What's remarkable is that we already effectively banned kids from playing outside and drivers still kill many of the few that still try.
Suggesting that “many” of the kids who “try” to play outside get killed by cars is the kind of conclusion you can only arrive at by living life through hyperbolic headlines or the dramatic evening news.
Ha. I had twins. One was a sprinter/climber and the other was One Slow Plodding Step At A Time. We took most of our walks at 10pm.
When I was a kid, the amount of kids outside was easily orders of magnitude more. Things I did as a kid are pretty much unthinkable now. I mean, as young as 7 I was riding my bike miles away.
It's not that things are worse now, it's that enough kids died that newer parents are much more cautious.
Take a look at this photo from 1995: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...
Note how visible all of those primary school children would be to anyone using one of those cars in the car park. Now imagine the same scene today with the car park full of modern cars (and 'trucks') where the bottom of any of the vehicle's windows would be well above many of those children's heads.
There is no way 1.5 to 4yo can play unsupervised, as in grabbing distance from adults, in areas close to traffic? Maybe 4yo can do with yelling distance from adults.
Like, if people wouldn't care so much as they do, I would guess there would be a lot of fatalities.
Do what now?
How far will you let your kid walk from home alone?
Anyway my point is just that pedestrian deaths have gone up even as the number of miles walked and biked (_especially_ by kids - the modeshare for biking to school has absolutely plummetted) goes down.
Pretty damn far, actually, as the parent of two.
There is a point in time between infant and adulthood were you have to start letting them play unsupervised.
People weren’t letting their kids play near 8 lane freeways back in the day, either.
Yes, people didn't let their kids play near freeways in the past. But now a much larger number of streets are freeway-style roads.
The hyperbole in this thread is wild to see.
Don't know what rinky dink town you're from, but here most roads are 6-8 lanes across. Yes, that includes in our small cities. They're essentially highways but with signal lights. Go to Arlington, Grand Prairie, Richardson, Fort Worth, Roanoke, Southlake, you name it, and it's just roads after roads like this. Trying to cross them is extremely dangerous.
Stroads is a correct description.
> I never lived anywhere where kids were playing right beside an eight lane road
You leave my neighborhood and immediately it's a 50 MPH 6 lane stroad. Granted, I'm counting 3 one way, 3 the other, occasional turning lanes makes it 7 or 8.
It's true your neighborhood is fine. But there's literally nothing in your neighborhood but homes. If you need anything, no matter how trivial, you have to cross stroads. This is very much in contrast to urban mixed-use pedestrian friendly areas.
You'll have smaller streets inside of neighborhoods which are islands of nothing but houses, then massive busy streets in between. Sidewalks directly abutting these very busy streets, if even there. Usually no bike lanes.
Even the largely carless (read: not many cars parked on the street) ones like my neighborhood that had a whole bunch of kids happily playing outside and in the street this weekend without issue? Every single one?
The cul-de-sac behind my house through the alley is a good bit calmer. That's where my kids go to play.
I remember vividly when I was a kid and we were biking on the street and someone drove too fast, dad went out in the road and yelled him down, which was reasonable.
If you chose to live in a car friendly suburb in Sweden that's on you rather than "society" I'd say.
/shrug
Edit: I don't care about upvote tallies or karma count, but it does seem pretty silly to downvote a comment for pointing out that areas like this, and play in those areas, still exist.