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What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

stevemagness.substack.com

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Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#121

Post by seanmcdirmid »

coryrc wrote: post #100
alex_young wrote: post #17

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m…

I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design. "Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to l…

Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#122

Post by nocturnes »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #105
prawn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say it every time on this topic, but the situation hasn't changed in 10 years so it holds true IMO. I agree, the big change is absolutely cars and street parking. My parents have lived in the same house for 40+ years (South Australia), in an area where every home has a driveway and garage/carport that can fit 2-3 cars combined. When I was young, that block had maybe 1-2 cars parked on the street, visibility was goo…

Is it not more people living per house? I can’t really imagine voluntarily street parking on a busy street to avoid car shuffling. Are there more cars per person now than in the 90s? I feel like parents had one car each back then and teens got cars at around the same rates they do now? But with housing prices going up like crazy everywhere it wouldn’t be surprising to me if there were more people per house than there…

In Australia, the pattern over time is definitely more cars per person, and fewer occupants per household. Rate of change seems to be slowing on both counts but it's still getting worse, not better unfortunately.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#123

Post by qingcharles »

This popped up on my feed, and I thought it was fitting :)

TV interview with parents taking their little kids to see Alien (1979):

https://x.com/TheCinesthetic/status/2058998742506954766

https://xcancel.com/TheCinesthetic/status/205899874250695476...

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#124

Post by coryrc »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #103
coryrc wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design. "Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to l…

> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.

Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.

Here's things our traffic engineer told me:

1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."

2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.

3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.

4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.

5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.

My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#126

Post by simonebrunozzi »

hibikir wrote: post #101

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places t…

You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#127

Post by ludicrousdispla »

Cheetah26 wrote: post #77

For those who grew up in a time and place where you were able to wander without supervision, how far away were your friends? Follow up, how much traveling did you do on your own? For me growing up in 2000's suburbia, the closest kids around my age that I knew of were about one mile and major road crossing away, but to get to a friend it could be a lot more. I think kids out in a group doesn't feel like a safety conce…

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, my friends were within a 2 block radius, so about 300 yards. Tack on another block each year and that was the standard walking distance to a friend's house.

And of course in high school there was the standard minimum of one student death per year per school, usually related to driving. So teen deaths seemed more prevalent than younger ages.

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#128

Post by monster_truck »

jaboostin wrote: post #79
keepamovin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential to risks raised in the article I guess, but I cannot understand something that's happening in the US: it's crazy how many demented people there are. That there is a market that captures children in order to traffick them for sex; that there are hundreds of people doing this regularly being wrapped up by LE raids, and dozens of children freed; that these raids happen on the frequency of weeks, or months; th…

100,000/yr is insane, where are you getting that stat? Best I could find is ~250 abducted per year in the US, not specifically for trafficking. There are 200-300,000 reported missing per year but >90% are runaways and return.

Consider the many millions who are unable to call the cops when this happens. Please don't make me explain why

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#129

Post by triceratops »

delichon wrote: post #2

A large part of the protectiveness of children is about the fertility trend. Parents with four children think about safety very differently than parents with probably ever only one. I saw this on my home street growing up. The girl next door was an only child who her parents hovered over relentlessly. When I was ten, with three brothers, and told mom I was going exploring, she made sure I had a quarter to phone home…

I think parents just have more time and energy to devote to an only child. Consequently they pour all of it into that child. Three kids? If they don't die or end up in prison, you've succeeded. (that last part is a joke, but the overall idea holds I think).

Re: What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard

#130

Post by waterTanuki »

hibikir wrote: post #101

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. When my son, a pre-teen at the time went to Spain with me, things were quite different: A small town that even had stores targeting kids, places t…

Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc.

Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.

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