Los Angeles Tests the Power of ‘Play Streets’ | Hacker News Reader

Los Angeles Tests the Power of ‘Play Streets’

nytimes.com

87 pointsartsandsci66 comments

It seems to me that the way cities are laid out makes all the difference. If you have residential streets which do not see much traffic throughout the day, you don't need designated play streets. Any good old street with a threshold number of kids living on would automatically transform into one. Necessity drives invention and all that. I've lived and visited several parts of the US, Europe, and India. The major difference seems to be the wide spectrum of city layouts. India—where I grew up—for instance, has a lot of residential streets with houses and apartments. There are also what are traffic streets which act as veins coming out of wider state and national freeways. These intermediate streets take in most traffic which frees up the residential streets and lets the kids play all day/all evening. Big cities in Europe and the US seems to lack this spectrum of traffic streets which results in residential streets themselves seeing a lot of cars and buses plying across.

It also perhaps depends on the sports and games culture of the geographical location. For instance, in India cricket is huge. It requires very little space to play a custom game of cricket with rules amended/modified to suit the turf you're playing it on. Same with soccer in a lot of European and South American cities. I don't know how friendly baseball or American football is to the streets.

> I don't know how friendly baseball or American football is to the streets.

I grew up playing both in the street in the small American town I'm from. It was quite common in the 80s.

Playborhood, by Mike Lanza, describes a related endeavor to transform one's yard into an inviting area for neighborhood kids. My wife and I have been discussing this quite a lot lately. How do we bring back neighborhood play so kids can get outside, meet each other, and just be kids?

Growing up in the suburbs my experience was there were very few children my age near me. Seems counter-intuitive since people move to the suburbs to have children, but I wasn't in a dense enough area apparently.

Kids need kids their age. 3 years is a big enough difference until you are close to an adult. Between those who don't have kids yet, those who's kids are already grown, and those who kids are the wrong age because families are so small there just are not a lot of kids in the neighborhood anymore.

Imagine a forest with only young trees - that only happens if they all die young, or if the forest is growing back after a forest fire/clear-cutting. Similarly, the suburban "dream" is only realistic in new (empty) developments where families can move in and cluster together.

"Dream" is just doublespeak here... it's post-WW2 lifestyle advertising. They were convincing people to buy cheap remote land at a steep markup by putting a house on top.

That sounds fantastic, unfortunately I'd worry about the financial liability.

Even using age appropriate play equipment and a soft-fall surface, you'd likely still wind up getting sued if a kid broke an arm or worse.

Some quick Googling suggests you'd need to have the playground owned by an LLC and get it "commercial business insurance" specifically commercial playground insurance.

The problem with that is that you likely aren't zoned for commercial, so running a "commercial" (even free) playground from a residential property is unlawful.

And you can put up an "at your own risk" sign but given attractive nuisance doctrine it likely wouldn't protect you from full liability.

Then on top of that, if the playground was too popular, or some of the kids caused issues near by neighbours likely would complain.

I know I sound like a complete grinch. I think it is a fantastic idea. Just the more I consider it, the more issues and expenses crop up.

Then don’t run a private playground. Advocate for public parks.

Don’t be the change you want to see in the world. Get into politics instead.

Public infrastructure and services are important responsibilities of local government. We should not be relying on people to offer up their homes as parks - let’s build some damn parks. Then the cost, liability, maintenance burdens can be appropriately shared.

This is solved by making friends with all your neighbors and your kids' friends' parents-- Then, when they do something bad, you ban only their kids from your yard (e.g. they can't play with their friends), and tell the neighborhood parents that someone is threatening the free communal play area

This comment is a grim reflection on the downfall of western civilization. I don't think society can recover from this level of evil bureaucracy that seems to have taken root.

Yeh. Here in Dublin, even in my inner city area which occasionally has some traffic. Parents just put out traffic cones reminding people to slow down. Small goalposts, chalk drawings on the road, skipping ropes come out as soon as the sun does.

Get a moon bouncy[1](not cheap but available on Amazon). It turned our house into the coolest house in the neighborhood. Depends on the age of course.

[1] http://www.irvineparkrailroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05...

My kids play with the neighbor kids. They run up and down a whole bunch of contiguous backyards and ride bikes in the front. Everybody plays with everybody else's stuff. I wish I could share the secret to making that happen, but it just happened on its own. The kids decided to play with each other.

You don't need to transform your yard. You'll need to smash the kids' electronic devices.

In the 60s/70s, we used to have a 'Block Party'. We'd pass the hat to pay for a permit and block off both ends of the street for a few hours on a Saturday. Set up picnic tables, play games, pot luck, talk politics and religion and basically call time out on our otherwise busy or boring lives.

The suburb I grew up in still has several of these every summer.

