I'm much more worried about the road to the playground than the risks on the playground themselves. Below 18, about 3/8 of the deaths are from traffic.
I grew up in 80's the time where almost everybody played in parks and fields. But I can't give that to my own son of 7.
He has to cross 3 streets to reach a playground 200m from here,the worst of the crossings a street with 50km/h limitsand 1 car every 10 seconds. Not much, except just enough people drive like idiots, 90km/h or more on a road not even 500m long.
We've been teaching him good pedestrian behaviour since he could walk. We've done a few tests where he walked to the baker, thinking he was unsupervised. He probably can do it most of the time. Except, 1 distraction while an idiot drives by will kill him.
So I bring him to the playground and let him play as unsupervised as possible for an adult on the side of a playground. Of course, he knows I am there.
I start working with him with more dangerous tools like a soldering iron. He can deal well enough with these risks. But not the streets.
The problem with statements like this is that they hide actual risk. The reality is that child road deaths are dramatically down, in line with all road deaths. Roads in the 1970s were basically warzones by today's standards. The fact that 3/8 of deaths occur there today is because we have come so far in decreasing all the other sources of early death.
US child pedestrian deaths 1975: 1632. US child pedestrian deaths 2019: 138.
https://seriousaccidents.com/blog/children-traffic-fatalitie...
I had a prof once joke that they worst thing anyone could do in the fight against heart disease would be to cure cancer: By taking cancer out of the picture, the percentage of deaths from heart disease would skyrocket. But exactly that has happened to children in recent years. Childhood cancer is no longer a death sentence, so too innumerable other conditions. And when kids do get sick they live long enough not to die as kids. So the smaller and smaller number of child road deaths each year ironically now represents a greater and greater percentage of total child deaths. The reality is that kids today are safer crossing the road than ever before.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a756524ed915...
UK Child death/injury in 1979: 12,458. UK Child death/injury in 2013: 1,980.
And that is despite roads now being massive more crowded and full of larger vehicles. The total population has also increased by at least 50% since the 70s, making the reduction in net traffic deaths even more dramatic.
Does this reflect safer streets, or just fewer (esp. unsupervised) child pedestrians?
It's fewer children in the streets. Sorry, my firsthand observations are my source. (anecdotal evidence)
This. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a single kid play outside (apart from the park near me) for well over 3 years
We live in an HOA-governed community in Central Florida. Our kids play in an alley just cross the road from us with a bunch of other kids from the immediate area. Streets are marked 25mph and everyone knows this community is rife with children. We've still had 2 or 3 near misses in the past 3 years and that's just including the kids within 1 square block from here. It gives me anxiety just thinking about it, but we do our best to warn them of the dangers; get them looking both ways; and put out "Kids at Play" signs to warn drivers.
http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).* In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
* In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school; 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
I wonder what is causing kids to live further from schools. Is it that there are fewer schools, or is it that more kids don't attend the closest school? There is a modern trend towards specialization of schools, or parents selecting one school over another, which would result longer distances. But there is also a trend towards centralization at larger schools.
Probably both. The streets are probably "safer" because there are fewer pedestrians-car interactions. We now have walking trails and such separate from roads. And driving kids around in vehicles might be bad environmentally, but if we are talking about traffic deaths then it is a legitimate tool (ie busses rather than kids walking to school).
I suspect much of it is simply that kids no longer wander around on roads. They spend less time outside and when they do it isn't near roads. But the numbers between the 1970s and 2020s are so dramatic that one must conclude that roads are generally safer places for everyone today.
It reflects that parents (accurately) deduced that roads were too dangerous, and now keep their children from interacting with them as much as possible. Given everything I've read about the hazards of children especially in the face of oversized trucks and SUVs, if anything, kids are more in danger than ever: both from drivers on the public road, and from their own parents being unable to see them around their massive Suburbans. https://www.nbcwashington.com/investigations/driveway-danger...
The graph in the article explains this. Kids just don't go outside anymore.
