may not address this, but many articles of this type by Lenore Skazeny and others do address it. IIRC the findings:
- stranger danger was worse in the 70s than it is now. - safety in numbers was better in the 70s -- if all kids are outside it's more likely to be somebody else's kid that is snatched. If your kid is the only one, ... - car danger was worse in the 70s. Cars are bigger/faster now, but there were more drunk drivers then. This varies widely by jurisdiction.
It's hard to balance the factors -- it's not clear whether or not it was safer to let your kids outside today than it was in the 70's.
Yes, I often wonder this too: It's said all the time that communities are much safer than they were, so why restrict kids? But that raises the clear possibility that those preventative measures might be why it's safer now.
Whether we've hit the right balance of freedom VS safety is still very much worth discussing. But it certainly feels possible that the preventative measures we take have led to safer outcomes.
Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; that the numbers on this in the United States are in the order of 100,000s per year (at least of missing/unaccounted I think). How can it be like this?
I just can't conceive it - how is this even a thing? What is the psychology of these adults doing this? How is the morality of this lacking? And how can there be so many people involved? Where is all this insanity coming from? How did it develop? How did it slip through the idea of safety in the neighborhood we used to have?
I don't understand how this is real, the scale is inconceivable (how can so many people be so totally demented) it's the craziest thing I cannot comprehend.
100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.
OK I did some searching and found I'm no expert and I didn't understand the numbers: I think I put the 100K+ "unaccompanied children" at border each year together with the FBI raid cadence and thought it was all trafficking. Quick searching indicates: there's maybe 85K "lost contact" children after placement from border, which also doesn't mean what I thought; and FBI/LE recovered maybe 1000s of trafficked children in last decade. Still unimaginably large but not the numbers I thought I'd heard.
Consider the many millions who are unable to call the cops when this happens. Please don't make me explain why
There will be many sick people in a nation of hundreds of millions.
Stigmatizing mental help drives a lot of problems underground. So does our awkward immigration system that keeps all kinds of migrants in precarious positions, even legal agricultural laborers.
Our president has the strongest personal ties to the most prolific sex trafficker in recent decades, second only to Gladwell. Yet he has suffered no legal consequences for his association, nor even serious investigation. Epstein himself seemed afraid to name him under oath, and yet privately called him "the dog that hasn't barked". This leader of the nation bragged to journalists of sexually assauting people, and over 20 victims say it's true. And roughly half of the voting public still checks the box with his name on it.
> second only to Gladwell
Ghislaine Maxwell, I suppose you meant.
Yes, sorry, it was late
The vast majority of child sexual abuse is committed by family members, not strangers.
Well yeah, but that's just selection bias. We shouldn't take precautions around strangers because it's more likely that daddy will rape you?
That’s terrible: that there are bad people in the world and sometimes they’re in your own family.
A bit of searching suggests that it’s more often acquaintances than family, but you have to consider what goes unreported to LE I guess, tho hard to be sure: https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/...
What drives people to do this? It’s so crazy.
Anecdotally it seems a lot of teachers are involved in this.
But strangers definitely seem the minority.
I'm in my sixties and reflect sometimes on how much freedom I had as a kid, and why things have changed so much in terms of risks parents are willing to accept.
One correlation with "safetyism" this article doesn't mention: the rise of the two income household (https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-d... for the US; the UK appears to be similar.) In reality when we kids were running wild about the town, someone was watching us out their windows. If we got into (or more likely caused :) ) a problem, adults, usually a housewife, would show up quickly from somewhere. Even when we were off in the woods there was a sense that we could find a house where a grown-up would help us if needed (like if some kid's little brother ruptured his spleen on a dare, which actually happened.)
Nobody would call Child Protective Services - you knew it was little Billy who threw that rock that hit Jimmy, so-and-so's kid. You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it. Now I imagine police and lawyers would be involved. It seems we don't have the informal social connections any more, which were largely driven by someone just being around.
The above link BTW shows that "only" 50% of mom's were stay-at-home in the 1970's. In my specific time and place, many of the moms who did work outside the home had jobs that revolved around the school schedule (i.e., working at the school, or some work schedule that allowed them to be home when the kids were not in school.) The ones with full time jobs like my single mother, supporting three kids through full-time work, were a rarity back then. Maybe my brothers and I had excessive freedom because there simply wasn't anyone to watch over us - fortunately we all turned out more or less OK :)
I'm in my early forties and both my parents worked (as did all my neighborhood friend's parents) and we still spent a lot of time wandering around. Honestly I think people are really overthinking this. We spent a lot of time wandering around outside because we were bored. Now kids have an endless well of entertainment to choose from so staying at home is a much more appealing option. It's always tempting to romanticize your childhood but if I'm being honest, most of that time wandering around outside I was bored out of my skull. I was just marginally less bored than I would have been sitting at home.
Late 40's now. Both of my parents worked in the 80's-90's and I wandered up to 10 mi (16 km) away when I was 13. I was cycling up and down fire roads in the mountains. They never gave two shits how far I went so long that I wasn't in the house all the time but was back before dinner or sunset.
