When I was young and growing up in the burbs, many kids walked or rode bikes to school. The roads were much more dangerous back then. Crime was much MUCH worse. No one batted an eye. I don't really understand some people's extreme risk aversion today.
Evolution has wired us to be constantly looking for risk. If we don't find danger, we'll invent it.
As we remove the riskiest risks, the bar on what we're willing to spend and sacrifice to address the next level of risks goes higher and higher.
Then there's the press which lives by sensationalizing every bad thing that happens, leading us to grossly exaggerate risk levels in our society.
Humans are really bad at assessing risk. Parents are more likely to be afraid of a stranger kidnapping their child when their child is far more likely to die on the car ride to school.
Which is sad when you think about how suburbs are designed to make people feel safe even though their road designs tend to be extremely dangerous.
Then I remember back not long ago when seat belt laws came into effect in the US. Before then? Meh. And car seats for 6 year olds?
There are no such provisions in most of the US.
Not necessarily. Your risk of being in a fatal car accident is nearly 3x higher on suburban roads than urban roads.
This is a good video on the deficiencies of suburbia road design if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
"Fun" fact: On my way home I was wearing a pink/white Nike hoodie and asked a woman for directions and she said something like "sir, please step away I have a child".
I grew up in Europe, so I get what you're saying and agree with it, but for most of the US, that is actually built for cars, it's not true.
That's not a little kid, that's just a kid. Americans have weird standards for kids' independence.
Compare the Japanese show 'my first errand' where little kids go on their first errands:
https://www.reddit.com/r/JapaneseGameShows/comments/1lvvgm/h...
7 years old navigating streets is not as much rarity as Americans think. And it used to be completely normal too.
(And that's what my original comment talked about. Also, it's just a cute show.)
I don’t believe in helicopter parenting but this is where we live.
I think it's far more common than that -- actually, guessing wildly, I suspect most children around the world get themselves to school and that the US is the outlier.
In Germany, where I live, and where my oldest will be starting school in two months, it's common and encouraged for kids to walk to school in their first year (age 6). Admittedly, ours is only a quarter mile away. We've just started letting our son go alone to the bakery downstairs and across the street from our apartment, and while it's not quite typical, it's also not wild here for a 5 year old to do that.
What shocked me most in this article was the paragraph:
> A mom wrote that she had been so encouraged that, at the grocery store, she allowed her son to leave her to get cheese from a different aisle. When he came back, she added, “That boy was six inches taller!”
That mother never allowed her son to do that before before being encouraged by the author? Poor child.
She has a great video. I'm a German also. I did live in the US too. I'd hate to have to raise a kid there.
The biggest problem with cycling adoption is “cyclists”. My hyperlocal blog has a guy that makes me want to throw my bicycle in the bay just so I’m not associated with him. And I love riding my bike.
Cycling needs a “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” moment.
E-bikes are a great opportunity for Americans to rediscover motorcycles but unfortunately cities are willing to allow motorized vehicles traveling at 20mph on mixed walking/cycling paths.
Other times attentive drivers exhibit attitudes that are less than redeeming. I once flipped on some streetcar tracks. Attentive motorists simply drove around me and went on their way. The people who did check up on my condition were pedestrians.
I've had a number of other experiences in my life that leave me feeling as though people cease to be human as soon as they get behind the wheel of a car. While there are exceptions, they are exceedingly rare. Getting back to the article, I am extremely worried about children being on their own on the streets. It isn't because of those who would intentionally harm them, since that is relatively uncommon. It is because very few people behind the wheel even seem to care.
But mostly the first one. The second you start giving everyone a 2k+ square foot home and backyard and front yard and 2 car parking, you now have everything spaced so far apart that you need cars. And everyone needs space to put their car, so that means huge setbacks for storefronts, huge parking lots, etc.
You cannot have a community optimized for both numerous cars and non car traffic. It is one or the other, and once the layout is done, it is not politically changeable. Certainly not the huge personal vehicles almost everyone drives today.
Beyond this minority damn near every road user (regardless of car vs bike vs pedestrian) behaves perfectly reasonably if you understand what they're trying to do. Once you understand what the other participants are trying to do things become very predictable and safe. The road user who is constantly having problems is probably doing it wrong themselves in a "man who smells crap all day should look under his own shoe" sort of way.
Crappy cyclists make crappy pedestrians make crappy drivers.
