254 replies
19h36m
The design of the physical environment is in no small part responsible for this. Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk and bike to school, to friends places and just in general play and exist outside unattended to a much higher degree than in the US. Because in the US they would be roadkill, and even if they somehow survived outside of a car, car centric design means there's nowhere for them to go on foot or by bike anyway. Everything is too far.
My particular bugbear here is the absolutely insanity of truck and SUV heights, to the point that even full-grown adults are no longer clearly visible from inside new vehicles (https://i.imgur.com/1dHWVxn.png).
We need reforms to the method the EPA uses to calculate and enforce fuel efficiency requirements. It's the direct driver of the gigantifucation of vehicles.
Yes, if by 'reform', you mean abolish.
As you can see, those requirements just get gamed.
Instead of complicated rules, just tax fuel (or emissions etc), and consumers will institute their own personal fuel efficiency requirements.
No, because that harm small fun sports cars. The problem is big cars. Just ban big cars.
Fuel tax is the best solution. Pay as you go.
More fuel you consume more emissions you produce, more distance you go, more road your wear occurs.
Do you want to get 8l V8 engine? Fine, just pay your fuel taxes.
Each US state has a gas tax already. Higher gas prices also don’t seem to stop people from buying giant trucks and SUVs.
A reasonable well optioned truck is $75,000. People who can afford to spend that are immune from high gas prices.
You'd be surprised how many people look only at the monthly payment amount and ignore other financial concerns when deciding on a vehicle purchase. And perhaps with some terribly long loan term like 72 or 96 months they can get that payment to "fit" in their budget.
You'd be surprised how many people don't even consider the monthly payment. Not uncommon where I grew up to see guys making $50,000 a year driving $70,000 trucks. Because they "need it for work".
What about the electric SUVs?
You could tax momentum as well. (Or as a short-hand, tax fuel and tax vehicles by weight.)
Tax road wear. The weight over each axle to the fourth power times number of axles. That'll put smaller cars on the road.
This is a silly tangential point, but with good design a V8 can be as efficient as an I4 (and with bad design a V6 can be more wasteful than a V8).
Pinning fuel use seems to be the way to go, rather than penalizing engine geometry, for this reason.
It's important to remember, though, that semi-trucks get 5-8 miles to the gallon due to their weight/purpose. Perhaps these new fuel taxes should only affect classes other than A, B, and C to avoid knock-on effects.
Small fun sports cars don't cost that much in fuel do they? Ferrari and Bugatti owners are pretty insensitive to fuel prices anyway.
You can tax momentum (and/or weight), too.
Basically, tax fuel and tax the car.
But no need for outright bans. Almost any externality you can think of from (big) cars is finite, and thus a finite tax is appropriate.
That's not likely to succeed, because:
1. People — individuals and companies — try to game the tax system at least as much as they do pollution regulations, and probably much more so because tax obligations are largely self-reported with only sporadic auditing to catch cheaters and gamers.
2. Certain political elements are always trying to defund the tax auditors (e.g., the IRS). We might well ask why that is.
3. Politically, tax hikes are always harder to get through Congress — and to keep in force — than sensible standards for products and behaviors that voters can see are beneficial to them (e.g., pollution prohibitions).
Tax the petrol itself. That works reasonably well in most of the world. No need for complicated individual audits etc.
I don't know. We kicked off the whole discussion because the standards you have are NOT sensible.
True — but see my #3 above (political problems), and then add 3.1: Special-interest groups, which donate heavily to politicians' campaigns, always lobby for tax breaks of various kinds, e.g., tax deductions (at the federal level) for state- and local sales- and property taxes.
it would be interesting to see the effects of taxation in this particular situation in the united states. from what i’ve seen, this is one of those situations where financial penalties do not dissuade or deter proliferation. at a minimum it seems to foment radicalization of political sides toward their general bent (the government is doing too much, or not enough). one side yells louder for more while consuming itself, the other side keeps buying the vehicles out of spite/support (for the manufacturers) as a way of thumbing their noses at the government overreach.
That's the beauty: If the taxes are set right, then people can buy vehicles 'out of spite', and it's all right.
At a high enough tax rate, the would-be gas guzzlers' contribution to the fisc outweighs their probabilistic homicide.
People's desires are the direct driver of gigantification of vehicles. I assure you nobody buying a RAM or F150 gives two shits about EPA or fuel efficiency.
People had no choice. When they come out with a new generation of car model they stop producing the old.
There’s also still the insane 25% tariff on light trucks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
Which makes importing smaller trucks like you see in other countries cost prohibitive
Only the most frugal and businesses are thinking about that tariff. Ads for these excessively large "utility" vehicles (which have sacrificed bed size for cabin comfort and are often not 4WD) are very indicative. They don't talk about price (and when they do, it's focused on credit terms rather than the capital cost). They talk about power, lifestyle, and giving the perception of masculinity. That is why people buy these vehicles, and that is the mindset that drives their size.
That's part of it, but not all: it depends on the buyer. People buying big trucks as a fashion statement are definitely doing it for this reason, but there's people who genuinely need trucks, and they're all bitching and complaining about 1) trucks costing $50k-100k because they're basically luxury vehicles and they don't make cheap, utilitarian versions any more, and also because all those fashion-statement buyers have driven up demand, and 2) that there aren't any small pickups available now, since many of them need a truck, but not a big truck. Some people have even taken to importing 25+ year old Japanese "kei" trucks (very very small utility trucks used in Japan) as "historic" vehicles and using those, but it seems some states are now trying to clamp down on this.
There's the Ford Maverick that starts at $24k and is relatively small.
That's exactly what we did on the farm.
We've got the Maverick hybird which does 99% of the farm stuff.
And we also have a tow equipped expedition that we use when we need to haul horses or the big trailer. The expedition also comes in handy when we regularly haul 6+ people.
I've had the need for a gooseneck trailer maybe once in the last decade.
Now if only you could buy the damn things.the price has gone up 25% in two years and you still can't find one for purchase.
Isn't it almost cosmically funny that the response to people who do want small trucks is to try banning the kei trucks, often over claims of "safety"?
Weird that the more unsafe (to everyone else) and wasteful and polluting but also more profitable to industry modern trucks and SUVs are legal in their place!
I don't think that's right. They don't get imported, period. I would love a small truck right now - I have a relatively rural property with lots of yard waste. I would make use of a pickup bed probably every weekend if I had one, but a small pickup truck simply doesn't exist in the market. Everything is a giant extended cab. I don't think I'm the only one with this need. There's nothing new out there that meets this need and there's not a lot used either.
No choice? They can get Camry. Or van. Or wagon. Yet massive trucks have higher demand than ever.
I thought we were discussing how trucks like the f150 have swollen in size?
There are not many van or wagon options left in the US anymore. It’s really just sedan, truck or SUV at this point. In Europe you have all kinds of vans and wagons for sale.
There are lots of smaller vehicles than those.
true! but we regulate people's desires in a million ways, so there's no reason why we can't regulate this too. I don't care if half of Americans want a monster truck any more than they want to fly attack helicopters and walk around with live grenades. it shouldn't be allowed, simple as that.
Simplest thing to do would be to just tax weight (at time of purchase and yearly) and require commercial license (only obtainable with demonstrable justification like running a business that requires hauling loads every day)
Still need to force trucks to design the front to be as pedestrian friendly as possible.
And ensure visibility! Those tanks on wheels can't see my children.
GWB sure did a nice favor for those corps his last couple years in office
Are you referring to some specific reform? Could you give a link? I'd like to read up on it
E.g. say non-CDL trucks can only have one seat in addition to the driver's seat.
