If you rank US cities by both violent crime and by hostility to the urban fabric (e.g. development of highways through dense neighborhoods, removal of reliable mass transit), a pattern emerges: the most dangerous cities in the US are also among the most car dependent. Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham, etc. This also closely tracks with residential air quality.
There are so many social/economic confounders going into the urban/suburban divide that any study showing one effect would be refuted by another that used different controls and methodology
In my anecdotal experience, I definitely have. Grew up in a medium sized Midwest town. I don't know anyone who really made it big. Some people moved to bigger cities and whatnot, but I don't know anyone that really moved up the social ladder significantly.
On the other side, every C level/director person I've worked with consulting for the bigger companies around here and elsewhere in the US are almost always from a major urban city. I can tell as soon as I meet them. They speak (I don't mean accent) and handle themselves very differently. There's a certain confidence that comes from having broader social experiences and the opportunities and networks that naturally arise from that.
Do you know any multihome millionaires from nowheresville Mississippi? How about Chicago, New York, or LA?
It's interesting how you put it that way. Another way of looking at it is that you depend on your car to explore the world. Can you imagine depending on a drug to enjoy the world? That's what dependency is.
By your standard, either you're walking, you're riding a bicycle, or you're dependent on something - a car, a bus, or a train. And most of us don't want to be limited to bicycle range.
I don’t think anyone is saying we don’t need cars. They want to decrease dependence on cars. The things that are in bicycle range should be accessible by bicycle. Today, they typically aren’t
Most transit and car trips are well within "bicycle range". For that matter, bicycle trips too.
In a congested urban area, the time range of a bicycle is better than that of an automobile, let alone transit. I.e. the radius where you can be by a certain elapsed time.
This is why I find the American way of thinking so interesting.
You are equating your body to a piece of metal and rubber. Your car is not your body. It is something external to you. Not only that but is also something that apart from being financially taxing on you, also leads you to destroy the planet and contribute to respiratory issues as well increasing rates of obesity by significantly reducing what's arguably the main source of human physical activity.
This reminds me of the tobacco industry trying to defend a dependency on something that is clearly bad for you. And please note that I am talking about private cars here.
And note that my response was to your "My car opens the world to me" which is not too different to alcoholics being unable to enjoy the world without unhealthy use of alcohol.
It is possible to have a city where amenities are within biking or walking distance. Those cities already exist. But the car first mentality will definitely go down in history as one of the leading factors in the poor health outcomes in the US. People think that fitness implies gym when it doesn't. For most of human history, there were no gyms. People engaged in casual walking
Eating food is the strongest dependency we have aside from oxygen and water. Sleep is also a strong dependency. Imagine requiring a constant supply of air.
Parent poster couldn't imagine having a dependency in their life. Your body uses drugs called food. We think we are more isolated and self reliant then we are as a species
You are comparing life functions with private car usage. Read the previous sentence again. That's what dependency is. People who have a dependency on something feel that their dependency is a need. You won't die because you don't use a car. If anything, using your car tends to lead to a bunch of negative health outcomes for you and a bunch of negative health outcomes for your neighbours. Do you imagine people smoking and blowing the smoke on your face everyday because they feel that they need to smoke as much as you need to eat or sleep? That's what dependency is.
Eating and sleeping are needs. Gambling regularly, smoking regularly or using your car regularly is more of a dependency.
I am not telling you to stop using your car but that you use it when you NEED it. And if you are needing it too much, just like the person smoking or the person drinking too much, you should evaluate your decisions. Every time you use a car you chip your health a little bit and everyone's health a little bit. Visualise it.
In developed countries like Japan and Switzerland, it's very easy to hop on a train in the city centre and hop off in the countryside for an afternoon hike.
But your car closes the world down to other people, children in particular. We have reached the point where children don't walk or cycle to school because it's dangerous... due to all the parents dropping off their kids rather than walking or cycling with them. A classic tragedy of the commons.
One other way that cars are affecting childhood is that car seat requirements keep getting stricter and stricter.
It used to be that parents would offer to run carpools to take kids home from activities. Or if you had a sleepover your friends parents would drive you to a movie.
But now that it’s not unheard of for kids to use car seats until they start middle school, it basically requires that one of THEIR parents show up for pickup and drop off.
This increases the level of necessary parental involvement needed and gets rid of one little way that kids learned to interact with other adults and families.
The kind of boosters that bigger kids - like, past 1st or 2nd grade - typically use are more or less interchangeable (so you could have an extra booster in the garage for when a kid stays the night, and not worry about fit) and cheap (so, not too bad to pay for the extra booster). They also tend to be pretty quick to put in or take out, unlike car seats for babies.
So, it is an additional logistics challenge, but not too bad of one, I'd say.
We have various local "buy nothing" Facebook groups and through those have never had to pay for a booster seat, despite having 7 - enough to fully outfit both of our cars with them.
Can you actually fit seven in you car (I assume minivan)? Because that’d be great.
I remember groups of sevenish kids piling into a car after a soccer game and getting ice cream. I think little things like that do a lot for your sense of autonomy when you can do something in a public place as a kid without a 1:1 ratio of kid:supervisor.
Have you see the TED Talk on car seats from Steven Levitt? Basically, a normal seatbelt would pass the government standards for car seat safety. The industry knows they can take advantage of parents in the name of safety, so they do. At least that’s how it’s looking.
>This increases the level of necessary parental involvement needed and gets rid of one little way that kids learned to interact with other adults and families.
This shit has a direct and measurable impact on birth rates for a negligible increase in safety. It's also humiliating.