> You would tell Billy's dad, who would make sure he didn't ever do _that_ again, and that would be the end of it.
By beating the child?
It's not necessary, but it might be necessary for the child to believe that's a possibility. It's like armies. The presence and the possibility do most of the work. My grandfather didn't beat his children, but e.g. spanks and being hit on the butt by a belt were permissible by society. He didn't do that AFAIK, but the children knew it was possible, and a single look from him sufficed to get them to stop misbehaving.
He's very loved by them, BTW. I didn't meet him, but they always talk with admiration of him.
I was hit with a belt as a child. The possibility nor the reality helped make me a better person. It actually has a negative effect on mental health
It might be like brakes. Some people abuse the brakes for their own self-satisfaction to e.g. brake-check others, others brake hard every time they need to come to a stop (e.g. intersections) because they don't know otherwise, and then others make it seem like the brakes don't even exist as the car glides without disturbance to the point that you might find it normal to have a drink from a open cup throughout. It's always necessary to have the brakes, and always permissible to slam on them in case an emergency is happening, but they're ideally used sparingly and softly. They should ideally be made to seem like they don't exist, even though everyone knows they do.
Aren’t you just describing an EV with regen braking and one foot pedal driving? The brake pedal is just for emergencies.
Dude, you're breaking the analogy. Imagine an ICE car from the 90s. It's not about what technologies you're using. It's about the skill and intent with which you use the brake pedal (considering it the only form of braking).
But the problem is fixed now with new tech. Now we just have to worry about heavy rapid acceleration in family sedans instead of bad brake discipline.
Actually no. I don't remember parents actually hitting their kids, even in the 1970's. And this was a very rust-belt working class environment.
Did we stop letting kids leave the front yard, or did they simply stop doing that themselves?
I grew up in the late 80s / early to mid 90s. We were allowed the roam around until dark. But that was also a more natural thing to do, as there weren't a whole lot of things to do inside (we had to ask very nicely if we could stay inside to play).
But as I got into my teens, indoor activities became more accessible. Everyone had a computer, the internet became a thing, you suddenly had more options than to just bike around or play. As I got into my young adult years, I noticed that team sports and things like that had dropped off significantly where I came from. Even in my small rural town we'd have 3-4 soccer teams in my age group...10 years later, they could barely string together a single team of teens to play for our town team. Many kids had simply lost interest, and were occupied with other things.
My context is that I was born in the late 90s: The main thing that lead to me prioritizing using the computer and playing with people online over in person was one of convenience. My parents did a really good job at making it a massive pain in the ass as a young teen to have a friend visit, or vice versa.
"Hey can I go visit X?"/"Can X come play?" "what time? did you already call to ask if it was ok? What did their parents say? Who's going to drive you, their parents or me? how long? Our house is too messy for visitors."
Very quickly I got sick of having to play 20 questions. It was far easier to just add my friends on skype, spin up hamachi, and host minecraft servers for us to play together online. No exhausting negotiation sessions with my parents, no worry that the scheduling won't work out, I just get to play.
Definitely not a universal experience, in that regard. But I think its definitely a component of it. Why bother trying to fight for the permission to be independent out in the world, when you could be digitally independent far more easily?
In the 90s/2000s, my parents refused to even let me go into the front yard alone because I'd get "kidnapped". 24 hour news made lots of parents absolutely deranged and plenty of people really thought kidnappers flew around like hawks, waiting for under 18s to be outside of the sight of parents for one second so they could swoop down and carry them away.
I tried to go outside a few times. Learned the hard way that it wasn't allowed. Plus many other kids weren't allowed outside either.
I'm old enough to remember Atari when it was new. Playing a video game at home was quite something, no quarters required! But it also had somewhat limited replayability. Doesn't matter how good you are, eventually Defender is going to beat you.
The NES was a radical departure in how games were played and how good they were. You'd never spend all day in front of the Atari, but you could with the NES.
Add to that the steady increase in the availability and affordability of cable tv, then VCRs and video rentals, and now the TV is even more central to the ordinary person's life. Then came computers, the Internet, etc.
I think there is definitely something to kids just not being as interested in going outside. Why would they be? All their friends are in the magic box in their pocket. Outside is where you get sunburn and ticks that make you allergic to meat.
Similar experience here. Lots of time spent outside until around 14, when I got my first self-built computer. After that more time was spent inside chatting with friends and playing games. It was self-isolation.
Of course around the same time my older brother, and all our friends were doing the same. So it was just natural to spend less time outside or hanging out with friends in person
I blame apps and products like WhatsApp and Nextdoor. We've created these online means of connection (and conflict) which allows us to communicate without having to actually meet anyone in person.
Absent these forced meetings, parents barely know their neighbors and consequently, their kids barely know anyone even two doors down.
We lost grownups.
Modern establishments (businesses/governments) work by making people afraid. It is truly, the age of fear.
Let me quote M.I.B
>There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!
At some point we figured that there is good money to be made by making the people perpetually aware of how they or their loved one are going to die 24x7!