Bam, SUVs are really unattractive.
There was a case recently where a little girl was crushed by a SUV making a right turn at a pedestrian crossing.
She was walking right behind her parents, but the driver could not see her because the vehicle was too high, so thought the road was free when the parents had passed through.
The court decided that the driver was at no fault as it was impossible to see the girl from his position.
I hope that means that the vehicle manufacturer is on a murder trial then. But I do not have illusions that this will lead to actual change.
Well, the driver should also be on the hook for driving such a dangerous machine in the first place.
The manufacturer should be jointly liable for producing a defective vehicle.
I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US, so the root cause is legislation that prevents this. I believe that if you could legally produce kei sized vehicles in the US, there would be a massive market for it, especially in urban environments. And I'm sure US manufacturers would be happy to sell them to all comers.
Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzukiauto.co.za/new-cars
This is blatantly false. See: the Mitsubishi Mirage as just one example.
The Mitsubishi Mirage might be a small car by American standards, but it seems quite a few weight classes above Kei cars.
(I don't know about erikw's claims about small cars being illegal in the US. So I don't want to express an opinion on that.)
The Honda N-box is listed as an example of a Kei car and is larger than a Mirage in some dimensions and also heavier.
Mitsubishi Mirage isn't a small car by EU standards. It's a typical, average sized one.
I thought it was just that you get hit with fines if your vehicle doesn't have a minimum mpg fuel efficiency and it's hard to make smaller trucks and SUVs with enough efficiency to avoid the fines
I don't really agree anymore. These massive vehicles on the road means that suddenly everyone has developed a very real intuition for F=ma and they're all competing in a sort of arms race to survive car crashes. Wanna improve your odds of surviving? Get the biggest fucking thing you can.
The Mazda Miata and most non-muscle car coupes are sized quite reasonably.
Are small cars in any way illegal or something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Fortwo
They are perfectly legal to sell. There's just little demand and most manufacturers have discontinued sales.
I own a not-quite-that small car and the manufacturer discontinued US sales for the same reason - the lack thereof. That's why the Smart Fortwo discontinued sales in the US in 2019. The US market for good or for bad just does not want small cars. Many manufacturers are even dropping their sedans for sales reasons; e.g., Ford dropped the Fusion and Focus.
Can you link to an article or source on that story? I can't seem to find it, just irrelevant ones about near-misses or not involving right turns etc.
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?si=2VnfQw_rMsZckB1I
WTF !
Pedestrian mirrors (allowing lorry drivers to see any pedestrians immediately in front and to the side) have been a legal requirement for years in Blighty.
https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/images/safer-lorries-schem...
Similarly I enjoy going hunting at playgrounds and don't see the problem if I shoot a kid because I didn't see them \s.
I'm in Eastern Europe; I've only seen an "American-style" SUV once I think two decades ago. I still can't get that image out of my mind. It was like a tank in front of my car. I couldn't understand how it fits our streets, how it parks, I couldn't see around it. Just... wow, honestly. I have no idea what car it was, but it was like a huge pick-up.
I once saw a F-150. It needed 3 parking spots at my eastern european local mall :)
And I don't mean the driver was an asshole, it simply wouldn't have fit in otherwise.
Well...
In the former soviet block, you don't "find somewhere else" to park your car. You grab the first spot where you fit because you don't know if there is another free anywhere else.
Incidentally, that's why i like 4 meter cars. On streets with parallel parking, they fit in more places than the 4.5 m or more.
Okay he could have been an asshole for other reasons, including for importing the F-150 here.
But the parking spots were at 45 degree angle and while it was narrow enough to fit in two if parked at 45, it was too long and it would have blocked the access lane with the tip. So it was parallel parked on 3 which was the only way to not block anyone.
I don't understand how choosing to purchase a vehicle allows you to break the law. This is a place you cannot park that vehicle.
There have been studies showing that the driver was likely an asshole. Not kidding: https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?si=2VnfQw_rMsZckB1I
Starts at 12:10
My favorite answer from soccer moms when I ask them why they drive their huge (by US standard tiny to normal) SUVs just around the city: 'I see better from up there and I feel safer in big car'.
So, bad driving skills and realizing it via lack of self-trust, being compensated with degradation of roads and parking for everybody else, or just throwing money at the problem (without fixing underlying issue, but feeling less shitty about it).
All could be easily solved by proportional taxation. Swiss folks figured it like many other things already, each canton has their own car tax rules but most are some formula with horse powers and car weight combined. No chance this decade for anything similar in the US I believe.
I deeply hate driving my family's F-150 for this reason. It doesn't fit in American parking spaces.
Ridiculous vehicle.
The driver was an asshole for not finding somewhere else to put it.
If it was ~20 years ago it wasn't even that big compared to today!
We in the U.S. don’t quite appreciate how much larger the average vehicle is versus 30 years ago. Low riding sedans are outnumbered by crossovers and full sized SUVs these days.
In the 1990s, I had a sweet little Honda Civic hatchback that got great mileage and handled beautifully.
But towards the end of the decade, the roads in my area were filled with aggressive drivers in Ford and Jeep SUVs who just were obnoxious. I felt forced to switch to a larger car just to feel safe on the road.
Actually, you'd want to get rid of those in car displays that require you to take your eyes off the road to do almost anything now, and will also spoil your night vision. There was an episode of Radiolab that was talking about this, and they made a very compelling case for it, along with those super bright headlamps that ruin your night vision when they're equipped on an oncoming vehicle. Tellingly, almost all increase in traffic accidents we've seen recently have happened at night. Pedestrian accidents with trucks haven't really gone up more than other vehicles either.
"along with those super bright headlamps that ruin your night vision when they're equipped on an oncoming vehicle."
I hate them.
I dream of the day, when proper night vision gear with the result displayed to the front window will be standard in cars, so all the cars can have no, or very soft lights to drive around savely at night.
Also, why not heat vision to better spot humans (and animals)? For the AI as well as the humans.
Is the tech military restricted?
Probably partly.
One nice side effect of headlights becoming LED arrays is that selective dimming is free in terms of marginal cost. Right now it's a luxury car gimmick but it'll eventually trickle down, and then we can mandate it.
photonic intensifiers are ITAR controlled, but china has started manufacturing gen2 equivalents recently.
digital is controlled but more widely made, but also barely worth it.
the real issue is how to display it. for head-mounted setups it's essentially full field of view, and in monocular use combination is subconscious, but it's still rather awkward and requires practice. you can't achieve the same effect on a windshield, even with HUD.
cadillac had this feature in the 90s, though.
You'd want to get rid of both.
It's crazy in this country SUV protestors deflate the tires
I always wonder if cars that are particularly top heavy could be flipped over while parked by particularly strong pedestrians
100% agree, and instead of showing any signs of stopping, the size increase is accelerating. Yesterday we used to joke about the trucks of today. Tomorrow, they will be twice as big.
Recently saw a YouTube video where around 500 kids a year are killed by their own parents because they can't see them in these monstrosities.
I recently had to borrow one of those big trucks to do some towing. Sitting in the drivers seat I felt like I was staring through a narrow slit. The nose and entire dash of the car are so high up it felt very unsettling. It seems extremely unsafe!
Even worse? Pop the hood on one and marvel at all the empty space. Those giant front ends are purely for looks.
I live in the US and my kids walk and bike to school. You're making wide generalizations across a large country.
Do they still play outside like previous generations used to?
My daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it is they're doing (I don't really know, that's part of what makes it so great). It's almost 9pm right now, I have no idea where she is. She comes home when the street lights come on. The other day I gave her a $20 bill and she rode her bike to the Walmart nearby (no major streets on the way there). She bought her friends ice cream and was a hero. Sure there were hiccups, one time she stole the neighbors solar powered lanterns from his front yard, but we made her return them and apologize.
I guess our strategy is we just don't let her have any screens. They make her absolutely insane. So instead she leaves the house as soon as she can and goes out and plays. Even her 5 year old sister who is wheelchair bound goes with her a lot of the time, in the $1200 Thule buggy super stroller we bought (used). I guess we just lucked out, but we also insisted on it and kept letting her go out even after some woman called CPS on us for letting our kid be unsupervised. We live in a middle class neighborhood with people from dozens of countries and every major religions living together, and all our kids play together. I'm sure it's someone's mental image of the ideal childhood.
9pm and you don’t know where your 9 year old is? That going too far in the other direction in my opinion. How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.
I mean this happens with my 9 year old. We have a parent group chat and just ask who knows where the crew is
Yep, we have a neighborhood group chat and send over a note with phone numbers when a new person moves in. Works great. She also has an Apple Watch with cellular service in case we need to get ahold of her. I’m happy to say she came home right on time this evening without so much as a phone call though.
So, my kid lobbied for her own cell phone for a year or so when she was in primary school. We finally caved in and got her one.
Then she realized we can now call her and tell her to come home when she's out.
"I'll leave the phone at home, daddy, I'm afraid I'll break it while playing."
That’s technology working to bring people together rather than driving them apart
Such a great use of group chat. Thanks!
It’s summer (no school) and it’s not dark until a little after 9PM, in my mid-latitude part of the continental US.
“Bye, have fun, come in when the street lights come on” is entirely appropriate for a 9-year-old when school’s not in session. It’s playing outside, not playing fortnight or drooling to the YouTube algo. It’s ok for that to run a little late in the summer.
For fucks sake, she's 9 years old, let a kid be a kid and not a productivity machine, she will have her whole life to worry about that later... At that age the worse that can happen academically speaking is taking a bit longer to learn how to multiply and divide numbers.
At that age is easy to pick up bad habits and also easy to let them go, OP seems to be a good enough parent to nudge their kid into better habits if they deem necessary.
9pm is just a number; street lights are obvious and well-timed for when it's time to stop being outside.
If 6pm and no knowledge was ok, almost 9pm with streetlights still off is too.
Reading wincy's comment above, it seems like their kid is the one that's a "bad" influence on the rest of the neighbourhood.
(Not actually 'bad', but trendsetters that helped some of the other kinds come out to play more.)
This one might have a regional element to it based on how late the days are. For example where I'm at it won't quite be sunset at 9pm, and each phase of twilight will have around an hour to itself. Around now would be about an appropriate time for a young person to make their way home so they get back before dark. In comparison it looks like Houston will be about halfway through nautical twilight and basically be completely dark by 9pm (nautical twilight ends at 920 there).
So yeah, your gauge of what 9pm means might not be accurate for the situation! I doubt you were imagining 9pm being bright and an hour or two before its too dark for a young person to be out riding a bike, but that could well be the case
Jumping in here.
Do you home school? Because if you don't home school, surprise! "Bad" kids are everywhere, including in any school that exists.
The best you can do is talk about bad influence. Peer pressure. Tailoring that conversation to the child's personality.
My thoughts on this are, the time to teach self-control and responsibility is when young. It won't take completely when young, as the brain is literally not fully developed in that capacity yet, but the lessons can stick, and be known when older.
Those lessons are action->consequence outcomes, and in a sense, borking up responsibility at times becomes a leaning moment. Put another way, mistakes are how we learn, and small mistakes when young, are better than massive mistakes when 20.
Yes, bad habits are a worry. I don't think there is any simple answer here, except independence is important for any adult mind, and that flows from independence in youth.
And of course, this all depends upon the child too. Some have more sense at 5, than others at 50.
You don't also know what is actually happening.
I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others.
One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this?
Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids.
Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.
Thanks for sharing your story, it’s wonderful, seems very similar to how we grew up. We have a 6 yo who does get daily outdoor time but that is supervised because it wouldn’t be possible otherwise, we live in NYC. My son does get screen time only 2 hours on weekends, at this point the cat’s out of the bag. We’ll just try to keep the screen time limited to 2 hours per week.
Out of interest, how did the interaction with CPS go?
Where is this?
Most suburbs are like this.
Maybe a tiny part of a suburb where you're not just near both the school and grocery store but it's nice to walk there and you're not crossing major roads. So, a tiny fraction of the US population.
Either way, some Americans will hear people talk about Europe or Japan or whatever and tell themself "I totally have that too where I live in the US" yet it's not even close.
Yup, in every European or Japanese town or city I've lived in (with the exception of one very small and isolated town), I never bothered getting a car. Everything was close enough to walk to (usually 2-5 minutes walk), and for things that were too far, I'd take the tram or train.
I've also lived in a few American cities, and it's a completely different experience. Even from downtown Philly it was inconvenient to get anywhere without a car.
There's a big difference between "Everything was close enough to walk to" and the schools is close enough to walk to.
In my experience, if you live in a suburb you do usually have to drive to get to things like stores, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. But what is close are schools and playgrounds. In the suburb I currently live, all three levels of schools and over half a dozen playgrounds are within walking distance.
Funny enough, I drove my kid to school for 8 years in Eastern Europe. But that's because she wanted that school that was far away.
On the other hand, if i need groceries I just take a backpack and walk 5-10 minutes to one of the 5 different stores. I can even afford to be picky and get my butter from one, bread from the other etc :)
I don't know what the percentage is, but having a school within walking or biking distance is definitely not uncommon in US suburbs. At least in the areas I've lived (in multiple parts of the country), schools are generally built close to large neighborhoods, and have dedicated infrastructure to help kids walk to school. Grocery stores are less likely to be within walking distance. But then, even if I could walk to a grocery store, I'm not sure I'd want to, because I would be limited by how much I can carry back, which means I'd have to go shopping more often.
Conversely, I have traveled to Europe and Japan. At least in the areas I went to, it didn't really seem any safer for kids to play outside than many parts of America. Yes, public transit was much better, but there were still lots of cars on the streets, and there were areas that weren't very pedestrian friendly. And in some cities it was quite difficult to find playgrounds. I don't doubt that there are places in Europe and Japan where kids can play outside without worrying about cars. But such conditions are not universal.
None of the US comments are true in the large areas of Georgia and Arizona that I'm familiar with. Sidewalks are very uncommon. One side of street only, if even there. Which is problematic at multilane intersections. Then the kid has to cross twice on each side. I actually managed to get a crossing light installed on my kid's bike route to school by complaining to a city council member. There are traffic jams at every school for drop-off/pick-up. Drive through the quite nice looking housing developments on weekends/holidays and there are zero children out and about. My wife and I think that's very sad.
That said, my kid rode a bike to school from 5-10th grades in Arizona. She was the only kid that did that.
There are about 7 grocery stores within 5 miles of my suburban house. I have never seen anyone walk/bike to any of them. (I look.) If you tried to you would spend quite a bit of time navigating parking/road infrastructure where the drivers clearly believe is their entire right of way.
In Mexico you would think it would be much worse, but it is light years better. Kids take care of getting themselves to school in Paris, from what we have seen.
This idea that "unless universal, the claim false" is... not helpful. As a family in suburban US we did the bike thing. It fucking sucked.
