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It's great to allow your kids to take risks, and we do this with our own as much as we can (they're 1 and 3, so "within reason" is still doing some heavy liftin
by CalRobert 5y ago
It's great to allow your kids to take risks, and we do this with our own as much as we can (they're 1 and 3, so "within reason" is still doing some heavy lifting. I pick ticks off of them now and then and patch up their share of bruises).
But fundamentally, what I want most is to be somewhere my kids can ride bikes or walk alone to school, to friends, to the shop, etc. from the age of 7 or so. As best I can tell that pretty much means the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan (more for transit than cycling).
Children can't drive, which means unless you're lucky enough to live very close to your friends, and ideally on the same side of the street, your home is effectively your prison in the US and Canada.
And yes, I suppose you _can_ let your kid ride a bike to school alone in the US at 7, but you would be risking arrest, and death. It's often forgotten that drivers are, by far, the leading killers of children. Far more than people with guns. I was an avid cyclist in the US for the first 30 years of my life and I still have a bruised rib and too many memories of very, very close calls with death.
NotJustBikes, who moved from Canadian suburbia to the Netherlands, explores this in more depth at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
- mips_avatar 5y agoI think cycling is one of those things where it’s important to do it in spite of Canamerica being such a bad place for it, every person cycling normalizes it and pushes indirectly for positive change. Of course it’s also important to directly push for change in city government.
- mulmen 5y agoI agree. Cycling needs good stewardship. The biggest problem with cycling adoption is “cyclists”. My hyperlocal blog has a guy that makes me want to throw my bicycle in the bay just so I’m not associated with him. And I love riding my bike. Cycling needs a “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” moment. E-bikes are a great opportunity for Americans to rediscover motorcycles but unfortunately cities are willing to allow motorized vehicles traveling at 20mph on mixed walking/cycling paths.
- xxpor 5y agoIt was crazy to me in NL that motor scooters (Vespas) could use the bike paths.
- mips_avatar 5y agoI think each near collision with a car radicalizes cyclists a bit. While cycling you build up experiences where cars prioritize speed over your safety. Most “annoying cyclists” I’ve met I feel like are arguing for the right things but they have a lot of bitterness.
- II2II 5y agoIt isn't just near collisions. I was once stuck be a car with enough force that it bent my bike frame, ripped the mirror off of their car, and created a crashing sound loud enough for people to hear inside their homes. As far as I can tell, the motorist never even slowed down. The people who came to my aid were nearby residents and pedestrians. How I managed to walk away from that one with little more than (nasty) bruises is a mystery. Other times attentive drivers exhibit attitudes that are less than redeeming. I once flipped on some streetcar tracks. Attentive motorists simply drove around me and went on their way. The people who did check up on my condition were pedestrians. I've had a number of other experiences in my life that leave me feeling as though people cease to be human as soon as they get behind the wheel of a car. While there are exceptions, they are exceedingly rare. Getting back to the article, I am extremely worried about children being on their own on the streets. It isn't because of those who would intentionally harm them, since that is relatively uncommon. It is because very few people behind the wheel even seem to care.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5y agoAs a pedestrian and ocassional roller blader in any major Metro City i visit, I'm actually far more afraid of bicycles than of any car. My only times I've near-collision or actual Collision have been with bikes. this is invariably because they far exceed the speed limit in some sections that are really close to pedestrian traffic or because they bike near a curve full of parked cars where he cannot have enough time to break for incoming pedestrian traffic when the bikers going to ~30 miles per hour.
- meristohm 5y agoA few exceptions from my experience, where the cycling is okay (more space on the shoulder than Japan, but also larger vehicles): Madison , WI; Tucson, AZ; and Minneapolis, MN. I’ve put more time into bicycling as transportation than most other optional activities I can think of (other than walking, reading, videogames?). San Diego, CA boasted of many miles of bike lanes, but we found them often not connected, dumping us into a five-way intersection with no guidance, for example. A hard problem for city planners, maybe. In my teens I cycled to my last three years of high school because I could sleep in (bus took over an hour) and visit friends on the way home. Thankfully the highway had a decent shoulder. I wore my helmet and eventually saw the benefit of wearing a neon-orange reflective vest (rather than stowing it once out of parental sight). Where I’m living now I’m pushing for improved bicycle routes between towns, in part for tourism and so we don’t have to drive our kid to school.
