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.
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...
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.
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.
Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon residents who are too cool for such a mainstream store. Despite the higher costs, I vastly preferred shopping at Market of Choice because I could easily walk there and the food was generally higher quality. Generically, I would consistently shop at stores I could bike or walk to, outside of that shopping center, and frequent restaurants I could get to.
Meanwhile, where I live now, there's a Haggen (an Albertson's branded Whole Foods competitor) across the street from a Safeway (which is the brand Albertson's uses in this particular market for their standard store). They carry identical store-brand items, but the premium store charges 5-10%, because they know that people will pay more just for a better shopping experience.
Obviously I don't speak for everybody, but I think a lot more people would accept paying a little bit more in exchange for not driving so much, but part of the problem is that, thanks to market effects and economies of scale and so on and so forth, they have to pay a lot more, for the same products.
But too many things are literally twice as much and for those the value of a Walmart trip is obvious.
Knock down three adjacent homes and you can get maybe 6-8 levels, which would be no more than 40 families.
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.
Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.
(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)
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.
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.
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.
Quality matters just as much as quantity, and often more when they're close together. (I would of course prefer a 10 minute drive to a 90 minute walk, for example).
Historic cities and castles are almost always wrongly depicted in movies. They are always placed in a grace field in the middle of nowhere, but there should be farmland everywhere.
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 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 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 doesn't seem to be anything mandatory about cities having proportionally more crime.
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
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 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...
unbiased source data, clearly
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.
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.
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.
Suburbs not only aren't required for this, requiring them to be suburbs actually makes it worse.
Suppose you have 1000 parcels of land and you need 3000 housing units. Obviously you need an average of three units per parcel. If 950 of the parcels are zoned to allow only one unit, the remaining 50 parcels then need to have an average of 41 units each.
Those parcels then become dramatically more expensive because they're the only place additional units can be added. Rents then have to rise to reflect the higher costs. Worse, some of those parcels already have e.g. 30 units but the cost of demolishing a perfectly good 30-unit building to build a slightly larger one is prohibitive, so now there is a shortfall and even the one-unit-per-parcel land ends up with higher rents.
I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
I am not sure that this phenomenon is unique to cities, in fact, but rather an inevitable endgame to the idea of owning land in perpetuity. It creates a permanent class divide.
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.
How does urbanism lock people out of owning real estate?
This can be overridden but it's hard. Most cities with good economies have unaffordable real estate.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
"Acquainted with computers" is closer to endlessly strolling tiktoc now.
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.
This was still in the era of SNES and Sega, but even those got boring after a while.
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.
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).
Since we couldn't drive, parents had to drop us off and then eventually come pick us up again.
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.
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
We found stuff to do last year when we visited Beijing, but we were closer to center city and ya, no playgrounds outside of a few higher end apartment communities. We have a trip planned this summer but the kid is spending 2 weeks in a Chengdu summer camp that is pretty activity loaded.
A lot of small towns, even in the US, offer such things. Towns far from being a city. It should be more common though.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be better for everyone, both in terms of business and living standards.
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.
Through the lens of a car being the only way that anyone you know has ever gotten around, parking is sort of a strict necessity. "How can you go anywhere if there's nowhere to park when you get there!?"
Meanwhile in the time since these laws came to be, we've roughly tripled the number of miles Americans are driving while the population has grown ~60-something percent, so there's more competition for street space than ever, people are spending tons of time in traffic/looking for parking, which creates a scarcity dynamic that freaks people out about any proposed changes.
The idea that getting some people to use other transportation modes could improve the daily experience for people who genuinely prefer to drive doesn't really click, either, because there's no frame of reference for getting around outside of a car, it's an abstract concept that people would actually do it. Even for people who've visited transit-rich/walkable places but never lived in one, there are often conceptual gaps—like the cadence of getting/carrying groceries, or the idea that bus/subway trips replace car trips 1:1, rather than the bus being a link between walkable areas.
Yes, I would agree with this as well.
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).
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.
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?
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.
If it's actually a market, it should go up AND down. Otherwise it's just a scam.
I don't get it either.
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.
It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.
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!
That doesn't matter to any given one because they rarely need multiple types at the same time, so they just go to the nearest one of whatever they currently need. If you could build them in the suburbs then for many people in the suburbs, that would be the nearest one and it would get enough business to be sustainable. While reducing traffic because now some subset of the customers can walk to it instead of 100% of them needing to drive.
> Even in dense cities it is common to see one street of ground for retail then several streets of no retail.