I would love any citation for "This shit has a direct and measurable impact on birth rates", since there's good reason to believe it has a greater than negligible increase in safety
I’d read that as saying the data are insufficient to prove either way. Likely because there are so many fewer deaths and only 10% of the children used booster seats, so the error bars are too big.
The idea is that you can only fit two car seats in the backseat and upgrading to a larger car that could fit three is enough of an expense/hassle that it discourages having a third child
19% seems to be a big number, until you figure out that the absolute number is not that big. Individually, it may make sense to mandate it, societally, probably no.
I live on a 4 way corner of a small small neighborhood roundabout that teenagers like to speed around. One teen drunkenly crashed into our parked car overnight.
But a four-way intersection is the exact opposite of a cul-de-sac, even in a small neighborhood. The only people that will ever drive to the end of a cul-de-sac are the owners or visitors of the three or four houses that are at the cul-de-sac.
Yea, I almost spit out my beer reading that. We have people who deliberately race down our suburban road to the cul-de-sac, slam on the brakes to make as much noise as they can, do a few burnouts there, and then race back, for no reason other than to be belligerent and antisocial. Not teenagers, either. Grown-ass men do this for the lulz.
I feel like that would end very badly indeed for someone in my neighborhood.
Everyone looks out of everyone while minding our business at the same time.
Plus we have a huge amount of local cops in the area at all times to the point I have to warn uber drivers that if they speed they are going to get pulled over, guaranteed.
Well, they don't exist in my neighborhood, on the cul de sac that I live on. I suspect most neighborhoods don't have teenagers terrorizing random culdesacs at any appreciable level.
Yes, cul-de-sacs are a design element that can help to reduce the negative impacts of cars - in the immediate area. Though if you build an area out of cul-de-sacs with no bike/pedestrian shortcuts, you end up not being able to practically get around without a car, so the area around the cul-de-sacs needs lots of car infrastructure. (Which is not so great if your kids are unlucky enough to live across a wide arterial from their friends from school.)
But ultimately yes, reducing through traffic can be a good thing, and there are ways to do that in cities too. There's a good video on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E
This is such a weird take. Have you ever actually lived in a such a place? Because your description is NOT what it's like to live there.
Suburbs designed around cul-de-sacs are amazing to get around in, very very easy, extremely bike friendly!
One way to do it is you'll have a main road with shops, and no houses, and leading off of that tons of very quiet residential streets with barely any cars. Kids play in the street, people bike all over the place, and when you shop all the stores are in one place so you save on car trips.
Obviously I don't know exactly the type of neighborhood you're envisioning from that description, but what you're describing sounds a lot like the suburb just north of me, and at least here that main road with shops is not a particularly friendly place to be without a car. The residential areas may be bikeable if you're staying very local, but the moment you need to cross one of the arterials crisscrossing the area it gets significantly less so.
Though I would have liked more nearby options, growing up I enjoyed being able to walk to nearby corner stores and such. Would you feel comfortable letting kids walk or bike to a nearby shop unattended in the places you're talking about?
Yes. My town is all cul-de-sacs and main roads with no sidewalks.
It's great when you have 3-year-old kids, because they can play safely in front of your house. But when they become 10-16, they can't safely walk or bike to anywhere and have to be driven to school, sports practices, Burger King, the Quik Mart, everywhere. The middle school is only a half mile from my house and the high school is only a mile a way, but none of the kids can safely walk or bike to these schools. Everyone gets dropped off by their parents.
I'm lucky enough to have a cul-de-sac and the entire area has side walks and bike lanes. My 7th grader bikes a mile to school each day and my 5th grader will start this year. Only time I have to drive them is if there is rain.
Its really an awesome perk to living in the suburbs, and my kids being able to just say "Hey. I'm going for a bike ride" and me not having to worry is a massive life upgrade for everyone involved.
Cul-de-sacs are great for the people who live in them, and they are a nightmare for people who live in densely populated areas that suffer constant traffic from the car-dependent suburbanites that drive there from their quiet cul-de-sacs.
You don't want other people driving their cars in front of your home, but neither do the people who live in the urban core.
This is where mass transit from the suburbs to the urban areas are need. The transit needs to be faster, cheaper, and easier than driving and parking.
I lived in the Chicago suburbs for a while and never drove downtown. I was a passenger a couple times, but when I went, I always took the Metra. During rush hour it would take half the time, or better, and it was fairly cheap. Though I won’t say the entire system was perfect.
Where I’m at now, the only option to avoid driving is the bus. The bus takes at least 3x longer than driving. No one is going to take it unless they have to due to their circumstances. I don’t want to drive and park down there, which leaves me with Uber. I’ve done it a few times, but it’s far from ideal, and fairly expensive. If they had some light rail and a free commuter lot, I’d go down there all the time.
Culs-de-sac aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of non-car options to bridge the suburbs and the city, to reduce car traffic in cities while allowing people from the suburbs to come into the city to spend their time and money. Not everyone will use the transit options, but it just needs to be enough to make the roads manageable. The better the transit options, the more people we’ll likely see opt in.
> Culs-de-sac aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of non-car options to bridge the suburbs and the city
North American suburbs typically lack the necessary population density to make the sort of transit you ask for viable. Car dependence is intrinsic to low density single family zoning.
I agree, but this is not the fault of the people that live in the suburbs. The vast majority of urban centers and suburbs outside of major areas like NYC and Chicago have very limited public transport. So people have to drive to where the jobs are. I think the nearest bus stop to my house is probably a 2 mile walk.