- mips_avatar 5y agoI don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but road shoulders aren't safe cycling/pedestrian spaces. Roads have the shoulders as a run off space for cars travelling at speed, so only having the option of cycling on the shoulder (car run off space) is a bad option that cities need to remedy. Painting the shoulder a "cycling lane" doesn't solve this either, it doesn't change the infrastructure at all it just reminds drivers of their responsibility to safety.
- meristohm 5y agoA network of bicycle lanes meant for transportation (rather than silly meandering lanes designed by someone who’s last experience biking was as a child, swerving down the road for the fun of it) would be awesome, potentially requiring less maintenance and reducing wear on automobile-roads, too.
- lanewinfield 5y agoI grew up in Milwaukee, WI and had this exact experience from an early age through 15 when I got my driver's license. A lot of biking between friends' houses and school. Not to say that bike lanes and bike protection couldn't be better, because it absolutely could be.
- neartheplain 5y agoI also grew up in a midsized Midwestern city, and had the same (wonderful) childhood experience. Biked to school, parks and playgrounds, the YMCA, local diner, you name it. This was in the 1990s and early 2000s, so I doubt much has changed.
- burlesona 5y agoI agree wholeheartedly. My life dream is to build a car-free city in the US so I can live there. When I was young and even more naive I hoped I could do this before having kids, so they could grow up with that freedom. Now I’m hoping maybe I can do this by the time I have grandchildren. We’ll see. It would require a lot of capital in the form of patient equity to pull off.
- mulmen 5y agoYou could just move to a walkable neighborhood in an existing city.
- Symbiote 5y agoI don't know North America well enough, but the linked video says such walkable neighbourhoods have very high prices. That's great if you can afford it, but it's also good to campaign for it to be available for those who can't.
- colinmhayes 5y agoBut if you built a similar city it would likely have high prices too. Why not try to get more housing built in the places that are already nice instead?
- oblio 5y agoI'm not sure I understand this, why would walkable places be expensive? Walkable places are generally high density which means that buildings are bigger and homes are smaller so prices should be lower.
- colinmhayes 5y agoFor the same reason walkable places that currently exist are expensive. People want to live there.
- mulmen 5y agoI don’t think this is an absolute. I grew up in a neighborhood that provided what you describe in Idaho. Both my brothers are raising their kids in an environment like you describe. I live in one in Seattle now. It’s not cheap in a city but it’s not unheard of in the US.
- mips_avatar 5y agoI don’t think Seattle does a great job of this either. The eastside is a suburban sprawl, and most of the parents I know in Seattle are too afraid of the homeless to let their kids go to parks/stores nearby alone.
- mulmen 5y agoThe East side isn’t Seattle. If you want to include suburbs you also need to include Shoreline and Burien. It depends a lot on your neighborhood. Mine is nice and I see kids running around the neighborhood regularly. As I mentioned this is definitely a thing in Idaho. My brothers and sister all have families and live in areas where kids can have freedom in the neighborhood but away from home.
- retrohomearcade 5y agoLots of kids ride their bikes to my daughters elementary school, where we live in the United States. Safe small towns with functional sidewalks, for kids to ride bikes on as necessary, still happily exist in some places in our nation.
- mips_avatar 5y agoWhere you live can the kids get to anything other than single family housing? Because there are definitely suburbs in the US with low enough traffic to be safe, but they don’t allow important freedoms like biking to schools/libraries/shops
- tesseract 5y agoYeah I think this is common. Where I grew up I could easily bike to some other kids' houses or to school, or a mile or two around the neighborhood for exercise, but other destinations I would have been interested in (the library, the local ice cream shop, the hardware store, parks other than the school playground) were basically impossible to reach due to distance, traffic/safety, or both.
- retrohomearcade 5y agoWe live on Main street in a single family home in a nice moderately touristy fairly inexpensive mountain town in the north-east. Main street is generally thriving, with the preschool, elementary school, middle-high school, library, and town park/common down said Main street. (The library is one block off.) Mixed together among the core mile and a half or so stretch is a decent collection of retail establishments (including 2 gas stations, a few coffee shops local and chain, restaurants local and chain, doctors offices, post office, auto mechanics, the now ubiquitous Dollar General, a liquor store, an ole' time hardware store, and a couple good ice cream places), single family homes, a church, a police station/opera house/townhall, and some hotels and motels local and chain. Side streets with single family homes, and some New England style multi-unit three stories are on both sides of Main street, where the river allows, with a small trailer park mixed in. There is certainly traffic on Main street, including log trucks, but with a 30 mph speed limit, and lots of crosswalks where people will generally stop for you (the law says you should), it's pretty human friendly. I will admit it's in many ways a throwback to the way things used to be...