Most suburbs? What suburbs are you referring to, exactly? The 'burbs I grew up in there was nothing nearby in a two mile radius. The only access to school was via bus or having my parents drive.
Chicago area comes to my mind
I’ve lived in OH, PA, and NC outside of major cities and none were like that
Also interested to know, sounds like a nice region.
I've learned from HN discussions that there is a vast difference in what people think of as a "suburb".
Some will say it takes over 30 minutes by car from a suburb to the nearest store. To me that's very rural, I'd never consider that a suburb. But some do. So we get these disconnected discussion on how you can/can't do such and such thing in a suburb.
I've nearly always lived in what I consider suburbs. Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby. The middle schools is an easy walk away for kids. High school is a bit farther but still an easy bike ride for high-school age kids (about 15 minutes).
> To me that's very rural
That's the idea if used in the North American sense. Suburbs are effectively rural areas, except with a higher population density. You will see rows of houses instead of rows of corn, but otherwise no different.
> Places with single family homes and parks and playgrounds where I can very easily walk to just about every store or service nearby.
What's a town, then?
Suburbs are usually grafted onto towns (and within a few minutes of stores), not in the middle of nowhere. That would just be bizarre.
> Suburbs are usually [...] would just be bizarre.
Usually, yes, but I know of settlements "out in the middle of nowhere" that are nothing but rows of houses. No businesses, schools, or anything of that sort found within the immediate community. One needs to drive through the vast corn fields to another town to access such amenities. It doesn't seem that bizarre.
> (and within a few minutes of stores)
For those at the nearest edge, no doubt. Those at the furthest edge could be quite a distance away. Although, even in a small suburb, often you find the craziest road systems. It might take a half an hour just to drive to a store only a mile away.
Suburbs surely do have crazy road systems, all meandering and looping back into themselves instead of connecting to the rest of the world. But you are greatly exaggerating how much this adds to trip times, I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store. If you have any specific examples in mind, I'd love to gawk at them.
Personally I just hate the aesthetic of suburbs, so I'll never live in one, but I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are. The suburb in my town takes no more than five minutes to drive across and is directly adjacent to the grocery store. From what I've seen this is typical. The worst I've seen are those in the DC metro area, but even then they have stores all over the place. The real pain in the ass in that region is needing to use/cross multilane roads to get anywhere.
> I've never seen nor heard of cases where it might take 30 minutes to escape and reach a store.
Well, me neither. I grew up on a production farm with actual rows of corn fields and there were still several different towns with stores 5-10 minutes away.
> I think some people in this thread are getting a bit hyperbolic about how inconvenient they are.
No doubt, but that doesn't really have much to do with the conversation. The conversation is about what we call the places that are just rows upon rows of housing without a shared and vibrant mixture of businesses, hospitals, schools, etc. They're not exactly rural, there are too many people living there to be considered rural, but they aren't like towns or cities either.
Suburb seems to be the prevailing term.
In Australian English, “suburb” roughly means “neighbourhood”. So to us, downtown (or the CBD as we call it), is a “suburb”. In the Australian sense of the term, the Financial District and the Upper East Side are suburbs of New York City.
Yes, when I used to live in Australia them calling everything a 'burb, including the middle of the town, was a bit confusing.
Yeah, when I visited down there I initially misinterpreted what the "CBD bakery" was selling... xD
Yep, but on the other hand aren't there regions where you'd get arrested for letting your kids go to school alone?
Normally you are not arrested, but a cps visit when you are reported is annoying. There are a lot of mandatory reporters who will be in trouble if they don' report so you will be. It wasts cps's time from real cases of neglict in most cases, but those exceptions get a kid help sooner.
I would LOVE to know where this is?? If it's more walkable that JUST the school.
I have lived in suburbs near enough to schools that you can walk on 2 occasions in both NC and AZ but this was a very lucky quality, not the norm AT ALL, highly desirable, and you could walk to practically nothing other than the school. Leaving the neighborhood on foot was not a good place to be walking.
You're also putting Europe on a pedestal. In many urban areas (where the majority of the population lives) it's no longer safe for kids to walk + bike to school freely. Not necessarily because of cars but significant crime.
guess what kills the most children, criminals or cars?
At a certain maturity, kids have developed mentally enough for cars to not be a threat to them. Criminals are a whole different problem.
Right, no teenagers or adults die by cars, for they have developed mentally enough for cars not to be a threat to them
…Except the 40 000 who do die by car, every single year, in the US alone. Countless more injured and permanently disabled. Meanwhile criminals are indeed a whole different problem. (an imaginary one)
Children, even teenagers, account for a very small portion of pedestrian deaths. Arguably this is because they're kept indoors, but the 20-25 age bracket is the second least likely to die as a pedestrian, despite being young and (stereotypically) dumb and reckless at that age. On the other hand, 25-35 are the most likely to get hit.
Some other interesting statistics: 25% of pedestrians killed were drunk, while only 19% of the time the driver was (these overlap, both drunk, in 6% of cases.) 3/4ths of pedestrian fatalities occur at night. 2/3rds don't occur in a crosswalk.
Take away: kids who don't drink, don't stay out at night and use crosswalks are significantly less likely to be hit.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/pedestr...
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli...
this is victim blaming IMO. people get drunk. people go out at night. people cross streets. if the physical environment doesn't take the above into account, to the point where there are countless needless and preventable deaths, the correct thing to do is to fix the environment, not say people should have been more careful.
Victim blaming? I'm explaining that children are at less risk than the crude statistic would suggest. I think maybe you're mad about that because it undermines your intent to radically restructure society with this child pedestrian safety pretext.
It's more that as a society we have agreed to a certain amount of risk that cars bring, because they have some positive value ( risk to value ratio will be debated ).
Criminals bring 0 value and all risk. Criminals also do more than just murder.
Roads, cars and trucks bring a lot of value for the disabled, deliveries and emergency vehicles who really need them. What like 90% of vehicles and trips do not fit in any of those categories, and so bring zero of the value but all the harm.
What kind of criminal is out to kill kids?
If only we made killing children with your car a crime.
I recently lived in Portland when a teen was killed by a car in the southeast part of the city. The guy fled back to Saudi Arabia and no semblance of justice occurred. In the real world, vehicular crimes are seen as just a part of life. Consider the common term "car accident" and the absolving of responsibility it implies.
Even your statement shows how deep the absolution of drivers is - a driver killed the kid. Though they’d face no consequences in the US either
How does the saying go? If you want to kill someone and get away with it, kill them with your car.
Alas. See the comment above, where a driver in a huge SUV got away scott-free for killing a child.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644209
I don't think if I went bird hunting where kids play and shot a kid "by accident" I'd get away with it.
Compare also https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
Exactly, what the hell is "not necessarily because of cars" supposed to mean? Or maybe it's a comment on how, despite cars being way more dangerous, parents over-focus on crime?
There is however an impression in fairly substantial parts of society that it's gotten worse, and that impression might well have a greater effect than the actual rate on some people's behaviours.
Can you find a source for this claim for European countries? I personally can't but maybe my scholar foo is bad.
For which claim? That people have an impression that things have gotten worse? You look at our recent European elections and how much of the campaigning was on law and order and the perception of the collapse of society.
Now you are moving the goal post. And if you ask me, those are just masks for inner racism about immigrants stealing their jerbs. I live in Europe and I don't see this being a big consideration. So if I'm not hearing it from my fellows then I would need at least a survey to believe this. I've seen those surveys for US.
Wait, the OP starts out with an even more vague claim and then a counter-point gets jumped on?