Maybe then the outside is just dangerous. There are lots of outdoor activities so dangerous that staying inside might be a better alternative in terms of preventable injuries (football, surfing, motorsports, anything involving horses). If the goal is to keep kids out of the ER, playing around on roads may be one of those things we should just not encourage.
I learned to chop wood and use a chainsaw as a child, partially during Boy Scouts activities. OMG that is a risky thing for a kid. Never would I suggest that be taught to kids today.
Why not?! Understanding how to handle dangerous situations in a safe manner is a huge learning opportunity for a young person. If you have a chainsaw at home ( and lots of us do ) young people absolutely need to have a healthy appreciation for the danger of that machine.
Only where the dangerous situation can be made safe. Rock climbing is dangerous, but with a little training and equipment becomes safer than playing soccer. A chainsaw cannot be made properly safe, not for use by children, for the same reasons we have minimum ages for driving cars.
Maybe a smaller electric chainsaw? With far less power and therefore reduced bucking/etc? 100% get what you're saying. Chainsaws are risky use items for skilled adults.
It also isn't just the chainsaw but the implications of using one. Chainsaws are not used indoors. They are used on uneven terrain to cut things (trees/logs) that are irregular in shape/weight and subject to unseen internal forces. It's a setup for random movements an unanticipated results. Even for adults, felling a tree with a chainsaw is a very dangerous thing.
I'd argue the other way around - supervised usage as a child (adjust age as desired) is much better than "restricted until you're on your own".
A ten-year old being taught how to handle tools could likely be safer than a 25 year old who has never seen or used one before, but just bought one.
Not to mention that the US population in the 1970 census was 203M. In the 2020 census, 331M - a 63% increase from 1970!
So a 91% reduction in deaths while population increased 63%. I'm not a statistician but that seems pretty great.
I'm sure the children-per-capita rate changed during that time as well so maybe someone who knows that figure could do some more precise math.
But overall the "oh no my kids couldn't possible cross the street without being immediately killed!" hyperbole seems just that.
The number of children hasn't changed that much, only a few percent since 1970. The proportion of the population under 20 years old has changed from ~~~about~19%~to~about~12%~~~ (edit:) about 38% to about 24%.
That's easily disprovable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Sorry, you're right, that was nonsensical: I was cutting all of the percentages in half. Excuse me. (This was based on looking at a chart where sexes were split and percentages of each age/sex were given out of the total population but I confused myself into thinking it was as a proportion of that sex.)
Should have said ~38% to ~24%.
Children choosing to be inside more (games, social media, internet), parents keeping children inside more (24hr news full of horror stories), suburbs too far from anywhere so parents need to drive children everywhere they want to go, not letting them go near the roads because the roads are thought to be too dangerous, decline in availability of parks, malls, 'third places' for children to go outside the home other than school, those would also show up as reduction in deaths by road accidents and yet could be consistent with "oh no my kids couldn't possible cross the street without being immediately killed!" being true.
Saying that the total number of deaths decreased does not mean that children are safer interacting with roads. It could mean that children interact significantly less with roads in the first place. The statistic you gave is not enough to draw that conclusion.
Yes, but what you are missing is that behaviour has changed! We have that level of net road deaths today, given that kids are being driven everywhere.
So you can't state from your data that it has got safer: you need the child deaths/km or deaths/hr walking.
Because no children play outside parents helicopter them.
You don't seriously think children stand more of a chance against cars of today with their ridiculously inflated size, power and weight do you?
The Economist had an interesting recent article suggesting that, at least in America, part of the problem is that car insurance is way too cheap, so owning a car and driving like a moron is too easy: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i....
I don't have a car, but I acknowledge that most Americans live in places where not having a car would make their lives much harder. Still, it seems reasonable for me to raise insurance requirements on enormous SUVs. They're 50-100% more dangerous to pedestrians, so this would reflect a higher actual cost inflicted on other people. If you don't want to pay that cost, and you still need the transportation of a personal car, buy the smaller and less dangerous vehicle.
increasing insurance increases the harm to the poor.