- _jal 5y ago> I suppose you _can_ let your kid ride a bike to school alone in the US at 7 I think you're forgetting just how big and diverse the US is.
- lordnacho 5y agoIn Switzerland you'll see very young kids taking themselves to school too. In fact I think the schools discourage you from doing them off. Loads of kids can be seen around town going to and from school, totally normal.
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- rmah 5y agoIn NYC, over a million kids of all ages walk, skateboard, bike, kick-scooter, or take the bus and subway to school every day. Little kids as young as 10 take the subway alone to/from school. Well, really they travel in packs, but still. Even in the dangerous Big Apple, the number of serious accidents or criminal incidents while going to/from school is just a handful a year. When I was young and growing up in the burbs, many kids walked or rode bikes to school. The roads were much more dangerous back then. Crime was much MUCH worse. No one batted an eye. I don't really understand some people's extreme risk aversion today.
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- WalterBright 5y ago> I don't really understand some people's extreme risk aversion today. Evolution has wired us to be constantly looking for risk. If we don't find danger, we'll invent it. As we remove the riskiest risks, the bar on what we're willing to spend and sacrifice to address the next level of risks goes higher and higher. Then there's the press which lives by sensationalizing every bad thing that happens, leading us to grossly exaggerate risk levels in our society.
- panopticon 5y ago> Then there's the press which lives by sensationalizing every bad thing that happens, leading us to grossly exaggerate risk levels in our society. Humans are really bad at assessing risk. Parents are more likely to be afraid of a stranger kidnapping their child when their child is far more likely to die on the car ride to school. Which is sad when you think about how suburbs are designed to make people feel safe even though their road designs tend to be extremely dangerous.
- refurb 5y agoYup. I lived in Asia for a while and toddlers ride on scooters without helmets. Shocking! Then I remember back not long ago when seat belt laws came into effect in the US. Before then? Meh. And car seats for 6 year olds?
- bsder 5y ago> As best I can tell that pretty much means the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan (more for transit than cycling). Or old pre-car cities in the US. The point of those is that they have dense interconnection that predates cars. In addition, building roads cost too much in terms of eminent domain, so they don't have very many high-speed roads interfering.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago>Children can't drive, which means unless you're lucky enough to live very close to your friends, and ideally on the same side of the street, your home is effectively your prison in the US and Canada. There are huge swaths of the country that are not the "built up in the 50s and 60s but now populated and trafficked enough to be dangerous" suburban hellscape that you are implying.
- chrisseaton 5y agoAmerica is famous for its small towns. People forget this.
- mastax 5y agoA lot of small town USA looks like this now: https://postimg.cc/4YHfF59X https://postimg.cc/4YHfF59X
- ska 5y agoThis is true. On the other hand, there are huge swaths that are.
- Alupis 5y agoWhy not let your kids take the school bus to school? Most suburban areas (and urban areas too) have a school bus pickup for the neighborhood. Showing up at the bus stop made me a ton of friends right there in my neighborhood, and made for some great long-lasting relationships that continue to this day. Having friends that lived in the same neighborhood meant I could ride my bike to my friends house, or walk, or whatever.
- johnkpaul 5y agoMy burb school rules are that they’ll only bus you if you are outside of 4 miles of the school as the crow flies. Even if there’s no possible way to walk there, my kids are stuck and I have no option but to drive them.
- bcrosby95 5y agoI disagree with one point on the video: at least in the suburbs I've lived in (various places in the South SF Bay Area, and Los Angeles), you could bike places. And I regularly did starting around 8 years old. I would regularly ride up to 4 miles out. And you could retrofit many of these suburbs to be more bike safe. I think the far larger problem is cultural. It doesn't matter how safe bicycling is if there's a chance for your children to be taken away from you for letting them take advantage of it. That is also why my wife is hesitant about this stuff.
- ed_balls 5y agoI grow up in a small town in Poland. I was walking on my own to preschool since I was 5 (it was about 400m from the house). If I had kids I'd let them free roam the city.
- dougmwne 5y agoSeeing elementary kids off on their own in Poland is shocking to me now, even though I was an elementary kid wandering around in the USA 30 years ago. Not sure how the USA took such a bizarre and sad turn.
- ed_balls 5y agoI guess there was a change in law in Poland as well. Now it's illegal to let someone younger than 7 to wonder alone.
- abraxas 5y agoPoland is far more walkable and pedestrian/commuter friendly than the US or Canada. It really has to be experienced first hand to sink in. The way that building codes in North America separate the buildings lends the geography there to be friendly to the cars and only to the cars.