Yeah no one was afraid during the Cold war
My personal opinion for the reasons for this:
- Less families with kids the same age in suburban neighborhoods
- Less community between neighbors
- More on demand entertainment inside the house
Basically it's more that there is less to do outside and more to do inside. Parents just want their kids to busy themselves, and inside is easier than outside now.
A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.
But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.
Grew up surrounded by farms in rural Ontario. My parents did a great job of driving me to friends houses to socialize, but when there wasn't an organized play date I had two options: stay at home or go wander. I usually opted to stay at home and read or play video games but I did often just pick a direction and go walking. My parents made me take a hunting knife with me and only let me do this around the age of 12. While it is great to romanticize my wandering in the wilderness, it was typically pretty boring. As a result I played more video games as I got older.
My best friend lived in a sort of suburb (still very rural) but we'd spend all day biking around, meeting other kids, getting up to trouble, and making grand adventures to the store to buy mountain dew. This was all the way up until high school. After 14 I was too busy with school and sports in the academic year to do anything else, and in the summer I worked at a camp.
I talked to my mom about this recently and she said that 'kids can't just wander around anymore it's unsafe' and I'd argue that a child with a smart phone that constantly pings their location is a million times safer than whatever the hell we were doing.
I think the challenge is that parents are more anxious and video games and social media are way more convenient than anything outside the house, making a perfect storm. I don't remember leaving the house as much as a kid because there was that much to do outside, but rather we had exhausted all the activities at home. I feel like now you have unlimited options for entertainment at home so why bother, especially if your parents would rather you be at home anyways.
Interesting what factors people choose to explain it. I just read Life After Cars which makes a compelling case that a major factor was the car: people don’t feel safe letting their kids wander and prefer driving them everywhere… which makes people feel less safe letting kids wander.
As I'm sure many people on HN with kids do, I think very highly of my toddler's capabilities. I'm looking forward to the day I can stick him on a cross-town bus and have him fly solo (or at least with a peer/buddy). I'm hoping he can do it by age eight or nine. That was the same age my parents let me ride my bike several miles across town to a friend's house.
My biggest fear for my kid out in the world is not abduction, but injury or death by automobile.
This matches research done by Let Grow that claims that kids spend so much time on their smartphones because they are on a short leash and would prefer unstructured play time:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/kids-smart...
As a parent of a 9 year old I often find myself keeping them on a short leash and need to consciously give them the freedom they crave. Reading these articles help me be more aware and courageous.
As a 16-year-old, I want to say this: My friends and I do go out, but that sense of spontaneity we used to have is gone.Everything's pre-arranged in group chats now, those spontaneous get-togethers always excited me more, but they’re very rare now. And I think this is now universal in most places
> According to a 2017 study, approximately 38% of all children will be investigated by CPS by the time they are 18.
This seems outrageously high. The study says it is an "estimate". I'm willing to be their methods or assumption are seriously flawed. Would be curious if someone has looked into it.
I'm also curious what it really means to have CPS called on you. People talk about it like it's a foregone conclusion that they'll take your kids away. I just can't believe they would do so lightly. Now of course even having to interact with them must be extremely stressful.
I overall agree with this article. I was mostly raised in the US but spent time from ages 7-9 in Finland, where I took the metro to school alone, so I see myself reflected in this statistic:
> For example, in Finland, the majority of 7 year olds are routinely allowed to walk or bike alone. And by 8, the majority of kids cross main roads, commute to school, and navigate their neighborhoods unaccompanied.
However, I feel the need to push back against this small addition to the main point:
> It's providing trigger warnings, so that people can walk out instead of face being uncomfortable in the classroom.
The article is about parents and parenting-culture _restricting_ a child's freedom, especially during important developmental stages.
Trigger warnings in a college classroom are for adults to casually and quickly let other adults know when content might trigger their PTSD (not simply discomfort) so they can make an informed decision about attending a lecture or not, given that it simply might not be worth their time if they won't be able to listen and learn in a clear-minded state. There are no restrictions to anyone's ability to make these decisions, simply a bit more information being provided up front to allow one to do so.
It feels rare to find authors online who both see the danger of raising a generation of children who are never taught that they are allowed to take care of themselves, but who also recognize the value of being kind enough to warn people when you are going to discuss sensitive topics in a lecture, harming nobody in the process.
edit: In fact, thinking a bit more about it, one of the large points the author makes is that consuming either traditional or social media, which is biased towards showing us negative content related to crime, violence, tragedy, etc, will prime parents to over-protect their children. And in the same article, claims that being warned about content that might provoke an intense emotional reaction is an overstep.
Maybe if these parents were also warned that "hey, I know you're just trying to catch up to the news, but reading about a child abduction 2 states over is actually just going to spike your cortisol and make you a worse parent", it would help a generation of parents self-select the media they consume, and help them avoid this trend?