At this point it shouldn't be required by law or it should be subsidized for those for whom it represents an undue burden.
And will increase the number of drivers without insurance. It's already an issue now, but it will go way up if insurance is even more expensive.
Like most of this thread, this is an enforcement problem. Insurance is way too cheap, and people just ignore it way too easily. Also, the minimum required coverage (in most states) is way way way too low. In most states it's as low as $25k bodily injury per person, $50k per accident[1]! A single broken arm can cost more than that in the USA. How on earth are we allowing people to drive a 3 ton death machine around carrying only $25k of insurance??? If someone carrying the minimum insurance plows into a car full of people, there is no way $50k is going to be enough to make everyone whole.
Finally, "accidents" that cause injury or death are treated way too lightly by the justice system. If you kill someone in any other way and get convicted, you're doing hard time in prison. If you kill someone with your car, you might not even get jail time if it was deemed an accident.
1: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-ins...
How many other ways does the average person have available to accidentally kill someone? If vehicles are about it, then you may see light sentences for vehicles simply because it's accidental, not because is vehicular.
However, the first dollars of insurance are often the most expensive; so the price to customers going from $50k to $500k may be not as much as even the first $50k was.
Some say "accidentally" but I say "negligently." Society is way to light on people who injure others while using their cars. How does the saying go? If you want to kill someone and reduce the chances you are punished, just accidentally kill them with your car!
uninsured/underinsured motorists is a business risk for insurance companies, one they mitigated by convincing our government to make it required but they did so at the expense of placing an undue burden on the poor.
My stance here is that if you're going to make it required by law, someone needs to subsidize it and I believe it should be the insurance companies.
The low minimums you're complaining about exist specifically because the law is trying to split the difference between requiring insurance and not causing too much harm to those that can't afford it, or can barely afford it.
Here's how insurance works.
I purchase insurance. Someone hits me. My insurance company pays to repair the vehicle and the medical coverage needed (per my insurance policy). They then sue the other party to recoup the money. If it's another insurance company they're typically guaranteed 2 things.
1. The company can afford to pay out
2. The company doesn't want to go to court so gentleman's agreements are made between the insurance company to minimize overhead costs.
If the other party is uninsured they're typically forced to eat the cost because the chances of getting money out of someone who can't afford insurance isn't worth the overhead of even trying.
This is why it's a business risk that the insurance companies have mitigated by getting it required by law.
The poor aren't buying oversized vehicles, because those vehicles are the more expensive option already.
Depends on what your definition of poor is, because if you go to street view in poorer areas of LA you do not miss out on seeing the SUVs.
it turns out SUV's can be purchased used as well.
A big part of the problem is that the used market is controlled by new car buyers (from the past) - if nobody is buying new compact/cheap cars (for whatever reason) then they're not available for used buyers.
And you can get what has happened multiple times - when gas prices rise substantially, low-mpg vehicles get dumped on the used market, so you have poor people and kids driving massive boats (the hotrodding scene from the 70s is a direct result of this).
Building a society where you need to pay for a car, license, fuel, and insurance to just to function increases harm to the poor.
The poor are more likely to be driving Civics than Escalades anyway. Increasing insurance on the larger, heavier, taller, more dangerous vehicles is exactly the right thing.
Doubly so if they have "badass offroad cosplay" mods like welded bumpers and lightbars. Yes okay maybe you need that out in the dunes, but if you're playing at that level you should be trailering the warmachine to the dunes and towing it behind something with better visibility. If that tank touches pavement, it should pay the insurance risk commensurate with its armor.
SUVs are not the problem. it's literally what the article said, mininums are too low. Most SUVs are family's traveling. You should look up the statistics for uninsured motorists in Florida, it's staggering. People simply will not follow the law, it's an enforcement problem. The sheer miles of roadways to police is extremely vast, it's very difficult to remove dangerous uninsured drivers. Hence why most people by big SUVs to protect themselves from collisions.
