To be clear, in the city kids don't play literally in the streets. They're on the sidewalks and playgrounds. It's the fact that suburban kids are often in the actual street that is part of the problem, and the fact that the streets are actually roads and designed for cars to go fast on.

I thought about this as I posted my story. There’s a park on the street next to mine. When weather allows, kids play basketball and baseball there and play on the jungle gym. We never had that growing up. For us, there were two or three parks in town, but none were within walking distance of our house, so we didn’t play there. If areas were set aside and accessible for kids to play safely, I’d imagine more would do that.

Where in Boston did you live? That’s definitely the case in the fancy parts of Boston and definitely not the case in the minority ghettoes like roxbury, JP, and dorchester

I'm not the original commenter, but I do live in Boston.

Could give a lot of anecdotal stories, but here's the stat -- Boston is the 3rd worst in the nation for auto accidents.

https://dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Citi...

This kind of data is less than useless without knowing the details of how they measured.

Typically they're just using insurance reported events which has a huge bias against areas where cars are newer on average (rich areas and against states that heavily use road salt) because nobody reports when two 20yo shitboxes trade paint but everybody calls in The System(TM) when two expensive new cars do (and these sorts of small accidents make up the majority of collisions).

Even if we knew it's still skewed heavily against dense metros because it uses miles instead of operating hours.

And this is coming from someone who hates the people of Massachusetts and wants to believe they are rightfully at the top of the list...

There's reversed arguments to every one of these...

> nobody reports when two 20yo shitboxes trade paint

And few people drive lambos around in Boston winter, the salt wrecks really nice cars. Also, SF is richer and ranks lower.

>skewed heavily against dense metros because it uses miles

If people are going slow, the accidents are more minor and they would be less likely to need reporting. Also, NYC is denser and ranks lower.

Anyway, this has gotten too far from housing discussion.

edit for formatting

In my neighborhood of Washington, DC, I do see kids playing in the streets now and then--throwing a football, throwing a baseball, shooting baskets on a hoop at the curb. I also see grumbling about it on the neighborhood listserv. This is a residential neighborhood of free-standing houses, with a few duplexes thrown in.