On top of that, in many states, riding the bus is essentially seen as a poor person activity as everyone is expected to have cars. So if you want to ride the bus, you have to walk 30 minutes in the 100+ degree temp or if its not hot, its raining. Then sit (if you are lucky enough to be next to a bus stop with a bench instead of just a sign) on an uncovered covered bench. Its made (designed??) to be such a bad experience that people avoid it if they can.
That's the eternal trade off of city vs suburb. In the suburbs you have to drive everywhere but there are fewer people. In the city (some of them) you can walk or use public transportation but there are far more commuters coming into your area. The choice really just depends on your life needs and personal situation
In my town there are cul de sac neighborhoods with houses to fit 4-5 people right next to a elementary school. But, the houses are primarily filled with single or couple 60+ year old folks who don’t want to move. It is really a shame. My cul de sac has 10 houses and 3 children.
very hard for people to move now.
If they have been there a while, they have a ~3% interest rate. If they have to buy a new home, they are looking at at least double.
It's the cars right? Not the speeding driver behind the wheel. Not the person driving home buzzed from the brewery. Or the person on their phone while driving. It's those pesky damn cars.
Our culture not only makes too many excuses for reckless drivers, it actively encourages them.
That said, our neighborhood has kids playing in the street all the time. But we are fortunate enough to be secluded from the major roads (even though there are plenty of roads).
Sure, but the critique of cars in this case is that by making people reliant on cars you encourage all of the above behaviors because people spend more time driving and have fewer transportation options. I don't think you're going to find many, if any, critics of car-centric infrastructure who don't think those things are a problem.
All: HN is for curious conversation. When you're not feeling curious, please don't post. Instead, find something story that you do feel curious about.
Comments that boil down to "boo cars" or "yay cars" aren't interesting, and set us up for flamewars that are the opposite of curious conversation, so please don't post like that.
I hated growing up in Canadian suburbs, and in most of North America, they are soulless places where kids and youth have not much to do and are forced to rely on parents for going to see friends, family, sports etc. Sure -- tucked away cul-de-sacs and side streets might allow the neighbour kids to play games here or there, but are not conducive places for communities to truly engage as their macro environment which has been generally destroyed for anyone outside a car. If you're lucky enough to live near shops, their usually pedestrian hostile seas of parking-lot asphalt where people fly through to get a specific task done, rather than just exist around other people. Peoples lives turn into monotony of Work->Walmart->Home->Repeat... It's honestly a really vile environment. I understand the desire for a large separated home with a yard where it's quieter, but for the suburbs to actually be functional, municipalities need to re-legalize front-yard shopfronts and more public spaces like plazas, community gardens, gazebos etc.
Vile? That's a little very over dramatic. What of all the kids growing up in the sticks in Canada? Pour one out for those lost souls, biking down the same gravel road with nothing on it for fun in summer, getting up at 6am to wait for a bus in a shack by the highway. Get over yourself.
Sticks and sprawling suburbia are completely different. I lived in the sticks in elementary school, then moved to suburbia. In the sticks, you may have swaths of fields and forests to roam. In suburbia, it can be someone else's fenced in backyards for miles around and you may not be able to get to a park unless you have a car. The freedom of the countryside is nothing like suburbia.
I grew up in Chicago and we pretty much only played in the streets and alleys. The alley is where I learned to ride a bike, with garbage cans to cushion the crash when I lost control.
The key is you still need quiet residential streets. That’s what many Chicago neighbors did and still do have.
Now I live in the suburbs in another state with two kids. Our street is a cul-de-sac but even on the neighborhood streets that lead out to the main road people speed through the neighborhood.
It’s no better or worse than Chicago was. Except here you can’t safely leave the neighborhood but by car.
This comment contrary to my suburban experience, where massive school closures, police being called when kids play unattended, and ageing demographics meant fewer children per sq mile and the collapse of children only culture.
And you'll barely see any kids. I live in a suburb. I was hanging with a friend on his porch this weekend and we were talking about how we don't see kids outside anymore, ever. We don't see them biking, walking, at the parks, anywhere. They're all inside.
30+ years ago the sidewalks and parks were filled with kids in the summer. They're nowhere to be seen now. I'd argue the more helicoptery parents live in the suburbs, they're afraid of everything that isn't exactly like them. You can't function with that attitude in a city. Well you could, but you'd be completely miserable.
They're terrified of sex trafficking, gang violence, child predators, and immigrants. In a Midwest suburban town. It's pathetic. 24/7 news has ruined kids lives more than cars by a long shot.
There’s a double-whammy of helicopter parents that don’t let kids out AND neighborhood busybodies that would call the police about kids being left alone or loitering
let's also not forget that people have less kids than in the past. The only people I see having 3 kids and more are the really rich or the strange religious folks.
> In the suburbs kids never stopped playing in the street.
There are many different suburbs out there. Some feel like small towns, as they may have been at some point. Others feel like wastelands, places where you won't see many cars driving down the streets since people are either sequestered in their homes or are elsewhere. I suspect that most of the hostile sentiment against suburbia originates from the latter.
Of course, there are other reasons for the sentiment. In at least some urban areas, the roads that pass through them are viewed as being destructive to their community. At best, the roads are meant to service those who may come in to work or to shop or to entertain themselves. At worse, they are virtually impassible rifts that divide communities while oozing air and noise pollution. They offer little to the communities that surround them, not even economic benefits, since the vast majority of people are simply passing through rather than stopping in.