Research indicates that SUVs are indeed more dangerous to pedestrians compared to other vehicle types in the United States. A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) highlighted that late-model SUVs are more likely to cause fatalities to pedestrians than cars. This is attributed to the higher front profile of SUVs, which tends to result in more severe injuries upon impact. The study found that at speeds greater than 19 mph, SUVs caused more serious injuries and were more likely to result in pedestrian fatalities compared to cars. Specifically, at speeds of 20-39 mph, 30% of crashes with SUVs resulted in pedestrian fatalities, compared to 23% for cars. At speeds of 40 mph and above, all crashes with SUVs resulted in pedestrian fatalities, compared to 54% with cars. This indicates a significant increase in the risk posed by SUVs at higher speeds[0].
Further research supports these findings, showing that trucks and SUVs with hood heights greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than shorter vehicles with sloped hoods. The study, also by the IIHS, used data from nearly 18,000 crashes and noted that tall, squared-up hoods, characteristic of many best-selling SUVs and trucks, contribute significantly to the risk. The number of pedestrian deaths has significantly increased, with pedestrian fatalities jumping 13% to 7,342 in 2021, marking the highest number since 1981. This rise in pedestrian deaths has outpaced the increase in overall U.S. traffic deaths, highlighting a growing crisis in road safety related to larger vehicles[1].
These findings underscore the need for vehicle design changes to improve pedestrian safety, particularly as the proportion of SUVs on U.S. roads continues to rise. Despite advancements in vehicle safety that have reduced overall motor vehicle crash fatalities, the increased lethality of SUVs to pedestrians poses a significant challenge that requires attention from both manufacturers and regulatory bodies.
[0] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-study-suggests-todays-s...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tall-trucks-suvs-are-45-dea...
(ChatGPT 4)
Good summary. Something ChatGPT missed is that SUV's are taller, and that tends to increase speed, because _perceived_ speed is lower the farther you are from the ground
'swhy Mitatas are so much freakin' fun.
And they present very little risk to pedestrians as a result. You're sitting LOWER than the pedestrians. You can see a bottle-cap on the road. You don't feel superior to anyone at all.
Interesting point!
It’s funny, I’m often tempted to fact check data or lookup jargon, etc. and comment to save someone else the trouble. I once did this on the seriouseats subreddit with copy paste from a relatively reliable source and met with an insane heated argument over what amounted to semantics and a flurry of downvotes. I wonder if attribution to ChatGPT increases civility towards the commenter or if HN is just generally more civilized.
Yep. This is enormously unpopular among suburbanites but America does too much to subsidize dangerous SUVs. Insurance should be by pound
Probably, the predominance of cars in our modern societies (and cars always getting bigger) is one of the factor that yielded to observations made in this article.
But in some places (for instance where I live, Lausanne Switzerland) it's becoming easier to escape this car culture. I don't have kids, but some colleagues do. One of them does not own a car and her 2 children (6 and 9 years old) do everything by bike : going to school, to the activities (they climb!), etc. They surely look much more agile and risky than other colleague's children. It's quite crazy to see these two kids on their bikes, and how much liberating it is for them to move by theirselves. Unlike most kids who just commute in their parents's car.
Of course, I am aware this works only because there's a really good bike infrastructure. And people drive pretty well too, I guess.
Family with a 4 your old in Germany here (rural suburbian village of a medium sized town), no car. Everyone always told us that we would buy one soon, because with a child you require one. So far, that wasn't true at all. We do everything by bike or public transport, and that wasn't a conscious or political decision. We just transitioned from car-less students to car-less parents, waiting for the time when a car would become necessary. My wife doesn't even have a driving license, so at this point in our life, adding a car into the mix would just mean so much overhead (time, cost, administrative). We do have carsharing, though, and use it every 2 months or so (for trips to places you cannot go by bike / public transport, or large purchases).
But I would bet that every service you might reasonably need is within a few kilometers of your home, and every conceivable service is likely within 100km. Many people do not live in such environments. I'm in a town of 16k people, but the nearest allergist 200+km away, the nearest railroad 400km away. (One of my team is away today because he has to take his kid to the allergist, an all-day trip by car.) And it was -30c this morning. Car "culture" isn't a fashion choice but a necessity for anyone not living in a warm suburban village.
