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Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

...Car culture is to blame? Suburban culture?

We've had "car culture" and modern suburbs for many many many years, including a very large time period where none of this was an issue. Blaming it on "car culture" is completely off.

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Two points:

* It's a complex of things. I identify suburban culture (and car culture as a constituent element) as one member of that complex, but there's plenty of identifiable factors: increased passive awareness of our areas (24 hour news that chiefly spotlights crimes), passive surveillance of children (always available via cell phone, locatable via GPS), and so forth. It wouldn't be polemical if I didn't start with the controversial ones, though!

* Car culture and suburban culture are not things we've had for "many many many years." They're shockingly new, even by American cultural standards: modern suburbs are a postwar invention, and the cultural lodestone of being stuck in traffic on an interstate beltway somewhere outside of a major city is only a generation or two old. There are, similarly, external factors that have historically masked some of the more deleterious effects of car culture: redlining kept suburbs racially homogeneous for the first half of their history, and over half of women didn't enter the workforce until the late 1970s.

I find it very hard to believe you're arguing in anything near good faith.

3-4 generations have grown up under "suburban car culture" and the changes we're complaining about are recent.

I think I covered this: I identify "suburban car culture" with the completion of interstate highways (and beltways) around major cities. The Interstate Highway System wasn't even begun until the late 1950s. And as I mentioned in the previous comment, there are confounding factors that explain why moral panic about childhood safety didn't really emerge until the mid-to-late 1980s (which, note, is about one generation after the first demographic of baby boomers was born in early suburbs).

The moral panic about child safety wasn't a thing where I was until at least the late nineties (when I stopped paying attention).

The Satanic Panic[1] and the McMartin preschool trial[2] were both in the early 1980s, and were key moments in the popular conception of child abuse. Another wave happened in the 1990s with prominent kidnappings/murders of children, which might be the one you remember.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

The first two involved the fear that kids would be abused by their caretakers/parents, not that walking down the street was unsafe.

We've had "car culture" and suburban culture for less than ~80 years at most. It's only been increasing and spreading in that time. Likewise, the growth in insular suburban culture has been on the rise over a similar time period. I don't think it's accurate to say either is a brand new problem that's existed without the other for the majority of it's existence.

Closer to 40 years. The worst effects only came with the dismantling of transit and moral panic about letting kids have agency.

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