Perhaps urban/suburban is the wrong dichotomy, but it is an easy one to draw upon. It fits our stereotypes. It fits the stereotypes of both sides since those who are drawn to suburbia can always find an urban concrete wasteland to point to, while those who are drawn to urban places can always find a desolate dystopia of lawns to point to. (Of course both sides can find peachy examples that fit their own preferences.)
Average cars got bigger and heavier with a higher line of sight since even the 90s, making them exponentially more dangerous for everyone outside them. Cars are the second leading cause of child mortality in the US
Link below has some interesting plots. One shows child pedestrian deaths per 100k population going steadily down since 70s. Yet adult pedestrian deaths have recently ticked up.
It is possible that kids spending more time in front of screens is at least partly an effect of it not being safe for them to go outside on their own, rather than then kids spending time in front of screens simply being the cause of them not playing outside.
I am all for walkable neighbourhoods, places where people feel welcome on the streets. Yet there is also the question of: how do we achieve that goal? As the article mentions, there is more to it than eliminating the car. Social structures must be rebuilt. There need to be places where children can seek safety (a friend's house, a store). Adults need to keep an eye on children, even if they are unfamiliar children, to protect them from harm. It's not just the "stranger danger" category that matters here. Kids can be miscreants too.
As much as I agree with people talk about children's lives being too structured, I also fear that too many people take things to the opposite extreme. Structure provides learning opportunities for children. They learn new games. They learn how to interact socially. Sure, that can be done without structure. Sometimes with very undesirable outcomes.
Reigning in cars and structure may provide room for social change, but they are not enough on their own. We also need a framework to facilitate that social change, rather than hoping it will magically happen.
Cutting off from everyone around you and living in your own bubble is convenient. I lived in a few places, and in none of them did I have any idea who my neighbors were, simply because living this way was always easier. In order to rebuild social structures you'd need to convince people that hanging out with your neighbors is net positive, not net cost.
> I am all for walkable neighbourhoods, places where people feel welcome on the streets. Yet there is also the question of: how do we achieve that goal? As the article mentions, there is more to it than eliminating the car. Social structures must be rebuilt. There need to be places where children can seek safety (a friend's house, a store). Adults need to keep an eye on children, even if they are unfamiliar children, to protect them from harm. It's not just the "stranger danger" category that matters here. Kids can be miscreants too.
A few decades ago, when it was normal for kids to play in the residential streets where they lived, those streets actually were places that were safe for kids, not just in terms of cars, but in the other ways you are describing, because there were generally enough people outside to keep them safe.
Additionally, creating a situation where people's kids are playing with other kids on the same street actually does help create these "social structures". (The kids' parents will typically end up getting to know the other kids' parents in a way that might not happen if the kids are always inside except when they're being driven around in cars.)
So I think just trying to do traffic calming on residential streets and make them safe for kids to play would actually help resolve these other problems, and resolving them shouldn't be seen as a precondition for trying to address the car aspect of making streets safe for kids to play in.
When I grew up there were all cars on the streets, and before cars there were horse and carts which had their own dangers. Over the last 150 years the distance that parents have allowed their children to roam has gradually diminished from many miles to essentially be the other room.
I feel this is more a product of our risk obsessed society, everything is about analysing and taking action to reduce risk. You can hear it everywhere, risk reduction, risk based analysis etc.
Edit: and in the interest of full disclosure I'm a father of 3 and know exactly how hard this is. I can't imagine me being comfortable with what I got up to as a child and that's the tragedy.
The risk is real, but not how you think. The risk of children getting hurt is actually the lowest it's ever been, but risk of legal trouble is the highest it's ever been.
We let our children roam and got a visit from the police because of it. Someone reported "unsupervised children". The police came to our door and started questioning us.
My wife just kept saying, "did we do anything illegal?" and "were they unsafe?".
The police ultimately admitted that they were perfectly safe and we did nothing illegal, but warned us that, "it just looks bad and you should be more careful".
We've also been scolded by other parents at the park when we let our kids go to the other side of the park 100 yards away. "How could you let them go so far? What if they get hurt or need you?"
It makes us not want to let them roam, just to avoid the hassle.
> The police ultimately admitted that they were perfectly safe and we did nothing illegal, but warned us that, "it just looks bad and you should be more careful".
The police need to stop taking these reports seriously and stop responding to "look bad". They're supposed to be enforcing the law, not the look. If some nosey busybody reports something happening where there is no law being broken, they need to be told in no uncertain terms to STFU and stop wasting law enforcement's time. Better yet, have light criminal consequences for this kind of misuse of emergency lines.
The incentives for the police don't encourage this outcome. Imagine if something does happen and there is a report in the local newspaper that the neighbors had reported to the police multiple times but they did nothing. Better to CYA and give the parents a talking to and be seen to have done something than to do nothing at all. Situations like this is what should give you pause before reaching for your pitchforks next time you hear of someone screwing up royally.
What ages are you talking about? Where I live (in the US) I can’t imagine parents scolding me if I let my kids wander 100 yards from me, unless they were very young.
A lot of urban problems can be charged 100% on cars, not this one. Cars are nothing new in America, and even on gated communites with traffic patterns not different from what they were 40 years ago, this dynamic has changed a lot.
The cult of safety and media induced paranoia and fear probably are far more important to explain this. Blaming cars for that is actually a symptom of the role the media fear mongers played on fucking our lives.
Having lived in various different places - dense city, suburban town, more rural town, for us it all came down to the city planning, far more than any other factor.
Living in a small but dense NJ town with close town-houses and good sidewalks our kids were free to walk to the neighbors and they knew all the kids on the street. Our neighbours actually positioned kids toys on all the front lawns when selling their house to emphasize the child friendliness of the area.