Yes, pickups do outnumber cars here. Most don't really need them daily, but offroad ability is an actual thing in winter in areas where the roads are not plowed ever 20 minutes, and in summer when forest fires evacuation is a real thing.
That is correct. Kindergarten, doctors, train station and my work are all within 7 kilometers. My wife's work is 60 km away, but reachable via train in 40 min. My parents live 400 km away, but are also reachable via train in 3h.
I am not advocating this lifestyle at all. I don't even think it is a lifestyle - as mentioned above, we didn't consciously decide to not own a car, it's just something that slowly developed.
As my wife cannot drive, living in an area like you are describing would be a prison sentence for her, so we avoid that. This has also has its downsides: a house in a remote black forest village with a bus every 2 hours would cost 1/3 of what a house costs in our area.
People around here say exactly the same thing about cities. Not being able to go hunting/hiking/camping/fishing. Not being able to ride a dirtbike/snowmobile. Getting a ticket if you cut down a tree in your back yard without government permission. Having to pay for parking. Having to adjust your work schedule around the mass transit schedule. People looking in through your windows. Being woken up by cop cars at all hours. They describe city life as "prison".
That doesn't sound like a prison at all, it sounds like there are different tradeoffs. The closest thing to a "prison" is not being able to hunt/hike/etc. which I can assure you is simply not true and people in cities do that frequently, just with perhaps an extra hour of travel time.
Being isolated in an area that depends on a car for any movement but not being able to drive actually is isolating like a a prison, however.
I've lived most of my life in big cities. Unless you live in Vancouver, and even then only certain parts of such cities, hiking let alone hunting is a weekend thing at best. When I am now I have a couple guys who think it completely normal to take a few ducks on a Thursday morning before coming to work for 8am.
I'm looking at moving to bloommerwede.nl, or maybe houte, in the Netherlands, so my kids can have this. I wish it were easier to find.
You don't need to move to these specific places in the Netherlands, in pretty much any city/suburb or town over ~3000 or something people you will have everything you need within safe biking distance, including a train or bus station to get around further.
Well, I live in Hilversum now, and _for me_ it's nice, I can bike or use public transport for everything. For _my kids_ it's... OK, but there are too many busy roads with fast traffic that they would need to cross to get to the closest playground, their school, etc.. Also quite a few large SUV's and big trucks.
My kids are 6 and 4 though.
Hilversum is the nicest place I've ever lived for biking and walking, but it's still not as good as Houten, parts of Utrecht, etc.
There's also less kids and that makes people drive faster. When I was a kid, there would be a dozen or more or us in a gang on bikes anywhere in the city and that was just us. There would be huge gangs of teens wandering. When I was a teen, I used to walk 3 miles to downtown with my friends for mo reason at all. My city hasn't changed except you don't see kids literally everywhere. Even in quiet neighborhoods with parks in the center, I don't see kids ambling about or playing. There's nothing dangerous around, but they still aren't there.
I think this is just the decline of the birth rate. I think about my neighborhood. My kid should be spoiled for kids to play with, but couple only has one kid and the ages are spread from infant to nearly an adult, so it works out in the whole neighborhood theres only a handful of kids she can play with. I see bus stops with just 2 kids there. When I was a lid there were nearly a dozen at just my stop.
I really think because there are less kids, it's just less safe for them because people don't honestly think they'll turn the corner and there well be half a dozen kids playing basketball in the street or something.
Lol. Maybe it is "safer" now because gangs of teenagers no longer roam the streets. I think today that many older people are happy not to see teens hanging in public. The old always fear the young.
Funny to see another Lausannois here, cheers
I grew up in 80's the time where almost everybody played in parks and fields. But I can't give that to my own son of 7.
I realize it's not possible for everybody, but there are areas where this is still possible. Even in the suburbs.
