16 ms·

Media is part of it, but the other part is this, taken from the first comment on the linked article: "I can’t help but notice how many freeways and roads are b

• deelowe 10y ago
  This is definitely the issue from what I see. I have a neighborhood road that runs in front of my home. Speed limit is 25 mph. Doesn't matter, cars still do 55 or more at times. When I was growing up, you'd never see anyone going that fast down a residential street.
  • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    Because kids playing in the street, cyclist and other hazards were more common, road markings were less obvious and road surfaces were rougher.
• freehunter 10y ago
  After reading the parent I was about to say "I'm almost 30 and I barely feel safe wandering alone". Not just crossing major roads (I live downtown in my little city, but I have to cross a major road to get to any shops, which puts a big damper on my walking) but just one person walking down the road, by themselves? It's almost a scandal. And if I'm biking around town, especially not dressed in spandex like a bicyclist... what, did you have your driver's license taken away? I know those are purely my hang ups and no one has ever stopped me and questioned my motives, but the idea comes from somewhere. It comes from a childhood where you weren't supposed to wander alone, and you were supposed to avoid strange men on the street. Then when you grow up to become a strange man on the street, you can't help but feel uncomfortable about it. At least I can't.
  • Kluny 10y ago
    Yeah, it's weird as hell to be the only person walking on an empty street.
    • saurik 10y ago
      I actually got stopped by the local police a year or two ago for going on a walk during a holiday, as they received reports of some strange guy walking alone.
      • orless 10y ago
        "Walking, just walking, walking?" This reminded me of the short story "The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian We've studied this story in the English class (probably some 25 years ago).
      • uxp100 10y ago
        That's a bummer. One of my favorite things is to walk down the middle of the street in my Grandma's town on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Small town, shops are closed, quiet except for a few bars and people's homes. Also a good break from family, and a walk on a day where I eat a lot.
      • nickt 10y ago
        Me too. Cop said, "are you English?" "Yep" "Though so"
        • balabaster 10y ago
          Hahaha I get this every time I cross a street upon a suitably large gap in traffic rather than waiting for the lights... because that's what we learn growing up in England where almost nobody waits for the lights - especially if there's a gap in traffic. The numbers of people gobsmacked at this behaviour here is... funny, honestly. As a pedestrian, are you really going to stand around and be dictated what you can and can't do by a stupid fcking light? Life is short, get your head out of your phone, pay attention to your surroundings and cross the fcking road before the little light comes to tell you that your time is up and it's your turn to go to the next life and you missed it. Every time someone baulks at me for doing it, I can't help but grin and remember the quote from the original Point Break: "It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins ... we show them that the human spirit is still alive."
• someguydave 10y ago
  Another reason is that things are generally very spread out in the US. Since it was taken for granted that everyone has a car, house lots are large and commercial areas are far from residential areas.
• space_fountain 10y ago
  Yep I (20 year old) rode a bike quite often down to say the public library about two miles, but it was all sidewalks on slow roads. It's one of the things I really miss about where I live now. It would be almost criminal to try having a kid ride to the library from here.
• hueving 10y ago
  This isnt it. The town I grew up in had precisely the same number of interstates and major roads as it did 30 years ago (flat population) and children today have nowhere near the freedom that I did as a child.
  • pyre 10y ago
    Are you saying that the causes can't be different from town to town or region to region, or that such actions couldn't be justified and rational in one region, while not justified and irrational in another region?
    • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      No, he's saying that "there's more roads so people drive everywhere" is not the blanket scapegoat that many around here make it out out to be.
  • couchand 10y ago
    Can you provide some details? I'm amazed by the idea that there's still a place like this. I'm guessing it's a relatively small town pretty far from any major urban centers?
    • baddox 10y ago
      I'm curious why you're amazed at this notion. Surely the vast majority of towns have not been significantly urbanized or had significant road changes in the last thirty years.
      • couchand 10y ago
        Not in my experience. I've lived in a variety of places in my life, one specific cross-section of America: from farm towns and small-to-medium cities in the midwest to major urban areas including New York, DC, and Chicago. Basically everywhere I've known for more than a few years has had some measure of road building. Perhaps other parts of the US haven't seen the same trend? I'm not talking about "significant urbanization", but I definitely am talking about suburbanization, which is a pox that affects the whole country, as far as I know.