I was a free range kid in the 80s in Daytona Beach FL, i was a bit of a handful so i would literally get grounded to "outside the house" and told not to come in until the street lights where on. Ironically, Daytona Beach FL during that time was not the place for a free range kid. I remember bulletin boards full of "have you seen me" posters of missing kids and runaways at the beach arcades. As a teen I was moved to Abilene TX (culture shock to say the least) but same situation, I skated all over that little city by myself between ages 12-15. My kids today ( 16 and 14 year old boys ), are doing more and more outside but they certainly didn't has young children. My wife and I encouraged it but there was just no interest. We'd have to drag them to playgrounds and parks.
My 14 year old has gotten into mountain biking so he's on his bike a lot. It's funny how proud boys are of scrapes and bruises. My 16 year old has taken up skateboarding which warms my heart as an ex-skater so he's been doing that more and more. Plus, the 16 year old has a driver's license now so he can get to a skatepark or hang out with friends without having to coordinate with me or his mom very much.
We raised out kids in an urban setting, Dallas proper. If i had to do it over I would have raised them in a suburb. There whole setup in the northern suburbs of DFW are just better for families. The public schools are acceptable, the parks are better, no gunshots every night, no vagrants shooting up or shitting on the sidewalk, more family oriented businesses the list goes on.
For those who grew up in a time and place where you were able to wander without supervision, how far away were your friends? Follow up, how much traveling did you do on your own?
For me growing up in 2000's suburbia, the closest kids around my age that I knew of were about one mile and major road crossing away, but to get to a friend it could be a lot more. I think kids out in a group doesn't feel like a safety concern to most people even now, but if they have to travel 5+ miles solo just to meet up with one other person, that's where the issue might lie.
Born in 1990. In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, many of my friends lived in the same neighborhood. That's how we became friends in the first place: you'd see each other outside and gradually become friends.
By the time I was 14 or so, many of them had moved to other parts of the town, typically 2-3 miles away. By this age I was comfortable riding a bike or walking to visit them, though equally as often we'd ask our parents for a ride just to save ourselves time or because we were bringing heavier stuff with us.
I did have a few friends that were farther away, about 4+ miles, and I rarely if ever made it out that far on bike or foot. That was a mix of the distance and the type of roads I'd have to take or cross to get there.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends were within a 2 block radius, so about 300 yards. Tack on another block each year and that was the standard walking distance to a friend's house.
And of course in high school there was the standard minimum of one student death per year per school, usually related to driving. So teen deaths seemed more prevalent than younger ages.
I used to live a kilometer away from school and would walk/ride there myself from 9 or so years.
Then when I was ~12 we moved further away. Probably 3-4 kilometers and I would still ride in.
I had friends scattered all over the area between my place and school but I never needed any assistance from them.
Same block, next block, and 3 miles (5 km).
I had some friends within half a mile or we'd meet at a park. But in high school, my friends were a few miles away and across a few highways. We needed to drive. Idk if this counts but my parents did let my older brother with a license take me places in his car.
I spent part of my life growing up in a major Asian city where communal ties are very strong, and spent a very significant fraction of my childhood outside of my house, just because there was so much to do - whether it was playing soccer, playing hide and seek, or taking the local bus/train with friends to shows, coffee shops or restaurants. All of this was before cell phones. If I got lost or needed help I'd ask a stranger for directions or navigation.
Nothing bad ever happened to me, and most people were actually quite kind and helpful to a 14 year old kid asking for help and directions. That sense of confidence in myself - that I could figure out how to pretty much do anything - has stuck with me in a way that a lot of my friends who grew up in sanitized suburban neighborhoods just don't have.
Kids really don't know what they're missing.
We would go into a forest and chop down trees... among other things. A sibling did get in trouble once, because it wasn't our forest, but it wasn't that big of a deal.
What happened is we learned the extend of sexual abuse of minors. Estimates in the early 90s was around 1%.
Research in the late nineties revealed the actual percentage was about 9% and 10%.*
Are we over-reacting maybe but maybe not.
* I vaguely recall that in an episode of PsychologyInSeattle, a guest that was doing research into food addiction back then realized that over 40% of their patients had experienced some sort of sexual abuse when they were a child, this led them to expand their research into that subject and discover the full extent of the issue. I think the research they did put the figure for the general population at 16% but take these numbers with a grain of salt it's been a while since I listened to it.
.. however, isn't that almost entirely from people known to the child? Authority figures, teachers, priests, step-parents? "Stranger danger" was in some ways a recoil from recognizing how bad the "system" was in secret, as it relied on abuse of trust.
I think that only reinforces the fear. The old thinking was the danger was the guy in the van snatching up children. Now we assess the danger may be the father of the kid next door.
Most of that happens in families
Ofc, it doesn't mean it's any safer outside.
I mean..if it mostly happens in families that does mean it's safer outside
Families are outside too. Once you trusted your neighbor, if they are abusing their child why wouldn't they abuse yours?
I remember walking the last couple miles of the Garden State Parkway a week or two before it opened. Could a youngster do such a thing today?
After checking the Wikipedia page, I realized that I was only 10 or 11 at the time. Somehow I remembered it as having been older – high school age.