Isn't that mainly because of zoning? The area with all the shops is the area where shops are allowed, or the area where something that pays higher prices for space than shops isn't.
> 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!
You should be able to have the shop and a housing unit or three on the same piece of land, which not only allows you to make more valuable use of the land, it also puts more people (i.e. customers) near the 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.
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.
Even in low income areas, seeing actual antisocial behavior is very rare. People simply have better things to do than to be problematic, especially those struggling to make ends meet. And they are smart enough not to shit where they eat, and generally band together to prevent bad apples from getting out of hand. They have families too.
Fine yes there are areas actually infested with gangs, addicts and the homeless, who do not have better things to do and are anti-social. But those are rare in the grand scheme.
I have been in most of the so-called dodgy areas in the Bay Area and SF. I was quite confused, it was rather nice! Just lower-middle class.
A lot of it is built up in people’s heads, and reinforced by media.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah I've heard that about Atlanta and a few other cities (mostly in Texas).
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.
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 ...
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.
And yes things have drastically changed in the 10+ years or whenever growing up was.
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.
NYC and Boston seem like the only east coast options and those are very expensive. What other options are there on the East Coast?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this was another comment about homelessness, not an implication about the law.
Obviously, this attitude is born from some incorrect assumptions, but it's a pretty standard feast from folks out of town.
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.
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.
> my understanding is many European cities have very few or only paid public bathrooms.
Not my experience living here, but I'm sure it differs a lot based on the country and the city, some will have free public bathrooms, some paid public bathrooms, some no bathrooms at all.
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.
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.
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 thank you, I’ll stay in Manhattan and not get kidnapped and murdered by monsters tyvm.
Yes.
>Have you been to big US cities?
Whoever said anything about the US?
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’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.
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.
Regarding your other arguments, the Balkan cities are a bit unique in the sense that we have Roma people living in close proximity. And to see how they live without a single care is eye opening. To say favela is a compliment, they live in shacks, don’t have stable work, live day to day… yet have 3+ children each.
Not without issues of course, but it’s a stark reminder that while far from ideal, they still have kids. Their (and the kids’) quality of life is terrible, it’s not an issue to procreate.
Long topic for here, but if you’re interested check out a movie called “Gypsy Magic”, it shows their life and their daily trickery to survive (not a documentary).
What is this argument, "too much comfort, too posh"?!
I understand the position of others and it’s logically valid, but for me it’s a line I’m not willing to cross - for beliefs, personal reasons etc.
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".
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'm Italian so the situations is similar if not worse back at home.
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.
It would be cool to live in a very dense Tokyo kind of place though. Tokyo is like a playground it is awesome!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
When the statistics are vastly in one's favor, it isn't luck.
Is it any surprise the US is backsliding?
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.
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.
Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.
You fell for the trap that caused this whole issue, you were about as likely to get abducted as struck by lightning.
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.
The other poster was using it to mean the opposite of pro-social, i.e. behavior that is bad for society (like roughhousing in a shared space meant for shopping). This definition is frequently used in the UK and Ireland thanks to Anti-social Behavior Orders.
You are using it to mean being averse to socializing.
Not a Karen -- it's about striking a balance.
My guess is that combatting gang crime was a major reason.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
> [...]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...
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.
They might not be amazing friends, or life-long ones, but they were friends.
The Wikipedia page on Loitering [1] is wild. A surprisingly large number of places seem to have criminalised "just existing somewhere".
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Those tributes being mortgages, income taxes, and sales taxes, among other things.
Theres is only one system of government in the industrialized world: feudalism.
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.
Garages in duplexes typically are not big enough to fit an average car comfortably.
Easier to park on the street and theft risk has been negligible.
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)
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.
4: Nearly every time a stranger tries to talk to me it is to beg for money or sell me something (which is also begging)
In fact I'd say this is by far the prime reason I don't interact with people I don't know. I'm not a kid, however.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
Kids are brainwashed to commit suicide at scale? Could you elaborate?
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’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
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.
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".
Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.
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.
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/how-dangerous-are-china...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if you look at pickup trucks, they’ve gotten way taller since the 00’s, for no reason except style.
There are other reasons (not that they're good ones):
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/energy/how-us-emiss...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy
Just teach safety and enforce speeding/dwi/immigration laws.
Much better than taking a certain vehicle away from law abiding citizens.
I need my large truck just as much as I need my EV. I haul stuff constantly while also driving safely and following all laws.
