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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

Every time I travel to the USA on business I am aghast by how poorly the cities are designed for use by human beings, and how evident it is that the free mobility of automobiles is the primary consideration of urban design.

Just look at those pictures. How can anyone live in that area and not think that they live in an environment and society that is openly hostile to pedestrians (school children)?

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In this kind of place, humans receive cars two years before they receive personhood (16 to drive vs. 18 to be the sole signer on a bank account). Thinking of drivers and people in general as separate categories is nonsensical. If a place isn't easy to drive to and park at, then it isn't designed for the human beings who live in American suburbia.

Mainstream American culture holds that it is apartment buildings and street life which are the true menaces to children. From the Street View, this place would be considered ideal to raise a family, because there's plenty of room for huge houses and huge yards/open nature areas between them.

That children can't transport themselves beyond the closed-world snow-globe of your immediate subdivision is considered a feature, as it limits the trouble they can get into. The most they should be doing without your accompaniment (in this mindset) is playing with other neighborhood kids in parks or in each other's houses.

Your first sentence here is most interesting to me. This is an aspect of car culture that's sometimes overlooked, but what it does is infantilize adolescents and provide an arbitrary blocker to normal human behavior (e.g. shopping, visiting cafes alone, etc) until the child is old enough to drive to those places. A kid in Manhattan is in society and has access to everything his parents do. A kid in the suburbs is outside society, in some very meaningful sense. His access to the broader culture is mediated through television, perhaps, but he's not actually there. He visits society when his parents feel like driving him there. [0]

Who is surprised, then, that the car represents freedom to so many of these kids? Where I grew up, a car was needed for everything, which meant that I had almost no access to the normal world at age 15 and almost unlimited access on my 16th birthday.

Like a fish who doesn't know what water is, most Americans don't even realize that car culture is all around them. And an appreciation for the status quo is baked in very early. The car is simply how you get places. How could it be any other way?

[0] I think this is actually really important. A twelve-year-old should be able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien to suburban kids.

Not just kids, but also the poor, the disabled, the injured, the elderly (hence the ironclad requirement that elderly people move to assisted living facilities), etc.

> A twelve-year-old should be able to pick up some groceries, mail a letter, grab a bite to eat at a lunch counter, and so on, but these basic acts of socialization are completely alien to suburban kids.

Compare Japan via this adorable TV show about childrens' first errants. They are as young as 2 or 3 years:

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/09/why-are-littl...

(Germany, Singapore are also on the saner side. But I don't know of any cute TV shows.)

As somebody who has bad knees, 11 acres, horses, a goat, a dog, and some cats, I really do love car culture. It might be unpopular to say it, but I personally think big wide streets with lots of parking that make point-to-point personal transport possible are simply awesome. I lived downtown in my area for a while - yes, I could walk to a lot of places and I didn't drive my car as much, but I also absolutely hated it. My next move was to skip right past the suburbs and into the fringe of farmland, and I now commute ~17 minutes and ~16 miles to work every day (80% 80mph freeway), and I love it. I get to have my tractor and my software engineering job. God Bless 'Murica :-D.

I think your situation is great! The problem arises when you have a million or so people who all want that same experience in the same small area. It just doesn't work very well.

We still have enough land that living in a rural setting is an option for many people. That's a good thing. What is not good is the many urban and dense suburban areas designed according to the interests of people who visit in cars, rather than those of people who live there.

I really hope that you walk your 11 acres rather than driving around in one of those militarized-golf-cart abominations. Your knees will just get worse if you never walk around.

And the idea of raising children in Manhattan is sacrilege. A family there that’s expecting or has young kids will be asked when they plan to buy a house in the suburbs in the same way that a childless couple of will be asked when they plan to have kids. Suburbia isn’t just how we grew up - there’s a strongly held community/cultural consensus that it’s the only right and proper way to grow up.

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