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- kfajdsl 5y agoNot sure if you're already doing this or not, but walking to the bus stop with friends (no adults) and playing outside after school were both the main ways I got independence in my suburban childhood. As long as I was home before dark, I was good.
- smoldesu 5y agoI live in a relatively rural area of America, and I still can't even fathom letting a kid ride their bike to school. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable riding more than a mile along any side roads, not to mention any city streets or main roads. America is really just not made for cyclists (not that I am one).
- meristohm 5y agoFamiliarity can lead to feeling safer, even if nothing else changes. I’m comfortable on a bicycle, but in a new place I’m more on-guard until the route feels known.
- wheels 5y ago> the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan I think it's far more common than that -- actually, guessing wildly, I suspect most children around the world get themselves to school and that the US is the outlier. In Germany, where I live, and where my oldest will be starting school in two months, it's common and encouraged for kids to walk to school in their first year (age 6). Admittedly, ours is only a quarter mile away. We've just started letting our son go alone to the bakery downstairs and across the street from our apartment, and while it's not quite typical, it's also not wild here for a 5 year old to do that.
- eru 5y agoWhen I went to Kindergarten in the late 80s / early 90s in East Germany, many kids went home by themselves.
- mseidl 5y agohttps://youtu.be/L7-k6nK1VUw https://youtu.be/L7-k6nK1VUw She has a great video. I'm a German also. I did live in the US too. I'd hate to have to raise a kid there.
- CalRobert 5y agoGermany is on our shortlist too, though the cycling infra seems poor compared to NL/DK/Nordics. Would love for the kids to learn German (and ourselves!)
- marton78 5y agoI live in Germany, too and can confirm. In Hungary, where I'm from, it's no different. What shocked me most in this article was the paragraph: > A mom wrote that she had been so encouraged that, at the grocery store, she allowed her son to leave her to get cheese from a different aisle. When he came back, she added, “That boy was six inches taller!” That mother never allowed her son to do that before before being encouraged by the author? Poor child.
- daddylongstroke 5y agoI thought that was pretty fucked up as well. My kids are completely free range. When I was 5ish in Poland, I was going to buy bread from a stand about 1.5m away as my daily morning chore. Nobody batted an eye. I loved it, and my mom got her annoying son out of the house for 35 minutes a day: a win-win! Not sure why we infantilize kids in the US.
- presentation 5y agoA take from Japan - actually for cycling it's not bad. Even though the infrastructure doesn't have nice separate cycling paths, it's still 16% trips taken by bicycle out here vs 25% in the Netherlands [1]. Most neighborhoods aren't high-speed and streets are tiny, making low-speed cycling not so dangerous, and the proximity of neighborhoods means that kids bike places all the time. [1] https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-unique-safety-of-cycling-in-tokyo-b3b8eded727e#:~:text=The%20Institute%20for%20Transportation%20and,25%20percent%20in%20the%20Netherlands https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-unique-saf....
- meristohm 5y agoWhen I was in Japan in the early 2000s I felt safe biking around. I already felt confident on a bicycle, and was grateful for the deference from drivers, both in and between cities. Some mountain tunnels were harrowing, with no railing and a longish drop to the road. Sometimes I used the road (I had lights and reflective vest, and the ignorant bravado of youth). In cities it seemed most cyclists used the sidewalk. I wanted to go fast, so I joined the cars. What a rush! I’m sorry now for the stress I likely caused people in their cars, and grateful I didn’t get injured. In the US I’m somewhat scared of getting shot or “nudged” off the road (had stuff thrown at me and people drive too close), so that and the caution of age make me a more defensive, careful, respectful cyclist. With plenty of bright, reflective things on my bike I’m willing to take our kid on the road, and am working on promoting better bikeways around here, for locals and tourists.
- refurb 5y agoMy neighbors kid in San Francisco was 9 and has been taking the Muni bus alone, back and forth to school. There are plenty of kids that age doing that. I think the “your home is a prison” is an upper middle class thing. Poor folks don’t have much choice but to let their kids use transit.
- matt_j 5y agoThis seems like an over-protective attitude to me. I rode my bike around the (Australian, suburban) streets from age 5, rode to school for 12 odd years, caught the train to the city and skated all over it from about age 13. My parents made a point of letting us (me and siblings) 'rough and tumble' as we grew up. We had a lot of scrapes, don't get me wrong, but you learn a lot as a kid if you can fall over a few times. Kids are good at taking care of themselves, and each other, if you let them. Within reason, of course, but I see a lot of coddling these days and a lot of soft kids that have never been beyond the padded playground walls.