My current "town" - Reston, VA - is like this. I can walk to all three schools (~1 mile), two lakes (~2 miles), a shopping center (~1 mile), community center (~1 mile), ball fields (~0.5 miles), and miles of wooded trails without crossing a single street at grade (we have pedestrian tunnels). And you can buy a decent TH for ~$600k (that's "affordable" for DC metro).
It always amazes me that people willingly choose newer/bigger homes with crap infrastructure for families to live locally over older/smaller homes where the QOL is, by my measure, so much higher.
Newer homes tend to have better park infrastructure in my experience. No modern suburb will allow a development without the developer donating some of the land to the city for a park. Older developments didn't have that and so parks are much farther away, and much more likely to be across busy streets. (exurb developments also don't have parks - but when you have enough land for horses you can find room for your own playground)
there is a lot of bad urbanism about new suburbs, but the parks are a bright spot.
Newer homes tend to have better park infrastructure in my experience.
From what I've seen, there may be parks, but they rarely seem to be walkable, and if they are, they're just a swing set (and not a full field with room for older kids to run). Lots of disjointed sidewalks, where the developer put sidewalks in/around the cluster of homes, but failed to link it anywhere useful.
It really depends who the developer is trying to sell to. There are properties being developed around here that would bog down an invading army, and there are others that are clearly developed for seniors, and some that are obviously aimed at families.
The latter two often are quite walkable and even advertise it as a feature. It depends on what is selling.
As house prices level off, expect to see developers throw more money at things like walkability and parks, as they hate to ever have to reduce prices in a development or an area, and would rather "throw more on".
That's not affordable, not even for DC metro. Houses in Greenbelt (one of the nation's original walkable planned communities) can be had for less than $400k. $600k is "large colonial" money, or "walk to UMD's campus" money. Even those numbers are not necessarily comfortable swings for the median worker.
The median household income in Greenbelt is significantly less than Reston ($82k vs $135k).
The average home sale for all of DC Metro, for all home types, is right around $600k. And average new homes in Fairfax County is around $1 million.
That's why I had "affordable" in quotes - it's not cheap, no debate there, but it's reasonable for the area given the demographics (and you can spend less, but get a less desirable home design or location). Lots of teachers and SAHM/Fs in my neighborhood, which you're less likely to find in Ashburn or McLean.
Hello fellow Restonite!
Reston is a gem. It's not perfect by any means, but it was intentionally designed to be something other than unmitigated suburban sprawl. And it helps a lot. There's still a big reliance on cars to get around, but the wide availability of trails is fantastic.
And it definitely varies based on which side of Reston you're in. Being bisected by the Toll Road has some advantages, but really limits the ability to fully link (by foot or pedal) the entire area.
Yup. College towns are especially great for this, because college kids walk all over the place, so there's a critical mass of pedestrians and drivers expect them. We live in Hanover NH, and packs of six-year-olds run all over our neighborhood.
It's a few thousand deaths per year for traffic. Kids need to be careful around streets but your fear is exaggerated.
I'm pretty sure car deaths are the number 1 preventable cause of death of children - doesn't seem like an exaggerated fear.
Step 1 is to reduce speed limit to 45kph (25mph) anywhere a pedestrian could interact with the road which is what Vision Zero recommends.
Reducing the speed limit further is not going to help because there is barely enforcement of the speed limit as it is today. You could reduce it to 10mph everywhere, and people will still drive the same speed as they do today.
Combine the great American pastimes - make it legal to shoot a vehicle that is 10 mph over the limit ;)
That's true but the number is exceedingly small. 4000 deaths / a couple hundred million is pretty much as good as it's going to get. That's just what happens with really big numbers.
Edit: and that's car accidents, not pedestrian accidents which is also a fraction of that 4k.
Keep in mind there are fewer kids walking and biking.
The top reply the the top comment shows exactly why this "the number 1 preventable cause of death" nonsense doesn't actually line up with reality. Traffic deaths decrease while population is increasing, street are demonstrably safer for children than they ever have been. Barely 100 deaths for 330+ million people in the US, likely even less in less car-centric cultures.