I've biked walked and driven at various points in my life. If you understand what everyone else is doing and choose your own actions to mesh with this you basically never have problems with other road users. You can blow through intersections on a bike. You can jaywalk. You can ignore turn specific arrows. You can do all these things safely. But you gotta have good situational awareness exercise good judgement about the time and the place you choose to do them or you will often be in conflict with other road users.
So, that "just this once" blowing an intersection or red light might be this time that a huge crash happens or someone is killed. Not worth the few minutes saved.
And if repeated, it's unforgivable.
Every time a red light is blown without directly harming someone net negative externalities are reduced.
[0] In my country cycling lights are traditionally used are traditionally used as a training ground for new police officers. These officers have to explain why you are actually breaking the law and also have to deal in a correct manner in the abuse from the perpetrators.
At the same time, idiotic cyclists are only risking their own lives and that’s it. Idiotic drivers are risking other people’s lives but not their own.
When there is a crash between and a car and a bike that involves a fatality, 100% of the time that fatality is the cyclist and not the driver.
Or will harm someone else than the perpetrator.
I strongly believe that when good protected bicycle infrastructure is built, average folks will be more represented among cyclists — and so cyclists will appear nicer and more cautious.
I try to be a good ambassador for cycling on my bike — got a rear radar, always hand signal, and always stop at lights and signs. But I've already been indoctrinated into cycling by having lived in the Netherlands.
Most like probably number 3 or 4. The "cyclists" are annoying and silly, but on the other hand they aren't literally killing many people.
I find "cyclists" to be as cringey as everyone else does, but cyclists aren't killing 40,000 people a year. They wear silly outfits and are kinda irritating. As far as sins go, those are pretty small in the grand scheme of things. By and large, when a cyclist acts a fool, they're endangering themselves. When a driver acts a fool, they're endangering everyone else on the road.
To be honest, average people riding bicycles for commuting or getting around cycle on the safe side, use the proper bike lanes, do not make left turns in front of the cars etc... while the "cyclists" insist on cycling on the car lanes, taking left turns and changing lanes while going 25-30 km/h on 50km/h road. Those people annoy me to the death while driving and cycling as well.
Until you round the corner on a sidewalk and narrowly avoid collision with a 7 year old on an electric bicycle.
I lived in Denmark for a bit in the 80s and I don't know how it is there these days, but back then, the police pulled you over and ticketed you for the tiniest infractions on a bicycle.
I can't imagine 1/10th of that level of enforcement in the NYC metro area without full scale rioting.
In my teens I cycled to my last three years of high school because I could sleep in (bus took over an hour) and visit friends on the way home. Thankfully the highway had a decent shoulder. I wore my helmet and eventually saw the benefit of wearing a neon-orange reflective vest (rather than stowing it once out of parental sight).
Where I’m living now I’m pushing for improved bicycle routes between towns, in part for tourism and so we don’t have to drive our kid to school.
My only times I've near-collision or actual Collision have been with bikes. this is invariably because they far exceed the speed limit in some sections that are really close to pedestrian traffic or because they bike near a curve full of parked cars where he cannot have enough time to break for incoming pedestrian traffic when the bikers going to ~30 miles per hour.
It depends a lot on your neighborhood. Mine is nice and I see kids running around the neighborhood regularly.
As I mentioned this is definitely a thing in Idaho. My brothers and sister all have families and live in areas where kids can have freedom in the neighborhood but away from home.
From my small experience living in France, Germany, Denmark and spending quite some times in other old[0] EU countries, you can do it everywhere there. From Portugal up to Finland and everything in-between. This is the normal way here.
[0]: Not to be taken negatively, just that I did not had the opportunity to visit/stay in the EU countries from the former East block.
Both my wife and I grew up there, hence why we prioritized getting a walkable place in the suburbs.
I'm way too neurotic about the future to take the plunge and move away from Dublin, unfortunately.
Main street is generally thriving, with the preschool, elementary school, middle-high school, library, and town park/common down said Main street. (The library is one block off.)
Mixed together among the core mile and a half or so stretch is a decent collection of retail establishments (including 2 gas stations, a few coffee shops local and chain, restaurants local and chain, doctors offices, post office, auto mechanics, the now ubiquitous Dollar General, a liquor store, an ole' time hardware store, and a couple good ice cream places), single family homes, a church, a police station/opera house/townhall, and some hotels and motels local and chain.