This bit is not supported by the quoted studies:
"We live in a culture of safetyism. And it’s largely an English speaking phenomenon."
If you look at page 14 of this:
https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files...
its far from clear.
I am also very dubious of the findings. The very low level of mobility in Sri Lanka contradicts what I see - especially relative to England. Most families do not have cars, for example. I suspect a bias to Anglophone affluent urban families.
I was wondering what the hell people here are talking about. Then I saw that my country (Finland) is number one on that list.
Indeed, my children (3 and 5 year old) run freely around the half hectare communal yard of my housing company (which includes 12 apartments). Almost all kids here go to school by themselves either by walking or by bike, starting at the age of seven. I also see kids around this age playing without adults in groups on streets and parks all the time.
City planning gets a lot of shit here, but apparently we did something correctly. It might also have something to do with cities here being generally safe. I'm probably just as concerned about my children's safety as parents in any country, but it just isn't that scary out there.
> It might also have something to do with cities here being generally safe.
Is the difference in actual safety or the perception of safety?
For example. Finland has a higher rate of traffic related deaths than the UK according to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
but kids in Finland have a lot more autonomous mobility.
Reading through the comments here, it shows just how underrated small towns and rural communities are. I've hardly even seen anyone here mention them as an option. While they have their own downsides, they check most / all of the boxes that people are talking about here in terms of child-friendly environments.
I was a lot more permissive parent when my children were imaginary.
Plans don't survive contact with the enemy and all that!
I was there when entertainment became available. 1 or 2 kids dissapeared inside, watching or playing on the new PS1/N64. Slowly more and more got PCs. Playing online.
I won't criticise actual parents - these are their children, their decision, their responsibility and their either regrets or appreciation later. That is a trade-off and they will see in about 20 years whether it was worthwhile. Even not having children I know parenting is difficult (I just remember how hard it was for my parents). However I definitely appreciate that I was allowed to wander through my town (in central Europe) when I was a child/teenager. Moreover - I regret being so afraid of everything and not exploring more. Maybe it was a time to have that fear so that I could overcome it in later stages of life. Maybe.
To be a devil's advocate - maybe lower frequency of crimes against children is a result of that red tape? Or maybe not. I don't know.
I live in the SE US suburbs and a regular story on the news are fears over roaming packs of kids on e-bikes or e-motorcycles. Now, while the safety concerns of reckless riding are warranted, it also tells me that at least some of the kids are alright.
I live in a low density, large neighborhood where kids 8-17 are out roaming all the time, the older half heading to adjacent shops and other neighborhoods. I recognize and know who most are and their parents. The common trend I see is a purposeful limiting of screen time.
We have the same "problem" where I live in central coast CA. It's so rad to see kids ripping e-bikes all over town. Would I prefer the kid riding on the back seat isn't staring at her phone? Of course! But at least they are outside exploring! Fwiw most of the kids I see with this freedom are Mexican but that could be because I live closer to and work downtown, closer to lower income areas and not in the suburbs.
It's fascinating to me that we forbid our kids to wander and socialize outside believing it's "dangerous" while it's safe. And instead we let them wander endlessly online where they can easily get abused...
"Why are we so afraid to let kids explore"?
Pedophiles.
They were always there, even inside of families and churches. Just underreported.
children are pack animals ... as a kid the neighborhood was full of children and all of us had freedom to walk or when older ride our bikes anywhere always in a herd ... this is still the case in that tiny one red light village ... challenge is due to globalization most of the factories within driving distance have shuttered so working age adults have moved to where the jobs are leaving that village dominated by grandparents ... same freedom exists yet without the density of kids
The point of the article is that children have less independence now even though cities are statistically safer.
Yet a lot of the comments here suggest that kids would have more independence if cities were safer (particularly from cars).
IMHO, the answer is to improve safety by teaching children how to navigate dangers. Teach children how to cross the road; teach children to be aware of distracted drivers; teach children about situations to avoid (e.g., being in a blind spot).
Waiting for cities to be sanitized theme parks before letting kids out of the house is how we got into this mess.
Moved house earlier this year, from an apartment in a not so safe area to a house in a family area with no cars and more green. The kiddos have been out so much more, and it's awesome to see how they find phones / screens less interesting when they can just go and play outside.
This popped up on my feed, and I thought it was fitting :)
TV interview with parents taking their little kids to see Alien (1979):
https://x.com/TheCinesthetic/status/2058998742506954766
https://xcancel.com/TheCinesthetic/status/205899874250695476...
Thank you for raising the issue. One stupid reckless driver, or a street criminal can cause overprotective behavior.
You can't control a society without keeping them afraid, so roll that tape of predators, kidnappers, gangs, and drug pushers!
What? A child doing something without adult supervision? Next thing you know they'll start thinking for themselves, asking uncomfortable questions, or looking for forbidden books in the library. Better call the cops and accuse them of vandalism or something.
> But the kindest thing I can do, the thing that will actually make my daughters resilient, is to let the small problems happen.
