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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

#581

Post by steveklabnik »

erremerre wrote: post #171
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks are…

Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon as one possibility here (and these are not without their own drawbacks, to be clear)

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

#582

Post by whimsicalism »

gligorot wrote: post #187
torben-friis wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children. Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays. But the children friendly aspect of society described…

I feel like we give too much importance to mortgages/financials, like a learned excuse. Let me tell why. I’m from the Balkans, and for a time here when money was tight (breakup of Yugoslavia, but maybe even long before), a lot of families lived together in small apartments. For example, two families (grandpa+grandma & their son+wife+kids) in a 50m2 apartment. The big family took the son’s bedroom, grandparents slept…

Your take is obviously correct, but you won't be very popular for stating it. The real drivers are media, birth control, and rising leisure opportunity costs.

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

#583

Post by bombcar »

petsfed wrote: post #548
bombcar wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.

The funny thing about the big box stores is that they can apply so much pressure to their suppliers (and their landlords) that the price difference outstrips differences in quality and convenience. Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon reside…

The corner grocery store (a regular one literally a block away) is fine for many things for me - 10-20% more is fine and saves a trip.

But too many things are literally twice as much and for those the value of a Walmart trip is obvious.

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

#584

Post by api »

throw0101c wrote: post #549
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate. Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.

> I think the idea is that it locks them out of owning real estate. How does urbanism lock people out of owning real estate?

City land owners use their political power to block new construction to force real estate to appreciate in value.

This can be overridden but it's hard. Most cities with good economies have unaffordable real estate.

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

#585

Post by lmm »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #460
lmm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bike helmets mitigate one of the most serious and common forms of injury while riding bikes. A form that is still extremely rare. No-one seriously advocates helmets for car passengers, for example, even though the injury rates are very similar. > be hit by a car Cars don't hit people, drivers hit people. > They don't prevent you from doing anything you would otherwise do. They're annoying enough that they do, in pr…

It's the most common sports related head injury by a wide margin and helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1] As a public health policy it makes a lot of sense. Anecdotally I've flown over my handlebars and hit my helmet without serious injury, and I'm sure I would have been in much worse shape otherwise. On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measure…

> It's the most common sports related head injury by a wide margin

Interesting, but we're not talking about sport cycling, we're talking about ordinary commuting.

> helmets are quite effective at injury reduction.[1]

Your citation provides no support for your claim.

> Anecdotally I've flown over my handlebars and hit my helmet without serious injury, and I'm sure I would have been in much worse shape otherwise.

This is why we don't make public policy on the basis of anecdotes.

> On cars the law requires seat belts and airbags and a variety of other legally enforced safety measures.

All of which are a lot less unpleasant at the point of use than helmets.

> If you have a study suggesting that helmets would significantly help I'd be curious to see it.

The rates of head injury are comparable (something like a factor of 4 difference), head injuries are very common in car collisions, helmets are already routinely used in motor racing. The evidence is no weaker than that for bicycle helmet use.

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

#586

Post by thaumasiotes »

iamalizard wrote: post #521
tstrimple wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a noticeable problem because they are Chinese and there are so many of them it doesn't matter if 4k die while trying to cross at crosswalks? https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/how-dangerous-are-china...

How does it compare to other countries, though? 4000 is high, but it's out of 1400000000.

4000 is also hugely exaggerated. The link specifies that almost 4000 Chinese pedestrians were killed, in all of China, between 2014 and 2017.

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

#587

Post by OkayPhysicist »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #480
nostats wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)

Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.

They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.

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

#589

Post by incompatible »

GeekyBear wrote: post #443
incompatible wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a local thing. I often see random kids roaming on the streets.

I first became aware of how insane things could be when a single mother was arrested for allowing her child to play at the park a couple of blocks from their home while she was working. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

Madness.

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

#590

Post by monch1962 »

It seems inconceivable in 2026, but in the late 1960s my parents dropped me off for an unaccompanied ~10-hour train trip from Melbourne to Sydney. That trip included multiple stops at different stations along the way, plus a change of trains as we crossed the state boarder. As far as I'm aware, there was nobody on the train who was watching over me.

I was 7 years old

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