But, what is the "deaths per mile walked/biked"? Put differently, people (kids included) also walk less than in the 60s or 70s because we've made it unsafe (or at least difficult and unpleasant) to do so.
I won't ride a bicycle in the UK because the British despise anything that isn't a car. People will literally cheer if a cyclist is mowed down.
That sounds horrific. When I biked a lot recently the worst I got was a water bottle thrown at me and shouts intended to startle me to fall down
You're being downvoted but I've observed this behaviour. I had a colleague who had multiple dash cams because truck drivers kept trying to drive him over when passing. They thought it was hilarious, they don't seem to care about whether or not the person will be killed.
I was shocked coming to Germany and seeing cyclists not constantly being attacked by the general public. In the UK it's seen as totally illegitimate.
With all do respect the numbers do not back this up. There were less than 200 of these types of deaths in 2021 according NHTSA and thats with a massive increase in cards from the 80s. Almost all danger for children has reduced since that time across all economics groups.
The pressure from parents on other parents has made it so we dont trust children to handle risks that are pretty manageable.
Kids don't walk and bike like they used to. I used to walk alone to visit neighbors on other blocks when I was 5yo in the 80s. Before owning a computer I'd walk or bike to play outside every day it wasn't snowing. And sometimes even then.
I've seen children on the sidewalk, and so it should be possible to get a corrected "deaths-per-sidewalk-mile" if someone wants to do the work.
I suspect that overall deaths are down, even if simply because overall total percentage of travel that is on freeway (controlled-access) is up.
That's why I personally cannot fathom living (and having a family) in a large town/city.
I grew up in a village and I felt like I owned it, a few roads of course but they had to careful, not us.
I believe that sort of mentality helps a lot in feeling connected with a place and not just a foreign object who has to take armored vehicles (e.g. Cars) to move from point to point.
I mean... I live in a dense neighborhood in a city, and since you know everyone, the feeling of 'owning the place' still exists. We're lucky to be an older neighborhood (for the area), thus we have smaller roads, which are easy to navigate for kids. I think the main issue is (1) do you trust your neighbors, (2) are the streets safe (i.e., small), and (3) can you not be an anxious wreck.
It seems that US motor vehicle deaths per 100K pop are down by about 50% from where they were in the 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Yes, cars have become much safer for the occupants. Also, far, far fewer people (especially kids) are walking and biking, so drivers have fewer chances to kill them. It's remarkable that pedestrian fatalities have gone up dramatically - now at the highest levels since the 1980's - _despite_ far, far fewer people walking to get around. For instance
https://walkbiketoschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Fina...
""" ▪ In 1969, 48 percent of students in grades K through eight (ages 5 through 14) walked or bicycled to school.1 ▪ In 2009, only 13 percent of students in grades K through eight walked or bicycled to school. """
Chances are you have the affluences to give all of that to your son if you chose, but for some reason (that is yours) you do not.
I'm confused, what do you mean?
In my town, the commune has built a children's cage at the other side of a not-so-busy road, where cars are thus invited to speed.
Thanks to the safety of their cage, cars can roam in freedom without having to worry about needlessly interferences.
I have been lately despising every kind of caged playground, where children might find fun in a sandbox.
In my experience in NYC, a playground without a fence and gate means a playground used as a track by teenagers on motorcycles and e-scooters (the sit down kind).
Meanwhile the Yanomami tribes children are climbing 100 foot trees on their own.
For 25 years I walked to work. The number of times, in a crosswalk, I had to jump out of the way to avoid serious injury or death could not be counted on my fingers and toes. And I was hyper-aware of vehicles (I include bicycles in that, because many times I had to avoid them, too).
Now, I'm in a city (in the Bay Area) and I was walking from a residential area into the city (2-3 miles one way). Still, you would not expect lawful crossing of a street to be so dangerous.
The kid can handle it. In the 80s at 8 year old I would travel all over town on bikes and buses. The streets are safer now than they were back then.