I live in an average California suburb. Average priced homes, relatively quiet street, not really any disorder or even appearance of disorder. When I let my kids play in the front yard - minding themselves - neighbors call the cops. I've written about this before, and it's not simply a matter of choosing to let your own kids have more freedom.
There are simply no kids outside anymore so if yours are, they stand out. Kids playing outside is now so outside the norm and neighbors on edge that they will call the police. The police will not ignore it, and you or your kids will have to contend with a police encounter. This has the effect of making parents perform a calculus every time their kids ask to play outside.
If there's a way to get neighbors to feel that kids playing in yards is normal, I'm all ears.
> When I let my kids play in the front yard - minding themselves - neighbors call the cops
> The police will not ignore it, and you or your kids will have to contend with a police encounter
What if you just kept doing it? I’ve heard about similar situations where the cops would start to ignore your neighbors.
You should never talk to the police. One of the most effective means of accomplishing this is to avoid police encounters.
Maybe it's different if you have 8 or 15 kids.
If you enjoy/agree see also: https://reason.com/tag/free-range-kids/
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Enough!
The notion that children are not allowed to play outside within a couple of blocks of their home seems like a mass delusion to me.
However, I'm GenX and having all my friends and I roam the neighborhood from the time we got out of school until our parents got home from work with no supervision seems perfectly normal.
"Come home when the street lights come on" and television PSAs asking "It's nine o'clock, do you know where your children are?" were the norm in the 70's.
Maybe it's a local thing. I often see random kids roaming on the streets.
I first became aware of how insane things could be when a single mother was arrested for allowing her child to play at the park a couple of blocks from their home while she was working.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...
Meh, even when you have the infrastructure for kids like in Germany. You still need to keep your eye on them. I've heard too many horror stories, including from personal friends of them just being dragged into a bush by a stranger and scarred for life. :/
It's a garbage world containing many garbage people and I think the "good old days" where you could just send your kid out in the morning and only see them at dinner never existed in the first place. It's just that predators can only prey on so many at once...
They're probably a lot safer in big numbers though, like if you had a group of 4 kids, each with cameras ready to film a potential attacker you could maybe give them ways in which they can protect themselves without necessarily needing adult supervision.
It's gonna be a hard problem to solve when I'll be a dad.
This is not a isolated phenomenon. Security measures for software products, for example, kept increasing making good old working software to be highly vulnerable in today's world. There are some islands that have un-contacted tribes. They can't survive if they move out of the island. In my childhood, there were some popular movie songs and stories which advised people to stay in villages, not to venture out to town-side and showed the scary stories of what happened to people who ventured out.
It's the context around you that is changing. Also, the digital divide is so strong that many old people and village folks see anything related to technology or complex online processes as alien things that they can't dare to deal with. They are basically living in the non-digital islands. The logins, MFA, password recovery, OTP, finding the correct web portal, filling in the right information - it's a nightmare for a common human.
Facebook/Nextdoor has been a curse for kids. Parents gossip, moan and report kids constantly. Recently hysteria over e-bikes. But really it’s any trivial annoyance.
I think adults / elderly completely lack perspective and compassion for kids. Berating them for using iPads, berating them for playing outside.
In reality there aren’t that many kids out socializing, and not many avenues for them to be free and be themselves. They are constantly monitored directly via their phones and indirectly via the E-Stasi .
When I was a kid in the 80s/90s there were kids just everywhere: parks, streets, malls , playgrounds, school facilities. We had to sneak into abandoned yards to find our own space.
Now adults are whining about a few kids roaming around being kids.
I'm a Gen-Xer. I work with a lot of younger, fresh-out-of-college kids. I tell them about how it was as a kid in the 70's and 80s, but they generally reject it with disbelief. They think I'm lying when I tell them that my single mother would leave for work in the morning, and us kids would have absolutely zero supervision until she got home, usually around 7PM. Contacting her at work was basically impossible ("If you call me at work, someone better be dead!") In the summer months we roamed the streets with other neighborhood kids like a pack of wolves on BMX bikes - completely unsupervised.
I had a friend get shot (some dumb-ass kid was playing with his dad's gun in the woods). One of the neighborhood kids was a Boy Scout and knew enough to tourniquet his leg. Another kid knew how to drive his dad's pickup truck, so we threw him in the back and drove to the ER. No parents around (until they showed up at the ER).
There was also a time when some creepy older dude used to come down to the woods where we all hung out and rode our BMX bikes. He was probably in his mid-20s. It was totally stereotypical. He used to offer us beer and rides in his cool Trans Am. We all thought he was a creep so we stayed away. One of the kids told his dad, and shortly thereafter the dude stopped coming around. I assume some sort of "street justice" took place, but I'm not sure.
Kids would get in fist fights around lunchtime, then be best friends by dinnertime. We lit stuff on fire, built ramps and treehouses with wood we stole from the nearby construction site, and we drank water directly from random houses' garden hoses.
Anyway, all of this stuff (and A LOT more) happened all the time. All the neighborhood kids stuck together and looked out for one another, even if we didn't necessarily like one another. Parental involvement really wasn't an option. Almost all our parents worked. And the best part: it was awesome!