• orthoganol 10y ago
  Reminds me of "Taken for a Ride", a somewhat famous documentary about the auto industry seeking to gut forms of public transportation in many cities. Having traveled quite a bit I believe the US's public transportation systems, within cities and between regions, is a national embarrassment.
• toast42 10y ago
  It will be interesting to see if self-driving cars lead to parents being more comfortable with their children exploring.
  • Asooka 10y ago
    This is one of the aspects that are most exciting for me about self-driving cars: no road rage, no hurrying, complete respect for road rules. You wouldn't have to do the "game of chicken" on the crosswalk where you start crossing, but in such a way that you can always bail out if the oncoming traffic doesn't stop. You wouldn't have to fear for your life when simply riding your bike on a wide street. You wouldn't be one person having a bad day away from needing a wheelchair for the rest of your life. To me that day can't come soon enough.
    • umberway 10y ago
      Yes, more than that: if robot cars could be made incapable of hitting pedestrians, then children might start to roam again. It would be a marvellous unintended consequence...
      • Filligree 10y ago
        No, from talking with some of these engineers, I'm pretty sure it's completely intended.
      • saiya-jin 10y ago
        that is impossible in real world. if you go 50 kmh in 50 kmh zone, and small kid jumps 2m in front of your car suddenly, there is nothing anybody or any software can do. if it's 5m, would you rather crash and kill the parents than the kid? what about 2 kids? it's dangerous direction of thoughts, meaning kids won't have to be careful when outside. but you have bikes, you have tons of other dangers.
        • ambicapter 10y ago
          Take an evasive maneuver at the very limits of the car's handling, brought to you by the speed of computers, while all the other cars around you adjust at similarly lightning-fast speeds?
• shams93 10y ago
  Yeah the traffic is a killer, I was almost killed by a driver who straight up ran a red light going around 75mph and nearly collided with me, an old man and an (estimated) 8 year old girl, its very dangerous to be a pedestrian, even more dangerous than being a motorcycle rider.
  • couchand 10y ago
    its very dangerous to be a pedestrian, even more dangerous than being a motorcycle rider I'm assuming you're presuming somehow controlling for the fact that one of those two is on motorcycle?
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > We have purposely designed our cities to maximize vehicle throughput and require car ownership This is just one specific example of the broader phenomenon, which is corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities, so that they may resell those things to us as products. Requiring cars to move around is just the surface. We go to coffee shops and restaurants to see our friends. We purchase MP3s or concert tickets to hear music. We order food instead of cooking it let alone growing it. And of course this is all a luxury to some: many of us would be happy to never have to walk significant distance, cook, or listen to a local musician ever again. But it's in the corporations best interest that children aren't really given a choice. And that serves nation states' best interest, which is to grow the GDP. But the result is a world of people who, without a credit card, are babies unable to care for themselves. Short of someone putting food in our mouths and maintaining the grounds around us, we would be lost. Luckily we have the cash to afford these things. And those who fall through the cracks of being able to hold a job are eaten up. All hail GDP. All hail capital. Thank you Gates, Koch, Slim, Walton, for providing us with internet connectivity, petrol, and toilet paper this day.
  • Cerium 10y ago
    Just a few days ago I was walking into Costco to buy a loaf of bread. Outside at the food court was an old Chinese man with what looked like a 4 year old grandson. The old man was playing a bamboo flute, very beautifully, while his grandson ate some food. The whole area was filled with some beautiful music which transported me back to time I have spent in China. I wish listening to live music was more common again.
  • clarkmoody 10y ago
    > corporations seek to remove all of our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities Please. It's in a corporation's best interest to give the customer exactly what he wants. We still have "our abilities to take care of ourselves and our communities," but we also have the option of a corporation providing for our every whim.