Side streets with single family homes, and some New England style multi-unit three stories are on both sides of Main street, where the river allows, with a small trailer park mixed in.
There is certainly traffic on Main street, including log trucks, but with a 30 mph speed limit, and lots of crosswalks where people will generally stop for you (the law says you should), it's pretty human friendly.
I will admit it's in many ways a throwback to the way things used to be...
Some metro areas demolished all of theirs, or developed too late to have built any. Rust Belt is surprisingly rich with them.
Why these countries in particular? You can do this in pretty much any EU country and many non-EU European countries.
I walked back 4km from primary school every day. I could go by bus but then I'd had to wait for 30 minutes and everything beats that when you're 10.
And during vacations me and my cousins roamed the forest near my grandparents house whole day every day only returning for a dinner :)
The alternative is called “elterntaxi” (meaning parent taxi) and is very much frowned upon.
So, every school morning, lunch, and afternoon, you have bunches of little kids walking on their own between their schools and their homes, wearing a special reflective jacket.
And I say moms because in Swiss it is moms who are expected to do it and forgo other activities while men are expected to go to work. Men are much less affected by above system.
See that's exactly the mentality problem.
My mum was working too, at lunchtime we made for example a little fire in the wood and exchanged the food our parent packed in, from spaghetti to sausages and so on, made our own snake-bread etc. You have to be really crazy to think your children's have a problem do stuff for them self for 1.5 hours. If it was too cold we eat outside, went back into the school asked the teacher if we can play flight simulator on the apple2's. There is no need that the state has to organize everything for you..children's need freedom too, true?
There are huge swaths of the country that are not the "built up in the 50s and 60s but now populated and trafficked enough to be dangerous" suburban hellscape that you are implying.
Or old pre-car cities in the US.
The point of those is that they have dense interconnection that predates cars. In addition, building roads cost too much in terms of eminent domain, so they don't have very many high-speed roads interfering.
If I had kids I'd let them free roam the city.
[1] https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-unique-saf....
With plenty of bright, reflective things on my bike I’m willing to take our kid on the road, and am working on promoting better bikeways around here, for locals and tourists.
Not to say that bike lanes and bike protection couldn't be better, because it absolutely could be.
I think the far larger problem is cultural. It doesn't matter how safe bicycling is if there's a chance for your children to be taken away from you for letting them take advantage of it. That is also why my wife is hesitant about this stuff.
I rode my bike around the (Australian, suburban) streets from age 5, rode to school for 12 odd years, caught the train to the city and skated all over it from about age 13. My parents made a point of letting us (me and siblings) 'rough and tumble' as we grew up.
We had a lot of scrapes, don't get me wrong, but you learn a lot as a kid if you can fall over a few times. Kids are good at taking care of themselves, and each other, if you let them. Within reason, of course, but I see a lot of coddling these days and a lot of soft kids that have never been beyond the padded playground walls.
Most suburban areas (and urban areas too) have a school bus pickup for the neighborhood. Showing up at the bus stop made me a ton of friends right there in my neighborhood, and made for some great long-lasting relationships that continue to this day.
Having friends that lived in the same neighborhood meant I could ride my bike to my friends house, or walk, or whatever.
It would require a lot of capital in the form of patient equity to pull off.
see:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/business/culdesac-tempe-p...
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexisohanian_culdesac-re-ima...
Good old adage is infrastructure first.
Otherwise you can just build taller.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackinac_Island_School_Distric...
I think the “your home is a prison” is an upper middle class thing. Poor folks don’t have much choice but to let their kids use transit.
But fundamentally, what I want most is to be somewhere my kids can ride bikes or walk alone to school, to friends, to the shop, etc. from the age of 7 or so. As best I can tell that pretty much means the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan (more for transit than cycling).
Children can't drive, which means unless you're lucky enough to live very close to your friends, and ideally on the same side of the street, your home is effectively your prison in the US and Canada.
And yes, I suppose you _can_ let your kid ride a bike to school alone in the US at 7, but you would be risking arrest, and death. It's often forgotten that drivers are, by far, the leading killers of children. Far more than people with guns. I was an avid cyclist in the US for the first 30 years of my life and I still have a bruised rib and too many memories of very, very close calls with death.
NotJustBikes, who moved from Canadian suburbia to the Netherlands, explores this in more depth at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98