I'm sure kids think Don't Tell Mom the Baby Sitter's Dead is preposterous, but our parents frequently left 6+ kids unsupervised for a week or more at a time. The oldest at home was 13
This still happens in most European countries, kids go to school on their own, you see them all over the place on public transports, play with their friends somewhere back home and then are eventually back.
To me, this is one of the many issues with designing around motor vehicles and motornormativity (i.e. viewing personal cars as the only viable mode of transport).
It's been spoken about a lot of times with philosophies such as 15-minute cities and there has been progress in Europe with promoting active travel and banning some cars from city centres. However, there's a lot of entrenched money and power that push for ever increasing numbers of cars and that's why the discussion ends up polarised.
Personally, I like Cory Doctorow's phrasing of "geometry hates cars". When places are designed for cars, more room is required for attempting to ease congestion (induced demand makes this futile) and parking, but facilities can be moved further apart as people are using cars to get there. That leads to more cars being used, which leads to more congestion, which leads to more space being allocated, which leads to facilities being spaced further apart. Rinse and repeat until cars are the only mode of transport which can be used.
It doesn't even matter if you choose to parent your kids like this anymore... there's nowhere for them to go and no one else to hang out with these days. There's no more village.
There's also one metric that I've heard that gives a lot of parents pause: while being out and about in the world is generally safer than ever in the US from a social standpoint, it's more dangerous than ever to be a pedestrian.
I have concerns in this area myself but I find the attempt to create an opposing ideology "safetyism" and then attribute unrelated stuff like trigger warnings to that ideology to be unnecessarily reductive.
I call this "Shitarticlism" and it includes OP's article and also a bunch of clickbait I read. And Microsoft Learn.
If I work from home I see tons of unaccompanied kids going to school in the morning. I live in what is statistically the most crime ridden area in my city. My toddler has a drive for independence that will probably lead to him doing this himself in a few short years just need to impress road safety on him a bit more.
My oldest son of 10 years already cycles alone through our village. Hangs out with friends in nearby parks or soccer fields. Here in the Netherlands infrastructure is build around cyclists and pedestrians. I can't imagine him sitting home all the time. As soon as he wakes up in the weekend he leaves the house. During the week he cycles to school which is about 2 miles by bike. No phone, no gps. It's how we live.
Very likely declining social trust has something to do with this phenomenon.
>But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
>"The extent of the effect is shocking," says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
>https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05iht-dive...
The world didn’t get more dangerous. We got more afraid.
The people in my life who consume conservative media are afraid. They all say the world is so different now. It is. It's safer.
The people in my life who don't consume conservative media aren't so afraid...
History Channel has a good series about what gen X and baby boomers grew up with: https://www.history.com/shows/hazardous-history-with-henry-w...
In general there is excessive alarmism, and the internet makes it possible.
This is a product of making everyone and everything reliant on cars. Social control is out of the window if nobody wanders the streets.
Not leaving the front yard is unthinkable in many countries outside the US.
> This is a product of making everyone and everything reliant on cars.
That's not necessarily the whole story. While walkable villages and cities would be a huge improvement in many areas of society and community resilience, however kids in un-walkable US suburbia and urban sprawl have had bicycles, skateboards, skates, or some form of mobility device since at least the 1950's. There have been dedicated bike lanes in some areas since around 1985-1990 and many have bike or multi-use trails. While not as fast or efficient as cars, it was how we got around before 15 ½ when one could apply for a learner's permit. About age 9 or 10 was when we were let loose.
You're looking at it too shallow. Kids don't bike because everything is too far away, because they expect you to drive out of the suburbs. The roads feel less safe, because everyone is in a car. Everyone in cars are unanimous, no social control.
When you have infrastructure that doesn't rely on cars, you will have schools and stores and communities right in your "suburb".
"A 2008 study found that media exposure explains why Americans, in particular, often see the rest of the world as dangerous Other research shows a link between the amount of crime reported on the news and the degree of fear people have over crime."
So we should go back to the 'good old days' and not report the crime? I guess ignorance is bliss. If there is more crime being reported in an area, that's a signal that it's more dangerous, and you should take precautions.
"Stranger abductions, the thing every parent imagines when they hesitate to let a 10-year-old walk to a friend’s house, were rare in 1985 and are rarer today."
It's the same with plane crashes. The problem is that it only has to happen one time for total devastation.
There are now grooming gangs in countries like the UK to worry about (which wasn't the case in the 80s and 90s). The Internet has made it much easier for predators to organize, share information, and get to your kids.
When I was 11, I was around people doing drugs, smoking, drinking, and lighting illegal fireworks off (nearly blew my fingers off a few times), all without my parents knowing.
The dangers were always there. Society just chose to ignore them in the those days.
When are we gonna get a rule about AI slop submissions?
"Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."
Why limit this to comments only? In this case the conversation was literally started by an AI.
At least require people to label submissions as AI-generated and then give users a way to filter that shit out. I don't come to HN to read AI slop.