"Don't believe me go to Europe and Japan where kids are still allowed to walk"
This is the top rated comment here, the line by itself is about as ridiculous as any other. Every kid in Europe is allowed to walk to school? How is this any different that than the US?
Is it no longer safe there? Because in the states parents have been restricting kids a lot more severely just as crime in cities plummeted (mid 90s--present). So I imagine it's either perceptions about safety, or parents just being more careful.
It isn't no longer safe for kids to walk to school. What happened is that American internet arrived here, and it has political reasons to want everyone to think it is.
I walked to the gas station with my dog and two kids, and had a guy yell at me that my kids were going to get kidnapped while I went inside for 5 minutes to buy us some waters and snacks. The biggest hurdle for us letting our children be free range and able to do things on their own has definitely been paranoid parents and busybodies who watched Sound of Freedom and think that every girl is going to immediately get sex trafficked to Guatemalan drug lords (or whatever, I didn't watch the movie) if she leaves her parent's sight for a second.
Wait, are you saying American internet it telling people that it's safe, or that it's unsafe?
Europe is a big place, it varies widely.
Sounds like a false claim. Robbery of children? Human trafficking? What exactly are you talking?
I would say one off the biggest threat for pedestrians in European city are electric scooters.
> I would say one off the biggest threat for pedestrians in European city are electric scooters.
How many deaths have they caused? How do those stats compare to the deaths caused by motor vehicles? Which one is more dangerous based on that data?
I have looked at local pedestrian casualty statistics and motor vehicles are by far the largest cause of injury and death in the large city where I live. I haven't even been able to find what was the last time that a cyclist or e-scooter rider killed a pedestrian. Meanwhile, cars and trucks have killed four cyclists this year alone.
this is bullshit, cars kill and injure orders of magnitude more people in Europe than scooters do. That's not to say there's 0 issues with scooters, because there are, but focus should remain on cars, not scooters.
The crime that has been *falling* throughout the entire western world after peaking in the mid 1990's ?
crime=/=crime
The park were we hung out as kids is now inhabited by drug dealers. Obviously no place for kids, or families or basically anyone else, I will try to avoid if I reasonably can. And of course there was no increase in statistical crime, as it just is not getting prosecuted, although it is clear as day that it is happening.
Crime stats are hugely misleading if you want to figure out what a social environment looks like.
Please, share your sources and what cities you are talking about.
I live in Europe and I see groups of kids hanging out by themselves all the time in many, many major cities across the continent.
I’m now curious where those urban areas are where crime is so significant, kids no longer can walk to school.
(And what kind of crime? We don’t really have lots of drive-by-shootings here, kids aren’t exactly a prime target for robberies either)
Please don't throw wild vague claims around without substantiating with data/sources.
Crime has decreased pretty much everywhere over the last three decades. I am sure there are pockets in the world where it hasn't, but those would be the exception.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-wes...]
Have you actually experienced Japanese drivers? They make American drivers look absolutely noble (and truthfully, we are) by comparison.
For starters, and this applies to both individual and professional drivers:
* They don't give way to emergency vehicles blaring the sirens.
* They don't wait for people to finish crossing intersections.
* They don't let other drivers into their lane.
* They drive absurdly fast.
* Most roads are very narrow.
Some particularly busy intersections require dedicated police officer supervision to shepherd the drivers because they're so unruly and disrespectful of pedestrians and other drivers.
There are many reasons Japan is more accepting of letting children be children, but most of that is social factors and motivators that are decidedly different from American ones. Cars are ultimately just a really small part, if any.
What you're saying doesn't hold up.
Japan: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 2.6
USA: > Road fatalities per 100 000 population: 13.8
[0]https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/japan-road-safe... [1]https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
That’s because they’re still far better drivers than us.
It's amazing to see in China too ... cars pulling out everywhere in front of each other, weaving in and out of traffic.
However I suspect there are less road accidents there per capita than here in Australia since everybody there has to pay attention and is patient with other drivers. Australian drivers either tune out or are too aggressive (road rage) and cause more accidents.
Having lived in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, Australia seems to me by far the worst drivers. Incredibly aggressive, insane speeding and road rage, everywhere, all the time. And it’s not just tolerated, it’s completely normal and accepted, even considered cool and encouraged. Just what.
This is my experience too. Pedestrian crossings are completely ignored and indicating is optional. Combined with this god awful SUVs, Australia is an unpleasant place to be a pedestrian.
Sydney has this weird thing where cars drive full speed to red lights and break at the last minute which is pretty frightening when crossing.
This is quite different to my part of inner-suburban Australia. I find drivers here to be almost universally polite and accommodating. And there is barely any speeding. Someone doing more than 1-3 km over the limit on the expressway is a clear outlier. Maybe it's only like this around here though.
I have driven tens of thousands of kilometres in the US on roadtrips, and the driving there is quite insane - speeding and dangerous, aggressive manoeuvres. Doing 10-20km over the limit is standard and anyone sticking to the limit is the outlier.
I’ve only really driven much in the Northeastern US and the Portland, OR area. The Portland drivers were much less aggressive and also much scarier. There just isn’t a tradition of moving with intention out there. They drift aimlessly about, sliding thoughtlessly through your blind spot. It is maddening.
You can see it in the stats too,
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Places like MA and NY are, I think, known for their rude drivers but the fatalities per distance: anomalously low.
My theory is that Japanese drivers are our brothers in attentive, intentional driving.
An alternative theory is that population dense areas like cities promote aggressive driving, but also tend to host slower-speed collisions just by virtue of all the traffic. However, this seems unlikely, because it is far too simple and straightforward. Also wouldn’t justify a great long ramble about the superiority of my local driving culture, so I can’t bear for it to be true.
I would be more interested in the stat per miles driven. I suspect the US still is worse than Japan but a lower ratio.
There is no point debating on US car stats, we are the best and worst at everything car related.
Why does miles driven matter? Fewer people are dying, that's what matters. The fact that I have to drive further/faster than someone in Japan to accomplish the same task is increasing my chance of death and that is bad. The fact that the USA has no regulations stopping its citizens from buying 6,000 pound trucks that have bad pedestrian visibility as a driver with a pulse-check standard vehicle license is bad.
If people are driving fewer miles in Japan that means that the built environment is better.
Is there higher usage of mass transit, cycling, and walking in Japan? You bet there is.
And don't give me that "America is oh so big and spread out, Japan is on an island" nonsense. 80%+ of Americans live in urban areas. It once had the largest passenger rail network in the world. This is a matter of intentional city planning and deliberate choices. Not every island nation is as transit-oriented as Japan (just look at the Carribbean or even the UK).
When divided highways were first being introduced globally, Japan's government made an intentional choice to invest in the Shinkansen instead of roadways. That was not an inevitability as there were voices there that preferred road investment.
I live in Aomori, I have been commuting every single day for the last 6 years, and I totally agree with you. There are three more points that make me mad:
- Stopping in the middle of the road whenever they feel like it. Just turn on the blinkers and boom, the road became a parking slot! And they don't care if it is a straight segment or the middle of a curve.
- Overtaking other cars on the left at an intersection. I don't know here, but in my home country that is illegal, because it is very dangerous. I have seen many near misses because of it.
- They don't turn on the lights as long as there is a tiny sliver of light in the sky. Every day I see people driving with the lights off after sunset, or during heavy rain or snow! Seriously, who drives with the lights off during a fucking blizzard with less than 10 meters of visibility?!?
Taxis and occasionally even limousine buses are notoriously guilty of this...
I wonder what subtle differences are there between road codes across countries.