Because the houses were close - feet between them, with many per block, the density meant every block had plenty of kids, and the walks were short enough to let them out. Smaller city streets kept cars slower too. But being a smaller town the only people around were neighbors keeping everyone feeling safe.
Cities have a density that stops parents wanting to let their kids out - think midtown Manhattan - just too much going on to let a younger child run free.
Conversely, living in more rural CT the house plots are so big it's a schlep to a neighbors, and there are no sidewalks. There are far fewer kids in walking distance because of the plot sizes. Without sidewalks and bigger distances the cars travel far faster too. There's always an F250 traveling 50 in a 25 ready to mow down a whole family without noticing it.
Given a little freedom our kids could easily walk to their neighbours, to the local school to play soccer in the school yard, or on the playground, and they'd meet so many more kids, even relatively young.
Towns need to be designed to be social - older towns are far better for this, the pre-car ones. Find a smaller town build before 1900 and it'll be great to raise a family in.
At least around here (Seattle area), houses built after 2018 seem to be doing exactly this: sidewalks, trees, densely packed SFH, playgrounds and close to shopping. Unfortunately, most housing stock is from the era of poor walkability (aka, 80s and 90s)
As a person who prefers walking/biking and also a parent the issue for me is all of the American infrastructure is not designed to be comfortable outside of a car.
I know the about pedestrian deaths declining, etc. I ride my bike for utility 1,000+ miles a year with both kids. It feels like I am going to war just getting groceries, going to the library or doing school. The statistics may not reflect it but my perception is with huge cars and trends in road designs everything _feels_ unsafe and uncomfortable.
Some concrete examples: I regularly encounter drivers rolling through stop signs in F150 trucks not seeing my HUGE cargo bike with a flag and every fluorescent color. I encounter broken crossing buttons at least once a month requiring detours or dangerous crossings. The best routes to not interact with cars are completely barren trails built under electrical transmission infrastructure- in the summer they are brutally hot due to lack of any shade cover. It all just feels bad.
To the articles point though I have met some good people and created some excellent experiences by not using a car. And I work hard to design my life around not needing to use a car. But, our defaults really stink and a lot of it comes down to a lack of human design factors.
Every little part of the infrastructure is dumbly serving the idea that a car briefly going 50mph is a good thing. The crossing buttons you mentioned, are often inaccessible from the bike lane. The bike lane doesn’t have a sensor (and such sensors do exist). You have to somehow go up the curb, push the button, and go back to the street. But what if you are turning left or going straight and there is more than 1 lane? What if there are cars in the way, say turning right? Being predictable is paramount to safety, how predictable is it to be in the right lane, hop up a curb to push a button, to go back across 2 lanes to make a left?
One thing I’ve realized is that there is a bias regarding speed. If people drive somewhere and there’s a nice fast road with a lot of traffic, then it’s a quick efficient journey. Regardless of the fact that they hit 4 stop lights and actually averaged less than 20mph. Factor in door to door times, and the numbers get crazy.
Look at the behavior of people in parking lots. It’s very common for people to spend more time parking, to avoid spending part of that time walking. So instead of going for the available spaces that are a 5-10 second walk from the “good spot” they battle to park as close to their destination as possible. To avoid walking 5 seconds. And now your average speed is 15mph in the suburbs. It’s great.
I for one am glad kids don't play in the street any more, I'd hate to have to hear all that noise constantly. Backyards with high fences are much better - they can still play outside if they want to but the noise is far more isolated.
Folks should really stop to watch this great video on School Streets in Paris and how making streets surrounding schools can make for a great, fun, safe environment for kids to thrive.
When I was young we lived in a cul-de-sac and after schools, and during the school holidays, children were a permanent fixture out in the street, kicking a ball around or riding their bicycles. There were no closures to cars and the drivers and kids were just cautious of each other. Now I’m the parent and we live in a very similar cul-de-sac there are never any children playing outside. I’d be quite happy for my son to play out in the street, but given there’s nobody out there, it’s understandably not very appealing for him. I don’t think the issue (here at least) is the vehicles, I think it’s a combination of the “stranger danger” mentioned in the article making parents afraid of letting their children out unsupervised and that other thing we all struggle with: screens. When I was a child there was far less to keep you entertained indoors. Now, with phones, games consoles and the internet, the options are endless. The lack of children playing outdoors is something my wife and I frequently lament, but I think the screens shoulder more of the blame than the cars.
Well... I see nearly NO KIDS walking around in dense cities, however I see many kids walking around here, in the Alps, where we all live with cars.
So well, no, there is no kids-friendly cities. We are social animals born in nature, cities are as more anti-social as more dense they are, as more alien as more dense they are. It's even worse for teenagers who going around only to consume services in cities because there is essentially nothing else to do. While in nature there are many activities to do without any specific service needs like climbing, riding horses, going out MTB, going sailing/phishing/rafting, skiing and so on.
In dense cities there are too many social issues to have kids playing around, in low density areas there are countless less. So no, as a European having lived most of the life in dense area, not designed for cars, we lost NATURE there, not because of cars but because of density.
The social city WAS the old small village few km long/large with nature around. There is no possible modern social city.
I grew up 2 miles and +300 ft outside of a small city in the 1960s. My near family has 6 acres. There was hundreds of undeveloped land that ended in a state park on one side and a New England dairy farm on the other. My parents rarely drove us around; it was bike or walk.