Wait, how do you know that? I took a quick look at OPs stuff and it seems human
what has been lost is civilisation.period, full.stop. what we have is institutionalisation at scale. which only rachets one way.
I have seen the opposite argument, such as kids having too much autonomy in so far as social media usage .Or just go on Instagram and you will see tons of examples of young adults taking steroids and other stuff. I'm sure the parents are aware of this, but meh.
And ppl on this very site "trying to interest my 3yo for programming by building fun little gagdets for her".
Ppl are so stupid, they need online courses for locating their wiener when peeing outside their regular zone...
Is likely due to how humans react to issues. They fix it or make a big deal to over fix it when someone gets hurt. The baseline risk shifts and people will get scared looking back doing a mental calculation: lower risk better then higher risk.
Stuff like training wheels, bike helmets when you are just doing leisure rides. Don't get me started with bike helmets, people wear them and do risker things, drivers drive less careful around them, and you get a false sense of superiority instead of being more careful. If you're on the road/off roading, sure, but now you can get fined in some place for not wearing is one small example of safetyism taking over.
I'm someone who advocates for rolling back helmet laws because they decrease ridership, but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes.
A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar.
> be hit by a car
Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people.
> They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do.
They're annoying enough that they do, in practice if not in theory. To say nothing of the fact that drivers pass you closer and more dangerously if you're wearing a helmet.
> helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Quite the opposite.
It's the most common sports related head injury by a wide margin and helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1] As a public health policy it makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally I've flown over my handlebars and hit my helmet without serious injury, and I'm sure I would have been in much worse shape otherwise.
On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measures. If you have a study suggesting that helmets would significantly help I'd be curious to see it.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7019a1.htm
Not that rare. When I was a kid (in the 90s) I lost two classmates to bike crashes. One actually dead, the other severely brain damaged for life.
Neither accident involved a car.
Both would have likely had a few broken bones at the absolute worst if they’d been wearing helmets.
I wasn’t in an especially large elementary school, either.
I'm sorry for your loss, but your school is very much an outlier; public policy should look at the overall rates, and statistically it is rare. Particularly if we're talking about an everyday school commute along surface roads (the risk profile for mountain biking or BMX-style stunt riding is quite different, and wearing helmets for those activities makes a lot of sense).
Consider the risk compensation theory where people take bigger risks when they feel safer. Not sure how true it is with regards to bike helmets, though. I saw there are a few studies but don't have the time to read them.
I usually wear a helmet but am opposed to such laws not because they decrease ridership but because they decrease our freedom to do stupid shit.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE
Sure. They should be widely available, cheap or free for kids, public awareness campaigns funded, etc.
> not overactive safetyism.
Not once they devolve into laws. That would be overactive safetyism with the second order effects worse than the cure - as you note earlier in your comment.
I know I simply stopped riding my bike altogether once my mom decided (as a young teen) out of the blue helmets were now required. That or I'd bike a block away, stash it in the bushes, and grab it on the way back home.
And for me it was simply comfort (sweaty!) and the fact I'd forget the damn thing everywhere and be forced to go back to get it/pay for one out of my allowance if I lost it.
> but helmets are a fantastic example of reasonable PPE, not overactive safetyism.
Especially with E-bikes, which are operated at higher average speeds.
As a commuter cyclist of over 20 years, my favorite recent trend are is wearing a bike helmet and giant noise-cancelling headphones at the same time.
To be fair, good noise cancelling headphones nowadays have "transparent" or "ambient aware" modes that actually electronically pipe the outside noise in. (Whether the cyclists in question are actually using that feature, who knows?)
I’ve also seen this. It’s completely insane. Especially when I consider how many times a sound alerted me to a danger while I was on my bike.
People use helmets because they are forced to. Not because they actually believe they are doing something dangerous while casually biking to work. People who got convinced casual biking is dangerous just drive while listening to audio book.
No idea about bicycle, but for motorcycles, integrated helmet headphones are a thing for long time. It maybe helps that a typical motorcycle helmet is quite noise-cancelling by itself, so one relies mostly on moving faster than traffic and if that fails, on mirrors and not on sound.
Besides being an mc person I always considered bicycle helmets a useless compromise in that they don't provide true protection like full-face motorcycle helmets do. You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle, so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
> You're still as likely to leave half of your face on the obstacle [when wearing a bicycle helmet], so either don't bother or wear something that would prevent that.
With surgical assistance, I can heal from leaving half of my face on an obstacle. Healing from leaving a big chunk of my brain on an obstacle [0] is -at best- quite a bit more involved.
[0] ...or a chunk of an obstacle in my brain...
> In England data shows that in 1971, 86% of primary-age children traveled home from school unaccompanied. By 1990, that had fallen to 35%. By 2010, it was 25%.
So basically the main change affected already the childhood of, what? 85% of the average HN reader, at least if they are from England. What are we talking about then?
Is not rocket science, if everyone has enough, then everyone has something to contribute, then a nicer environment flourishes. Why do you think the finland example is there. Inequality create problems