For example, in my romanian road code you are not permitted to turn right at a red light unless there is a separate green blinking arrow pointing that way (and no, the blinking green isn't always there). I know that in the US the default is you can turn.
How about stopping on the side of the road? Here it's permitted anywhere it's not explicitly forbidden. And I think taxis have an exception and they can really stop anywhere for a few moments to pick up/drop people. They may get cursed at but it's legal.
Here's a little mind twister:
In the US there are Right Arrow signals. A Red signal indicates you can turn right if it's safe just like ordinary Red signals. A Green signal indicates you can turn right, obviously.
Wait, what?
You see, this Right Arrow signal exists alongside ordinary signals at an intersection. Specifically when the ordinary signals are Green (so you can go straight ahead or turn as appropriate) but the Right Arrow signal is Red, you cannot turn right. Usually this is because someone is crossing the intersection and you would risk running them over.
This specific arrangement is very rare.
Hmm here there would be a normal 3 color light specifically for turning right, with 3 right pointing arrows.
Never saw single red lights. Just the blinking green when it's permitted. Btw blinking green implies yield to other cars, pedestrians or anything else that's in your way.
They are. Heck, one time I even saw a truck driver just taking a nap! Like, he decided to stop in the middle of the road and sleep!
Sure, better than falling asleep and crashing, but come on, all the konbinis around here have parking slots big enough for trucks.
Lived in Japan 20 years and still spend ~2 months a year there including last month. Never experienced any of this except "most roads are very narrow" which is only semi-true. It's true many small roads are, um, small. But there are plenty of big roads as well.
I've never seen dedicated police supervision. I have seen directors around road construction. That's no different than in the states.
Here's some more detail concerning pedestrians crossing intersections that I mentioned earlier.
In America, it is literally against the law to enter an intersection unless you can completely cross it without stopping. That means if a pedestrian is crossing, you wait outside of the intersection for them to finish crossing first.
In Japan? With pedestrians crossing? You enter the intersection and hopefully you stop inches from the crosswalk in the middle of the intersection while you wait for the road to clear and then go through if there is space.
Yes, even professional drivers do it. It's fucking insane if you ask me. How much time do you save? Seconds? And you risk a higher chance of running someone over?
Japan is world renowned for their hospitality, but Japanese drivers are by far some of the biggest assholes I have ever seen in my life.
This is false: it depends on the state. In Arizona, it is the law that you can enter the intersection to turn, and then if the light turns red, everyone has to wait until you complete your turn before they can enter the intersection.
None of that laundry list ultimately matters when Japanese speed limits are so much lower; speed is what kills. (Also, Japanese drivers are used to keeping their cars in lane, are used to sharing the road, and are driving much smaller and lighter vehicles). I suspect that what you perceive as "absurdly fast" is probably very different between those countries: because of the absurdly wide roads in the US, absurdly dangerous speeds get normalised. Someone doing 25% over the speed limit in Japan is still driving much slower than a driver in a comparable neighbourhood in the US.
So like any intersection in New York.
Nah. It's cars, more specifically street parking.
Absolutely agree on street parking. If you're driving down a clear street, you can see a kid chasing a ball out from their driveway, or someone about to scoot across the road. When the area is full of parked cars, your visibility is going to be down to nothing in some of these situations.
This is NOT at all my experience here in Tokyo. Drivers are generally very careful around crosswalks, and for good reason: if a driver hits a pedestrian (or cyclist), it's automatically the driver's fault, with almost no exceptions.
The only really bad drivers I normally see here are some taxi drivers, driving too fast on narrow streets in the city. Everyone else is generally careful.
But don't forget: here in Tokyo, most drivers are professionals (delivery trucks or taxis usually), not private individuals. Your experience in more rural or car-centric parts of Japan are likely to be very different.
The thing is, you get used to it. Living in an eastern european country that hasn't caught up on infrastructure, I'm used to driving on narrow winding roads.
What happened when I first drove a couple hundred km on a freeway[1]? I had to ask everyone else in the car to keep me talking because I was literally falling asleep.
[1] Or whatever the US term is for the roads with at least 2 lanes, directions separated by a fence and grade separated intersections.
I lived in Japan for five years and I don't agree with you.
There's plenty of shit drivers there as everywhere but the physical environment (not the least of which street parking not being a thing) enables people to exist a lot more safely and conveniently outside of a car than in the US and the data bears that out. Eg narrow roads improves safety for motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists alike.
Why does HN love this narrative so much? The article is about very different causes, cars are mentioned only once in passing. It's getting really stale to have to read this same comment over and over rather than people discussing the topics that TFA is actually about.
It is a big political trend on reddit, mostly it is about American progressives fantasizing about European cities, while having no idea how car centric all of Europe is or the actual causes of the problems they perceive.
Just as a hint, Europeans love their cars as well. They drive them a lot and outside of large cities public infrastructure is sparse at best and almost never an actually viable alternative.
I started the thread, I am and grew up in euro, have lived in Japan and North America a well. It's not a fantasy, it's lived experience and hard data.
I have never entered the US, but have been to many of the larger European cities. None of them came close to what Americans on /r/fuckcars are fantasizing about, when they talk about Europe.
If they post pictures it is almost always of the few square kilometers of the city where millionaires and shops for millionaires are located. The rest of the city is full of streets and cars are everywhere. The one difference is that there are trains, which usually are awful places but get you from A to B.
It's true all of Europe doesn't look like that, but the difference is real and shouldn't be underestimated. Even in most European single family home suburbs, you can usually walk, bike or transit to nearby schools, supermarket, the odd cafe and restaurant. Ie what's being said isn't that Europe is devoid of cars, it's that it isn't exclusively designed for cars to the point where you cannot exist without one.
In a huuuuge share of the US, this is not the case. There are no sidewalks, you have to travel extremely far to get to anything, and cross highways or even freeways doing it. There's no transit. There's no village center or train station around a natural focal point, just giant strip malls that are few and far between. So EVERYONE. MUST. DRIVE. It is the ONLY option for every trip and errand, there is no alternative. This is insane.
Because it distracts from the parts that many people don't like to talk about because it goes against their personal beliefs (such as religious conservatives being more connected with their communities and overall happier than everyone else)
You maybe on to something there but you phrase it as antagonistic.
HN is heavily biased towards tech centers (SF, NYC, Seattle, etc...). These places skew liberal, agnostic, pro-public transport, pro-dense housing.
Conversations will always shift towards these talking points, the few of us that don't fit into one or more of these boxes get drowned out as out-of-touch.
Where I grew up in Australia, I don't remember anyone besides ethnic grandparents going to church (then or now). It just wasn't any sort of factor in the decline of free play for kids.
In more religious countries, are the religious conservatives the ones that are freely roaming streets and socialising more than their peers in a "play-based childhood"?
The obvious changes to me, as a parent now, and someone who still visits the street they grew up on in the 80s, relate to cars.
It's actually in the article multiple times. The physical design of communities (i.e. - designed around the automobile, not around a person on foot/bicycle) is what the previous post is referring to, not specifically cars themselves.
Car dependent design is the problem that prevents children from being able to play with friends, because they are dependent on an adult to bring them somewhere.
Car dependent design also has negative feedback loops for community in other ways. Local shops can't compete with big box chains in the suburbs due to economies of scale and are forced to close, further increasing the need to drive further for basic necessities. Cars are dangerous, further decreasing our base level of trust for interaction with our local community.
These are just the surface of the iceberg though - take an open minded approach to reading up on the second and third order effects of car dependent community development before being so quick to dismiss the topic.