I wonder what we lost when children stopped hanging out on dairy farms, hiking to an abandoned quarry, hill-topping, sitting in a tree house 30 feet up in a big old pine, discovering edible fruit in abandoned orchards, skinny dipping in a local reservoir, blueberry picking, and sneaking smokes under the powerlines.
There were many things that were not good about growing up at the time, biases, and actions that I grew out of, even if my peers did not, but I do miss the woods.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadUrban areas provide the potential for lots of human interaction and culture.
Rural areas provide nature and solitude.
Suburban areas give you a three mile walk to a convenience store without sidewalks.
Mainly for those with money.
On the other side, every C level/director person I've worked with consulting for the bigger companies around here and elsewhere in the US are almost always from a major urban city. I can tell as soon as I meet them. They speak (I don't mean accent) and handle themselves very differently. There's a certain confidence that comes from having broader social experiences and the opportunities and networks that naturally arise from that.
Do you know any multihome millionaires from nowheresville Mississippi? How about Chicago, New York, or LA?
Again, my 2c, and I almost consider this obvious.
you get whatever it is that you want, and those of us who actually enjoy urban areas get a safer, cleaner existence
In a congested urban area, the time range of a bicycle is better than that of an automobile, let alone transit. I.e. the radius where you can be by a certain elapsed time.
You are equating your body to a piece of metal and rubber. Your car is not your body. It is something external to you. Not only that but is also something that apart from being financially taxing on you, also leads you to destroy the planet and contribute to respiratory issues as well increasing rates of obesity by significantly reducing what's arguably the main source of human physical activity.
This reminds me of the tobacco industry trying to defend a dependency on something that is clearly bad for you. And please note that I am talking about private cars here.
And note that my response was to your "My car opens the world to me" which is not too different to alcoholics being unable to enjoy the world without unhealthy use of alcohol.
It is possible to have a city where amenities are within biking or walking distance. Those cities already exist. But the car first mentality will definitely go down in history as one of the leading factors in the poor health outcomes in the US. People think that fitness implies gym when it doesn't. For most of human history, there were no gyms. People engaged in casual walking
Eating and sleeping are needs. Gambling regularly, smoking regularly or using your car regularly is more of a dependency.
I am not telling you to stop using your car but that you use it when you NEED it. And if you are needing it too much, just like the person smoking or the person drinking too much, you should evaluate your decisions. Every time you use a car you chip your health a little bit and everyone's health a little bit. Visualise it.
But your car closes the world down to other people, children in particular. We have reached the point where children don't walk or cycle to school because it's dangerous... due to all the parents dropping off their kids rather than walking or cycling with them. A classic tragedy of the commons.
It used to be that parents would offer to run carpools to take kids home from activities. Or if you had a sleepover your friends parents would drive you to a movie.
But now that it’s not unheard of for kids to use car seats until they start middle school, it basically requires that one of THEIR parents show up for pickup and drop off.
This increases the level of necessary parental involvement needed and gets rid of one little way that kids learned to interact with other adults and families.
So, it is an additional logistics challenge, but not too bad of one, I'd say.
I remember groups of sevenish kids piling into a car after a soccer game and getting ice cream. I think little things like that do a lot for your sense of autonomy when you can do something in a public place as a kid without a 1:1 ratio of kid:supervisor.
There is profit to be made when people who have perfectly good child seats have to throw them away, so that others have to buy new ones.
https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_surprising_stats_abo...
This shit has a direct and measurable impact on birth rates for a negligible increase in safety. It's also humiliating.
Yet another policy failure by the bureaucracy.
I would love any citation for "This shit has a direct and measurable impact on birth rates", since there's good reason to believe it has a greater than negligible increase in safety
> The risk of experiencing an incapacitating/fatal injury was not associated with booster use.
It seems to imply that booster seats do not reduce the risk of serious injury or death, but I'm not sure I am reading correctly.
The idea is that you can only fit two car seats in the backseat and upgrading to a larger car that could fit three is enough of an expense/hassle that it discourages having a third child
Not so safe. :(
You underestimate the perverseness of teenagers in loud cars.
Plus we have a huge amount of local cops in the area at all times to the point I have to warn uber drivers that if they speed they are going to get pulled over, guaranteed.
But ultimately yes, reducing through traffic can be a good thing, and there are ways to do that in cities too. There's a good video on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E
Suburbs designed around cul-de-sacs are amazing to get around in, very very easy, extremely bike friendly!
One way to do it is you'll have a main road with shops, and no houses, and leading off of that tons of very quiet residential streets with barely any cars. Kids play in the street, people bike all over the place, and when you shop all the stores are in one place so you save on car trips.
Though I would have liked more nearby options, growing up I enjoyed being able to walk to nearby corner stores and such. Would you feel comfortable letting kids walk or bike to a nearby shop unattended in the places you're talking about?
It's great when you have 3-year-old kids, because they can play safely in front of your house. But when they become 10-16, they can't safely walk or bike to anywhere and have to be driven to school, sports practices, Burger King, the Quik Mart, everywhere. The middle school is only a half mile from my house and the high school is only a mile a way, but none of the kids can safely walk or bike to these schools. Everyone gets dropped off by their parents.
Its really an awesome perk to living in the suburbs, and my kids being able to just say "Hey. I'm going for a bike ride" and me not having to worry is a massive life upgrade for everyone involved.
You don't want other people driving their cars in front of your home, but neither do the people who live in the urban core.
I lived in the Chicago suburbs for a while and never drove downtown. I was a passenger a couple times, but when I went, I always took the Metra. During rush hour it would take half the time, or better, and it was fairly cheap. Though I won’t say the entire system was perfect.