    • renlo 10y ago
• lamontcg 10y ago
  > it's mostly due to the rivers of high-speed traffic that cut up the city and that is the priority. you have to be able to drive as fast as the roadway allows to get where you're going without needing to think about the safety of others. if some kid runs out in front of your car, its not going to be a question of if you were driving to fast but one of "where the hell were the parents?" the assumption being that the vehicle occupant has the right to get where they're going absolutely as goddamn fast as is humanly possible and nothing had better get in their way. driverless cars can't get here soon enough.
  • saiya-jin 10y ago
    typical commuter mindset. me and my needs are above everybody's else because... i have a car?
• cel1ne 10y ago
  I see your point, but don't you think it's possible to teach children to cross traffic safely? When I was little, I regularly walked 3 or 4 miles to visit friends. I had to cross at least one "big" road on my way, where I just took extra care, because my parents had reminded me to.
  • solipsism 10y ago
    Never has a thread been more full of survivorship bias. If you had juggled chainsaws as a kid and survived it wouldn't be any more relevant.
    • E6300 10y ago
      So what you're saying is that most adults never crossed any major roads as children and most children that have crossed major roads didn't grow up to be adults? I know traffic statistics are depressing, but surely they can't be that bad.
    • dtech 10y ago
      You're making it sounds like there's a pile of dead kids just growing on the side of the road every day. Lethal traffic incidents among children are non-trivial, but no-where near enough to introduce any kind of "survivorship bias" effect.
      • solipsism 10y ago
        The point is that "I did X and I survived!" does not advance the conversation, regardless of which side is right.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • DonaldFrump 10y ago
      Indeed. Among the many reasons life-expectancy was worse back then, children were less likely to survive to adulthood. Among "Great Grandpa's" 13 siblings growing up on the farm, the one who drowned unsupervised at the ol' swimmin' hole six miles from home is just another statistic next to the couple who died as infants from disease. Everyone's grandparents who survived just fine are exactly that: just fine, because they survived. Nowadays, with parents having fewer children on average and with tragic childhood accidents being more exceptional, I would only expect modern parenting to favor greater restrictions.
• baddox 10y ago
  I'm curious if that's a sufficient explanation. Do all the parents today (who remember roaming as kids but who wouldn't let their own kids roam now) live somewhere with more dangerous roads than where they grew up? I wonder if my own home town, which I know has not had significant road changes, has experienced the same alleged decline in roaming.
  • ktRolster 10y ago
    It's not just roaming. If you let your small children play in the front yard alone, neighbors can call CPS.
• nvarsj 10y ago
  This is very true in London, unfortunately. Cars destroy the city - both by polluting it, and making walking and biking dangerous. Boris Johnson's goal as mayor was to optimise traffic flow through London, which just encouraged more cars. Going to a city like Cambridge where the center is shut down to cars is quite eye opening - lots of kids and people walking and biking. In London it's just a sea of cars driving and parked on sidewalks so you can't actually walk anywhere safely. Case in point: my daughter had a very near miss when she was about 2. She was walking down the side walk a bit in front of me, and this middle aged lady in a Range Rover went onto the sidewalk to get around a stopped car, barely missing my daughter. I yelled at her but she didn't even notice in her sound proof SUV.
  • ciaranm 10y ago
    I make a point of banging on any vehicle that's nearly hit someone and not noticed/acknowledged it - regardless of whether it was me they nearly hit or not. People get mad (especially people driving vans/small trucks), but it's disgraceful that people are driving multi-tonne vehicles and are completely oblivious to their surroundings. I'm glad your daughter is ok.
    • wj 10y ago
      I did that when I was nearly hit in a marked crosswalk (they didn't slow down and were less than arm's length from me) that was at an intersection with no light. They went around the block to come back and start threatening me for hitting their car...