These statements as facts aren't helpful because it implies car dependence is the only thing. There is so much history and nuance here. OP is right, making every discussion essentially '/r/fuckcars' doesn't get us anywhere.
Anecdote: I grew up in a small suburb, 100% car dependence. However I still walked to grade school and rode my bike on roads/sidewalks where cars are the same now as they were in the 90s.
Personally, cars and the increase in street parking (reducing visibility) are the biggest factors in deterring me as a parent from having my kids roam the street with some level of freedom. When driving, I also see how many drivers beside me are looking at their phones.
I think back to my childhood and roaming the streets. There wasn't any formal community venue or organisation. No one then or now was going to church. No one was going to a community centre or youth drop-in facility. I don't remember parents coordinating much. We rode bikes on the street, kicked a football and walked to the school basketball court or ovals. Parents generally felt safer about their kids doing that, so it was trivial to walk out front and find another kid to socialise with.
Because it's an absolutely huge part of what's wrong with modern life and too many people stubbornly refuse to see that filling our entire world with asphalt ribbons of violent, gruesome death has, in fact, had consequences.
That's how it's like in the suburbs. There are very few cars, and kids can play and bike on the roads, and go anywhere on their bikes.
It's only urban areas that are very car centric and kids can't do that, although they can go on the subway or a bus. The suburbs are much nicer and safer for kids.
Agreed. in suburbs, cul-de-sac neighborhoods and such, you'll still see kids, but only within that fishbowl. It's the core areas where kids are gone. Traffic is also much nastier there. lots of intersections, vagrants skulking around, more through traffic .. much more of an antisocial vibe in general, hard to put your finger on. I think that's why the difference with europe is so stark. You go visit, and you'll be in the center of some beautiful car free wonderland, and there's kids just hanging around and playing, and sharing that space with everybody else. In the usa, kids only roam free in secluded pockets, far away from the "real" city. And, conversely, they're the only ones out too, maybe some seniors doing their post linner dog walk.
Sad stuff, the collapse of the public realm. Compound living is the only thing we can manage still.
The discussion is about suburbs, so by definition it is away from the city core.
Here in our (US, California) suburb it is wonderfully walkable for kids and adults alike. For kids, there is very little traffic since only local neighborhood traffic is present unlike in cities. There are bike/walk trails around and across. Multiple playgrounds, sports fields, all connected by bike trails. Stores, restaurants, school, assorted services, theaters, all within a ~10 minute walk radius. This is what suburb means to me.
That is not how the majority of cul-de-sac subdivisions work in the American South. There are certainly not a bunch in amenities within a 10 minute walk -- usually you can't even leave the subdivision in that time on foot, let alone safely walk to the nearby gas station on a 40mph road with no sidewalk or shoulder.
Where are these magical subdivisions with city-like access to amenities?
They exist! I live in one and there is a small "town square" where the kids all walk/bike to and play with green space and (grocery, cafes, restaurants). It is surrounded by a typical suburban layout with high density closest and then low density housing as you get farther away.
If you are really interested in this type of living, look for newer master planned communities in the south. They are immensely popular and aforadable compared to coastal cities.
yeah, I've seen them, much better way to build. it doesn't solve the traffic issue, people still drive everywhere, but within it, it's a little village. the one near me is immensely popular, i love to go visit too, just for dinner or what not.
Tons of cars in my suburb. You might mean rural areas?
How do people get around in the suburbs?
There is definitely a strange stereotype of suburbs in online discourse. Pretty much every suburb I’ve been part of (6 or 7 across 4 states) have been quiet with low traffic, low speeds, and even kids playing outside. About half of those it is possible to walk to school and some shops safely without crossing major thoroughfares. The suburb where I live now, when school is out there are high schoolers walking home and crossing large roads in packs of around a dozen.
There’s decent choice when house shopping, at least the places I’ve lived. If someone chooses a suburb surrounded by 2 miles of other suburbs, that’s their choice. There’s plenty of “old city” suburbs (what used to be the edge of town 25 years or 50 years back) that now have sidewalks and stuff nearby. HN trends wealthy though, so I imagine many people only look at housing on the current city edges.
You sure you describe american suburbs? Maybe it's aomewhat true for european ones, but american suburbs are mostly designed to isolate ppl
This most definitely does not describe the suburban hellscape that most American suburbs are.
In my prewar non-car-centric city, kids still walk to school. They don't play outside like previous generations. You'll see the Christmas bikes for a few weeks when it's warm enough in late spring then nothing all summer long.
As a parent, I can tell you video games and smart phones have a lot to do with this.
I think there is some generalizing here I grew up in an Australian City in the 90's.
Even back then kids weren't clamoring to play outside in the street. Or ride bikes etc (there was a clique at school who were skateboarders but not a widespread thing). I think it very much depends on the kids temperament, my experience as a kid didn't involve a lot of outdoors activities.
However my parents were pretty big on making sure I had exercise I played sport on the weekend (cricket in the summer and soccer in the winter) and it was non-negotiable my parents insisted on it. If not for sport I don't think I'd have spent any time outdoors at all.
I think Weekend Sport might be an Australian cultural thing does the US have weekend kids sports?
Yes, it does, it’s pretty common.
Maybe because the outside environment is so hostile to kids that being inside on their phones and tablets is more appealing?
When I grew up we were a lot on the streets but there was simply nothing else to do, for better or for worse. I mean "no screens" wasn't a policy which got dropped, it was just the way it was. So maybe we're also having some nostalgia in this discussion: "in my times" looks always rosier than it actually was.
Some speculate it's a consequence, not a reason. When most of the environment is poorly designed, lack of third places, lots of dangerous cars, big distances, no sidewalks, parent supervision etc... it's natural they started using phones more when these arrived: it gave options to socialize without encountering all the impediments
What? How do roads prevent you from going outside.
Of course I went to the houses of my friends by foot/bike after school. Unsurprisingly there were roads with cars everywhere, which do exist here in Europe. Blaming "road centric infrastructure" is delusional, road centric infrastructure has been the norm for at least 60 years and if that were the cause you would have noticed a degradation then and no degradation after. Clearly not the case.
I find it quite offensive to suggest that "European cities" are somehow this extremely car unfriendly place. We Europeans like cars as well, we like to drive them a lot and like to live in places with good car connections. Places like Germany, where I live, also have very good car infrastructure. Outside of large cities cars are the only way to get around as other modes of transportation are very unreliable and not serviced often. None of this has prevented me from going outside with my friends or biking to school alone.
If I had to guess why kids are playing less outside than they used to, maybe it is because the park we hung out is now inhibited by drug dealers. Or because of the girl who got raped there.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/05/19/a-crosswalk-too-far-v...
"In the Boston suburb of Burlington, Massachusetts, the AMC movie theater is right across the street from the Burlington Mall. But if you're planning to travel between these two destinations on foot, you're in for quite a hike. The closest crosswalk is more than half a mile down the Middlesex Turnpike. That means crossing the road -- if you're going to do it 'the safe way' -- requires a 1.2-mile journey, and it's definitely not going to be a pleasant one. Local resident David Chase reports that only one side of the street has a sidewalk."
Who cares that the city administration is too stupid to put in traffic lights.
Seriously, what a dumb example. The problem has already been solved. My city is full of cars, but there are also enough traffic lights triggered by pedestrian s, hardly a miracle of modern engineering.
The people living there?
Yes, that's why the poster said "in the US they would be roadkill". It's very much a solved problem; the US is notable for not implementing the solutions.
If people lobbying their local government for traffic lights is enough to solve a problem it can't be that relevant.
Except it often doesn't work that way.