Where I’m at now, the only option to avoid driving is the bus. The bus takes at least 3x longer than driving. No one is going to take it unless they have to due to their circumstances. I don’t want to drive and park down there, which leaves me with Uber. I’ve done it a few times, but it’s far from ideal, and fairly expensive. If they had some light rail and a free commuter lot, I’d go down there all the time.
Culs-de-sac aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of non-car options to bridge the suburbs and the city, to reduce car traffic in cities while allowing people from the suburbs to come into the city to spend their time and money. Not everyone will use the transit options, but it just needs to be enough to make the roads manageable. The better the transit options, the more people we’ll likely see opt in.
North American suburbs typically lack the necessary population density to make the sort of transit you ask for viable. Car dependence is intrinsic to low density single family zoning.
On top of that, in many states, riding the bus is essentially seen as a poor person activity as everyone is expected to have cars. So if you want to ride the bus, you have to walk 30 minutes in the 100+ degree temp or if its not hot, its raining. Then sit (if you are lucky enough to be next to a bus stop with a bench instead of just a sign) on an uncovered covered bench. Its made (designed??) to be such a bad experience that people avoid it if they can.
That's the eternal trade off of city vs suburb. In the suburbs you have to drive everywhere but there are fewer people. In the city (some of them) you can walk or use public transportation but there are far more commuters coming into your area. The choice really just depends on your life needs and personal situation
Our culture not only makes too many excuses for reckless drivers, it actively encourages them.
That said, our neighborhood has kids playing in the street all the time. But we are fortunate enough to be secluded from the major roads (even though there are plenty of roads).
Edit: Less than an hour later I got ran out of my lane by a guy in a truck :’) That’s what I get for driving a tiny car, I guess…
Ultimately this is a system level problem that requires multiple solutions and multiple approaches.
Ultimately, jailing drunks after the fact is just too late. You need to intervene earlier.
After all, there's no drunk to jail if adults never get drunk. Or people just walk home never having to worry about getting hit by a car.
Comments that boil down to "boo cars" or "yay cars" aren't interesting, and set us up for flamewars that are the opposite of curious conversation, so please don't post like that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This article is written by someone who lives in a city.
"In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups." - but this isn't true in a suburb.
I've really started to notice who all the articles complaining about cars are written by people who only know what cities are like.
Move to a suburb - it's much nicer, and you'll barely see any cars.
The key is you still need quiet residential streets. That’s what many Chicago neighbors did and still do have.
Now I live in the suburbs in another state with two kids. Our street is a cul-de-sac but even on the neighborhood streets that lead out to the main road people speed through the neighborhood.
It’s no better or worse than Chicago was. Except here you can’t safely leave the neighborhood but by car.
30+ years ago the sidewalks and parks were filled with kids in the summer. They're nowhere to be seen now. I'd argue the more helicoptery parents live in the suburbs, they're afraid of everything that isn't exactly like them. You can't function with that attitude in a city. Well you could, but you'd be completely miserable.
They're terrified of sex trafficking, gang violence, child predators, and immigrants. In a Midwest suburban town. It's pathetic. 24/7 news has ruined kids lives more than cars by a long shot.
There are many different suburbs out there. Some feel like small towns, as they may have been at some point. Others feel like wastelands, places where you won't see many cars driving down the streets since people are either sequestered in their homes or are elsewhere. I suspect that most of the hostile sentiment against suburbia originates from the latter.
Of course, there are other reasons for the sentiment. In at least some urban areas, the roads that pass through them are viewed as being destructive to their community. At best, the roads are meant to service those who may come in to work or to shop or to entertain themselves. At worse, they are virtually impassible rifts that divide communities while oozing air and noise pollution. They offer little to the communities that surround them, not even economic benefits, since the vast majority of people are simply passing through rather than stopping in.
Perhaps urban/suburban is the wrong dichotomy, but it is an easy one to draw upon. It fits our stereotypes. It fits the stereotypes of both sides since those who are drawn to suburbia can always find an urban concrete wasteland to point to, while those who are drawn to urban places can always find a desolate dystopia of lawns to point to. (Of course both sides can find peachy examples that fit their own preferences.)
Most kids have unlimited access to internet so it's video games and porn for boys and social and games for girls.
The roads and curbs didn't change here, but the amount of time outside definitely did.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
Many girls are negatively affected by their porn consumption as well and this is a huge blindspot with the default focus on boys
As much as I agree with people talk about children's lives being too structured, I also fear that too many people take things to the opposite extreme. Structure provides learning opportunities for children. They learn new games. They learn how to interact socially. Sure, that can be done without structure. Sometimes with very undesirable outcomes.
Reigning in cars and structure may provide room for social change, but they are not enough on their own. We also need a framework to facilitate that social change, rather than hoping it will magically happen.
Cutting off from everyone around you and living in your own bubble is convenient. I lived in a few places, and in none of them did I have any idea who my neighbors were, simply because living this way was always easier. In order to rebuild social structures you'd need to convince people that hanging out with your neighbors is net positive, not net cost.
A few decades ago, when it was normal for kids to play in the residential streets where they lived, those streets actually were places that were safe for kids, not just in terms of cars, but in the other ways you are describing, because there were generally enough people outside to keep them safe.
Additionally, creating a situation where people's kids are playing with other kids on the same street actually does help create these "social structures". (The kids' parents will typically end up getting to know the other kids' parents in a way that might not happen if the kids are always inside except when they're being driven around in cars.)