- Loic 5y ago> the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan (more for transit than cycling). From my small experience living in France, Germany, Denmark and spending quite some times in other old[0] EU countries, you can do it everywhere there. From Portugal up to Finland and everything in-between. This is the normal way here. [0]: Not to be taken negatively, just that I did not had the opportunity to visit/stay in the EU countries from the former East block.
- CalRobert 5y agoWe hoped that this would be our experience moving to the EU (Ireland) but due to housing issues we wound up in a field in the countryside. They DO get free reign of the field and the lovely walking trail, but the road is full of high speed drivers with nothing but a dense, tall hedgerow to jump in to. Ireland copied all the mistakes of America with regards to urban design, too.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoYeah, the Irish countryside is beautiful, but not walkable. Both my wife and I grew up there, hence why we prioritized getting a walkable place in the suburbs.
- CalRobert 5y agoFunny enough when we were looking it was either between the canals in Dublin or in the countryside. We looked at places in Clonsilla, etc. but they seemed really hostile to walking. Inside the canals was too expensive, sadly. I ended up getting a remote job and we moved to a few acres in Offaly, about a 15 minute bike ride from the train. It's beautiful and there's a lot to like (We even have a walking trail by the house!) but it's definitely a place you need a car.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoYeah, we looked at clonsilla too but it didn't work for the same reason. We managed to find something just over the m50 but still pretty walkable, in Laurel lodge. I'm way too neurotic about the future to take the plunge and move away from Dublin, unfortunately.
- edem 5y agoWhen I was a kid I lived in the suburbs (Hungary) and I was cycling all day. It was great. I want the same for my kid and for that we had to move to the countryside because the capital (Budapest) became hell on earth in the last 10 years.
- ornornor 5y agoIn Switzerland it’s mandatory to let your kids go to and from school on their own from age 7 (I think, +/- 1 year) The alternative is called “elterntaxi” (meaning parent taxi) and is very much frowned upon. So, every school morning, lunch, and afternoon, you have bunches of little kids walking on their own between their schools and their homes, wearing a special reflective jacket.
- watwut 5y agoSwitzerland managed to figure out preschool/kindergarten system that literally puts even more limitations on mom then having kids at home.
- nix23 5y agoWhat is the limitation on "moms" here? And btw, why having a limitation on one parent?
- watwut 5y agoYou have to take kids to kindergaten twice and bring them back twice. The time while they are there needs to be used for cooking lunch. They are not there long enough to allow much else. It literally gives you program for whole day without freeing you for other activitities. Being full time with the kid is literally better for that parent, because at least you can structure day how it suits you. (There is benefit for kid itself in terms of socialization, but that is difderent topic) And I say moms because in Swiss it is moms who are expected to do it and forgo other activities while men are expected to go to work. Men are much less affected by above system.
- nix23 5y ago>You have to take kids to kindergaten twice and bring them back twice. See that's exactly the mentality problem. My mum was working too, at lunchtime we made for example a little fire in the wood and exchanged the food our parent packed in, from spaghetti to sausages and so on, made our own snake-bread etc. You have to be really crazy to think your children's have a problem do stuff for them self for 1.5 hours. If it was too cold we eat outside, went back into the school asked the teacher if we can play flight simulator on the apple2's. There is no need that the state has to organize everything for you..children's need freedom too, true?
- ajuc 5y ago> But fundamentally, what I want most is to be somewhere my kids can ride bikes or walk alone to school, to friends, to the shop, etc. from the age of 7 or so. As best I can tell that pretty much means the Netherlands, parts of Denmark, or perhaps Japan (more for transit than cycling). Why these countries in particular? You can do this in pretty much any EU country and many non-EU European countries. I walked back 4km from primary school every day. I could go by bus but then I'd had to wait for 30 minutes and everything beats that when you're 10. And during vacations me and my cousins roamed the forest near my grandparents house whole day every day only returning for a dinner :)
- mmsimanga 5y agoSounds pretty much like my upbringing in Africa. Bus drivers had authority and if they spied you being naughty through their review mirror they could kick you off the bus resulting in a few kilometre of walk home. It was common to get off the bus in solidarity with your friend who was being kicked off and walk home with him. Sometimes it was just more fun and quicker to walk than wait for the bus much like you.
- widforss 5y agoI'm Swedish, but lived in New Orleans for 6 months in 2001, when I was 5 years old. I used to walk to kindergarten together with my siblings, 3 and 5 years older. Was that another time, or was that too much freedom for the US to handle even then?