NYC was all ready to implement a congestion fee, with years of buildup and $15B in revenue scheduled for use... and the state governor nixed the entire at the eleventh hour by fiat, because out-of-NYC voters who shouldn't have a say don't like the concept.
This seems like a problem which has absolutely nothing to do with traffic.
If local governments fail at basic duties missing traffic lights are not the thing you should be worrying about.
Most parents in Europe would not let their kids walk alone to school lol, maybe outside of large cities but it is not the norm anymore.
Is "lol" really appropriate in this context? Theses days it seems more like a nervous tic.
because its a laughable suggestion to pretend Europe doesn’t have the same problems as the US
but they don't though. kids are so much more independently mobile than here, is that really not the case? I mean, you can literally just see it, you'll be on the bus to your tourist thing or whatever, and some 10 year old is riding with you to school, his laughably overstuffed backpack on his knees.
"Lucifer Our Lord"
I have friends with school-age kids ranging from 9-12 years old living in Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Münich, and Milan. Almost all of them go alone to school: walking, biking, or using public transport, the only exception is the couple who lives in Milan.
I always wonder if part of it is how much we move around for life these days. We travel away from our home towns for college, the somewhere else in many cases for work where we have kids without our parents around to help.
Let this happen to enough people constantly coming and going and moving…the community is gone. It’s just a cumulative effect.
I believe that this is a much larger contributor than many realize. Moving is a total reset for the individual and a hole left behind for the town moved out of.
You could compare the US today with the US a few decades ago. I think people where on the move a lot, too?
I don’t have data to back it up but I think both the number of people moving and the frequency of moves has increased substantially in the past couple of decades.
Some of this is undoubtedly going where opportunities exist; my graduating high school class (late 00s) for example all moved away from the area I grew up in simply because there’s nothing out there except for a handful of dead end minimum wage jobs, with prospects declining further as time goes on. The prior two generations by comparison largely stayed put, with moves being very local in nature and mostly driven by finding suitable housing (e.g. apartment became too small for family or keeping rent down).
I also believe that people who’ve had to move around a lot for career are more likely to continue to move regularly because they’ve grown accustomed to not having deep roots anywhere which the resulting reset less of a big deal, which multiplies the impact of needing to move for work opportunities.
There is no need to move them if you create the spaces, like courtyards, gardens and backyards.
Their friends don't live in their backyards though.
And it's fun to explore spaces, and the community.
This is a common thought on this but I grew up and have lived in mostly California suburbs and it's pretty easy to be within biking distance to things (1-2 miles).
People talk about the dangerous cars but they were there 40 years ago and my friends and I would bike to school, the mall, or into the hills surrounding us.
My 9 year old's friend lives just two blocks from us and her parents don't let her walk here alone. When I was that age we were riding our bikes for miles in car infested San Jose.
This experience is so far from being accessible to a typical resident of the US, what exactly are your motivations for framing it as "shrug there's no issue with urban planning"?
I don't know if you realize how much the built enviornment has been changed in 40 years.
Some of those roads you biked on have probably been widened. Cars have gotten faster, larger, and heavier. Speed limits have increased.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed to be dramatically different but I think there probably is some kind of difference.
Just look at the pedestrian deaths chart for the past 5-10 years or so.
Europe is getting worse too. Big SUV's and trucks, fast traffic, and cars illegally parked all over the footpaths (and I'm talking about the Netherlands here, it's worse elsewhere).
I mean it's better here than where I grew up (California) but I still wouldn't call it "good".
This is where opportunistic roving tow trucks start to sound like a good idea.
Tow trucks would also be very useful to handle the people who think the trolley tracks, the bus stop or the sidewalk are a good place to park their car.
With trolleys, it'd be even better if the tracks themselves had some kind of AI technology to detect parked cars and call the tow truck to remove the car before it causes a delay.
After-WW2 development has been largely the same everywhere - more cars, wider roads, etc. Also in Europe and Japan cities an neighbourhoods that were built after WW2 are often very hostile to pedestrians while those built before are walkable.
The biggest cities of Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, etc.) are pretty historical and thus are walkable. However, where I live - Finland that is - much of the country has been built in the past century and is designed for cars. However, in the past decade or two the trend has changed again and the very new neighbourhoods again feel like 100+ year old neighbourhoods in terms of walkability.
Exactly, it's the same in France, although it started in the 90s (late 80s maybe) and ended after 2010, so we screwed up less neighborhoods than say, Netherlands, but we're 10 years behind into the rehabilitation of local communities. But any neighborhood built between 1990 and 2008 is often souless, car dependent and look like US suburbia (I lived in one)
The physical environment from my childhood was substantially “worse” than what exists now. I don’t remember really ever going to a park, and the playgrounds that existed were full of [fun] death traps.
When I got older and rode my bike everywhere there was not a SINGLE bike lane anywhere in my entire town, and the sidewalks were disused and crappy.
And yet: we were outside playing CONSTANTLY.
I agree with this. Growing up we had nothing but some small patches of "woods" and some industrial areas but we still had plenty of fun. We also had various school grounds and the little league park. Definitely zero bike friendly infrastructure.
But now there is so much more everywhere I look. Skateparks everywhere, kid friendly pools and parks. More bike friendly roads. My daughter is still too young now but it seems like the outdoor resources are better than ever.
Depends where in Japan; I live in a small city, and it is the worst urban sprawl that you could ever imagine. You absolutely need a car for everything, but at the same time the streets are really narrow and dark, and without sidewalks. It is not fun, to put it mildly.
Cars slow down in narrow winding steets. Wide straight streets are very prone to speeding.
I agree with this for the most part but it doesn't explain everything.
The town I grew up in has a lot of areas that are conducive to children roaming; low traffic speeds and volume, separated sidewalks, parks, green spaces. As kids we ran around freely. The traffic volume and patterns haven't really changed at all and as a whole the community drives pretty slowly, nobody seems to be in a hurry. Yet you never see kids out anymore. Where did they go?
Roblox and Tik Tok.
I was just noticing, on separate occasions today kids walking on the side (no shoulder) of a two lane road (often driven too fast) because there are no continuous sidewalks or cohesion of the street network between housing developments.
(context: suburban CO)
Here, a regional town in Australia; we had the council approve build of a petrol station on one side of a children’s crossing from a school block.
No joke; the children’s crossing now terminates on the “island” of the petrol station, with entry and exit for the vehicles of the station either side of the island.
It boggles my mind, truly. I fear it’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.
So.. not hard to relate with your post.
I can’t help but notice how poorly people treat eachother in the bigger cities, too. To the point I get constantly complemented for just being a decent person, or aggressively attacked for the same.
Not sure what the answer for any of these problems is..
And even Europe, eg Germany, has seen a relative rise in helicopter parenting compared to recent decades.
Now why would children be safer in high trust homogeneous societies that share descent, religion, language, and culture than in low trust divided societies that share little more than a common currency?
Must be light trucks! What a fine example of Occam’s butterknife at work.
Neighborhoods haven't changed since I was a kid and I played outside plenty. It's those damn smartphones.
This is one reason I am grateful for having grown up in an apartment complex - I had ready access to loads of kids around my age, a field for baseball and football games, a cement area for wall-ball and four-square, and secret places to just be alone and enjoy the outdoors. From my first conscious memories to when I moved out after high-school I could walk out my front-door at any reasonable hour and I would bump into someone I knew to goof-off with. In a sincerely-not-at-all-condescending way I feel bad for kids that don’t have that. Without that experience I don’t know how I would be (at least in my opinion) the generally well-rounded person that I am.