So I think just trying to do traffic calming on residential streets and make them safe for kids to play would actually help resolve these other problems, and resolving them shouldn't be seen as a precondition for trying to address the car aspect of making streets safe for kids to play in.
When I grew up there were all cars on the streets, and before cars there were horse and carts which had their own dangers. Over the last 150 years the distance that parents have allowed their children to roam has gradually diminished from many miles to essentially be the other room.
I feel this is more a product of our risk obsessed society, everything is about analysing and taking action to reduce risk. You can hear it everywhere, risk reduction, risk based analysis etc.
Edit: and in the interest of full disclosure I'm a father of 3 and know exactly how hard this is. I can't imagine me being comfortable with what I got up to as a child and that's the tragedy.
We let our children roam and got a visit from the police because of it. Someone reported "unsupervised children". The police came to our door and started questioning us.
My wife just kept saying, "did we do anything illegal?" and "were they unsafe?".
The police ultimately admitted that they were perfectly safe and we did nothing illegal, but warned us that, "it just looks bad and you should be more careful".
We've also been scolded by other parents at the park when we let our kids go to the other side of the park 100 yards away. "How could you let them go so far? What if they get hurt or need you?"
It makes us not want to let them roam, just to avoid the hassle.
The police need to stop taking these reports seriously and stop responding to "look bad". They're supposed to be enforcing the law, not the look. If some nosey busybody reports something happening where there is no law being broken, they need to be told in no uncertain terms to STFU and stop wasting law enforcement's time. Better yet, have light criminal consequences for this kind of misuse of emergency lines.
The cult of safety and media induced paranoia and fear probably are far more important to explain this. Blaming cars for that is actually a symptom of the role the media fear mongers played on fucking our lives.
Living in a small but dense NJ town with close town-houses and good sidewalks our kids were free to walk to the neighbors and they knew all the kids on the street. Our neighbours actually positioned kids toys on all the front lawns when selling their house to emphasize the child friendliness of the area.
Because the houses were close - feet between them, with many per block, the density meant every block had plenty of kids, and the walks were short enough to let them out. Smaller city streets kept cars slower too. But being a smaller town the only people around were neighbors keeping everyone feeling safe.
Cities have a density that stops parents wanting to let their kids out - think midtown Manhattan - just too much going on to let a younger child run free.
Conversely, living in more rural CT the house plots are so big it's a schlep to a neighbors, and there are no sidewalks. There are far fewer kids in walking distance because of the plot sizes. Without sidewalks and bigger distances the cars travel far faster too. There's always an F250 traveling 50 in a 25 ready to mow down a whole family without noticing it.
Given a little freedom our kids could easily walk to their neighbours, to the local school to play soccer in the school yard, or on the playground, and they'd meet so many more kids, even relatively young.
Towns need to be designed to be social - older towns are far better for this, the pre-car ones. Find a smaller town build before 1900 and it'll be great to raise a family in.
In my town, the difference is night and day.
I know the about pedestrian deaths declining, etc. I ride my bike for utility 1,000+ miles a year with both kids. It feels like I am going to war just getting groceries, going to the library or doing school. The statistics may not reflect it but my perception is with huge cars and trends in road designs everything _feels_ unsafe and uncomfortable.
Some concrete examples: I regularly encounter drivers rolling through stop signs in F150 trucks not seeing my HUGE cargo bike with a flag and every fluorescent color. I encounter broken crossing buttons at least once a month requiring detours or dangerous crossings. The best routes to not interact with cars are completely barren trails built under electrical transmission infrastructure- in the summer they are brutally hot due to lack of any shade cover. It all just feels bad.
To the articles point though I have met some good people and created some excellent experiences by not using a car. And I work hard to design my life around not needing to use a car. But, our defaults really stink and a lot of it comes down to a lack of human design factors.
This summarizes my feelings well: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/28/if-we-want-a-s...
One thing I’ve realized is that there is a bias regarding speed. If people drive somewhere and there’s a nice fast road with a lot of traffic, then it’s a quick efficient journey. Regardless of the fact that they hit 4 stop lights and actually averaged less than 20mph. Factor in door to door times, and the numbers get crazy.
Look at the behavior of people in parking lots. It’s very common for people to spend more time parking, to avoid spending part of that time walking. So instead of going for the available spaces that are a 5-10 second walk from the “good spot” they battle to park as close to their destination as possible. To avoid walking 5 seconds. And now your average speed is 15mph in the suburbs. It’s great.
See here on Streetfilms: https://youtu.be/ezPzocuqKPc?si=cb7PGXsS_LDAQb1b
So well, no, there is no kids-friendly cities. We are social animals born in nature, cities are as more anti-social as more dense they are, as more alien as more dense they are. It's even worse for teenagers who going around only to consume services in cities because there is essentially nothing else to do. While in nature there are many activities to do without any specific service needs like climbing, riding horses, going out MTB, going sailing/phishing/rafting, skiing and so on.
In dense cities there are too many social issues to have kids playing around, in low density areas there are countless less. So no, as a European having lived most of the life in dense area, not designed for cars, we lost NATURE there, not because of cars but because of density.
The social city WAS the old small village few km long/large with nature around. There is no possible modern social city.
I wonder what we lost when children stopped hanging out on dairy farms, hiking to an abandoned quarry, hill-topping, sitting in a tree house 30 feet up in a big old pine, discovering edible fruit in abandoned orchards, skinny dipping in a local reservoir, blueberry picking, and sneaking smokes under the powerlines.
There were many things that were not good about growing up at the time, biases, and actions that I grew out of, even if my peers did not, but I do miss the woods.