    • de_Selby 10y ago
      As a cyclist it happens all the time, it goes something like this: 1) A car comes within centimeters of side swiping me and knocking me down. They don't even notice I'm there. 2) They stop at the next traffic light, I tap on the window to tell them to be more careful. 3) They get angry at me. 4) Other drivers see this interaction and soon you see articles in newspapers complaining about "militant cyclists"
      • 10y ago
• danielbarla 10y ago
  Your comment made me consider this point, and I think it's a good one. That said, I actually live in a less crowded and busy city than I did as a child, yet the conditioning the parent poster mentions is there. As a 6 year old, I would walk next to busy urban streets alone, cross streets, get on trams, and go to school. I don't think the risk of that has really gotten much higher, we just perceive it differently. A good example is how cars didn't have seatbelts (at the back at least), or headrests, and they had a tendency to crumple and have the steering column impale the driver during collisions. We seem to be more keenly aware of these issues nowadays, and are somehow more averse to them - quite aside from any actual changes for the worse.
• ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  But the driver for building roads is frequently that roads enable an upgrade in zoning for land that fronts on those roads. More modern roadways are quite distant and independent of even the usual retail/restaurant establishments. You have to take an exit. These roads tend to be toll. I don't know how anyone who hasn't used them would be able to see what I mean, but around Houston, the new 99 and I45 stand as examples of the two approaches.
• thomnottom 10y ago
  I grew up deep inside a suburban development in Pennsylvania. We could ride our bikes for miles and still avoid major roads. Street hockey games very rarely had to move nets for cars. A number of friends lived easily within walking/biking distance. Even leaving my development usually meant dealing with one "major" road before getting into the quiet streets of the next one. I would love to let my 8 year old daughter roam our current neighborhood like that, but we get more speeding cars in an afternoon cutting through our street than I would see in a weeks at my parents'.
• Melchizedek 10y ago
  I can't help but notice that this is close to Rotherham. The second hit when you google for Rotherham is the Wikipedia article on the "Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal". The report estimated that 1,400 children had been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.[7] Abuses described included abduction, rape, torture and sex trafficking of children. Perhaps freeways aren't the only factor here.
• MK999 10y ago
  Great point to consider geography and the urban environment. In the suburb I grew up in there were no sidewalks, and a few woodsy areas around my parents house were quickly developed and turned into more suburban dwellings, so there really wasn't anywhere to roam.
• talmand 10y ago
  Rivers of high-speed traffic in the city? Dude, I feel like I can't allow my kids to walk alone to school that's four blocks over in my own neighborhood without some nanny state enabler calling child services on me. Hell, I don't let them play in the front yard and wonder how long it'll be before I get the knock on the door because I let them play unsupervised in the fenced backyard with a trained full-grown German shepherd on watch. Things are seriously screwed up.
  • basseq 10y ago
    And then it spitballs. The police / CPS will listen, and we've all heard horror stories about "good people" getting slapped with lawsuits, fines, community service[1], or straight up losing their kids[2] because of a system gone mad. And the sad part is that we've been conditioned to it. The parent that lets their kids roam with that kind of societal norm and social pressure? You start wondering... [1] http://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/the_day_i_left_my_son_in_the_car/ http://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/the_day_i_left_my_son_in_the... [2] http://www.sunherald.com/news/special-reports/dhs/article95083217.html http://www.sunherald.com/news/special-reports/dhs/article950...
    • talmand 10y ago
      From the second article: "... adding that forging a document to take away a child is almost as severe an allegation as kidnapping." Holy shit, that is fucking kidnapping. But somehow because a government worker does it somehow it's not the same thing?
• DiffEq 10y ago
  I think this is a large part of it. I don't care so much as 5 cents about what somebody at child protective services thinks...but where I live people drive so fast it is a bit ridiculous..but also my neighborhood has roaming packs of dogs. For whatever reason my area seems to be where people go to drop off unwanted dogs; they pack up and become dangerous. I have been attacked 3 times, my wife once and I am not too keen on my children's ability to defend themselves against them. I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs.
  • Arizhel 10y ago
    >I have disposed of many of them but it seems just when it is safe again to go for a run...there are more dogs. Sounds like you need to pack a pistol and some mace when you run.
• mseebach 10y ago
  Traffic is definitely a big, unsolved problem in todays cities -- but in this context, it doesn't really fit into the causal chain: People report roaming about freely as kids in the 70s and 80s (that would include myself), several decades into the golden age of cars everywhere. Obviously individual areas can change, but the world at large today isn't significantly more dangerous for traffic reasons than it was 40 years ago.