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).
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
* https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close...
It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks:
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
ABS in aviation goes back to the 1950s in planes and the late '60s in cars.
It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
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.
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.
All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.
Damn, I'm glad I got to grow up then.
"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.
Also much cheaper than casts, physical therapy, and possibly permanent damage. An ounce of prevention and all that.
A test wouldn't work here as she can't read yet (not full sentences at least).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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"
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.
How times have changed.
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.
200yr ago they'd have used some Victorian morals bullshit or religion to the same end.
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'm loathe to imagine what kind of trouble they might get into now for that.
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.
We joke about having a main child and an emergency backup child, but deep down it's not a joke, it changes our behavior.
most parents can, its just illegal now.
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*
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.
(We get a babysitter for our dates, but they're too scared to leave their kid -- no judgement... that's just how it is).
Do your neighbors have parents nearby? I think this makes an enormous difference.
Even going from one child to two.. suddenly you don't have numbers on your side in dealing with things.
But, that overprotectiveness is very much an American phenomenon - exported a little but not that much yet.
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.
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.
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 roads 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?
Could it be possible that we're confusing cause and effect here?
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ghislaine Maxwell, I suppose you meant.
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.
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 :)
By beating the child?
He's very loved by them, BTW. I didn't meet him, but they always talk with admiration of him.
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!
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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
Absent these forced meetings, parents barely know their neighbors and consequently, their kids barely know anyone even two doors down.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/marc-klaas-close-foundation-3-deca...
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.
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.
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.
Moreover, AI guardrails will interfere with you identifying any meaningful anthropological conclusions.
In this respect it depends on how AI is used. In this case, I didn't envision it doing this in the "deep research" sense or otherwise making its own conclusions from data, I meant more in the vein of a well scaffolded agent loop iterating through, for example, census tract-level data, cross referencing that with other data sources to find the relevant, granular-but-requires-intelligent-judgment details to piece together countless small datasets to assemble a large pictured. Grunt work that is repetitive but just variable enough you can't do something like download/scrape and assemble at scale because each block or tract or zip code needs one small bit of human judgement.
None of that is my work though, just where I think things might usefully go. For my part I'm trying to jump industries into AI more directly, it aligns well with my background, but that fact combined with zero industry connections (save Claude Code's recommendation & endorsement, that I had to tell it not to email on my behalf to Anthropic) hasn't broken down that wall yet, and in the meantime I try to build useful things that might help in that direction. So I'm aware of AI's blind spots on some things, and its significant capabilities still need significant shepherding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
"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.
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.
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.
I was 7 years old
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.
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.
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.
My biggest fear for my kid out in the world is not abduction, but injury or death by automobile.
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.
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.
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.
TV interview with parents taking their little kids to see Alien (1979):
https://x.com/TheCinesthetic/status/2058998742506954766
https://xcancel.com/TheCinesthetic/status/205899874250695476...
Pedophiles.
They were always there, even inside of families and churches. Just underreported.
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.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
>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...
In general there is excessive alarmism, and the internet makes it possible.
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...
Not leaving the front yard is unthinkable in many countries outside the US.
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.
When you have infrastructure that doesn't rely on cars, you will have schools and stores and communities right in your "suburb".
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.
"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.
We can't have a blanket rule to ban all AI-generated articles, because we can't review every article that's submitted and make an evaluation about how much it was AI-generated or assisted. If an article is badly written, whether or not it was AI-assisted, it should be flagged.
In this case, yes I can see the LLM-style of the writing, and I'd prefer writers avoided publishing work that with such obvious fingerprints.
But it got few flags on HN, no complaints other than yours and a good discussion, and the quality of the discussion is what matters most on HN.
Ppl are so stupid, they need online courses for locating their wiener when peeing outside their regular zone...
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.
Don't get me started with bike helmets
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, but we're not talking about sport cycling, we're talking about ordinary commuting.
> helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1]
Your citation provides no support for your claim.
> 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.
This is why we don't make public policy on the basis of anecdotes.
> On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measures.
All of which are a lot less unpleasant at the point of use than helmets.
> If you have a study suggesting that helmets would significantly help I'd be curious to see it.
The rates of head injury are comparable (something like a factor of 4 difference), head injuries are very common in car collisions, helmets are already routinely used in motor racing. The evidence is no weaker than that for bicycle helmet use.
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 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.
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.
Especially with E-bikes, which are operated at higher average speeds.
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.
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...
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?
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.