There was a movement in the UK that did exactly this (reclaim the streets, I think). They got infiltrated by the police!!

When I was a little kid in Eastern Europe we played in the street, footbal, catch, other games.

Cars were pretty rare, one every 5 minutes, we would collectively pay attention and just yell "car" when one was coming and get on the sidewalks. There was no adult supervision, just us 5-10 year olds.

Of course, if that kind of thing would happen today some parents would probably go to prison.

>some parents would probably go to prison

Not in Eastern Europe

I hesitate to think it would in the US, either. For all of the concerns of "in my day this, but today, that," the ultimate goal of child services is the welfare of the child, and no one's going to think that locking a parent up for their children playing in a residential street is what's best for the kid.

The Meitiv family near DC gained some notoriety for allowing their kids to walk to the park by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitiv_incidents

That this attracted police attention and became news of this magnitude is depressing.

...which is not on the residential street with any responsible adults available.

This story is even more ridiculous since in the metro DC area (inc Silver Spring), public buses are pretty much the schoolbuses and it is an everyday thing to see groups of kids ~5y and up taking public transit all across town for school...

They won't think that, but the problem is they have to enforce laws as written which often don't have exceptions. And those who have to enforce the law have much more to lose by applying judgement than following the rules as written. Zero tolerance policies make it worse because they eliminate all judgement.

I did this growing up in the suburbs of the US as well, back in the 80's and 90's.

Hell, my late-30s/early-40s friends still say 'game off!" when a car comes down the street we're walking/loitering on.

obligatory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpkecYVRt_E

> Of course, if that kind of thing would happen today some parents would probably go to prison.

This is still common in many US suburbs…

Until Waze routes commuters off busy thoroughfares to these quiet sidestreets.

This is why I don't use side streets as shortcuts. Even before I had kids I understood it was a bad idea. I also try to only use services like Google Maps before departing, memorizing key turns. It helps that I'm old enough to have learned how to drive in unfamiliar areas without a computer giving me the turn-by-turn.

Perhaps one day Waze and others will be held liable for any accidents or even public nuisances that occur.[1]

[1] Better that than government regulators acting as gatekeepers for technological innovation, who typically rely on imaginary, fear-based scenarios rather than actual, manifest harms.

> Perhaps one day Waze and others will be held liable for any accidents or even public nuisances that occur.

Waze is sending drivers onto public roads. Public roads belong to everyone, not just the people whose kids play street hockey on the roads.

Don't like it? Then privatize the roads and make the people who live on the roads bear 100% of the maintenance and law enforcement costs. But don't complain about members of the public using a public road.

Or campaign to have the road blocked off at one end, so it's useless to through traffic but still fine for people and bicycles.

There are plenty of areas in larger European cities which have done this. Its sometimes called filtered permeability.

https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/dictionary/filtered-perme...

I'm not complaining about members of the public using a public road. I'm complaining about a company directing its users to take routes which were never designed as throughways; routes which few if any of those users would have taken but for Waze directing them.

Imagine you own a large parcel of land with a public easement for crossing to a beach. Every day a few dozen people walk across. Now imagine I put together a party and direct 3,000 friends to walk across your parcel all at once. As large crowds of people do, they stray and destroy things. Your mailbox. A small bridge crossing a creek that you own and maintain (thankfully nobody is hurt).

But for my party and the people I invited, none of this damage would have happened.

Not only did I create a credible nuisance (actionably by itself), it's not too much of a stretch to say I could be held vicariously liable for the damages. All this even though it was a public right-of-way.

In the absence of relief (self-policing, civil liability), I can tell you what is likely happen with the Waze issue. States will pass laws that require Waze and others to exclude routes upon notice by state authorities. A database will emerge of impermissible throughways. Neighborhoods and towns will scramble to add their streets to the database. Violations will come with huge fines whether or not actual harm occurs, even if the violation was exceptional (i.e. reroutes through blacklisted streets during a traffic accident). Ultimately the only routes you'll be given are truck routes.

This has already begun, it's just voluntary, and Waze doesn't cooperate. That's not going to last long. Waze will ruin the space for everybody else by inviting heavy-handed regulation.

Yeah the "public roads for everyone" point is always the immediate response to the Waze debate, and it's accurate. But really the opposing viewpoints are:

- my "right" to drive to somewhere as quickly as possible

- living on a street without cars zipping by

City planners didn't plan out streets for Waze. We generally have small, slower streets feeding into larger, faster streets. The smaller streets weren't designed to be thoroughfares. And sure there were people who knew shortcuts, but with Waze, it's a magnitude more drivers.

So you can't fault homeowners for being upset by this change. And the folks driving on these sidestreets aren't legally trespassing, but they're probably speeding, and that's the crux of most complaints.

If the re-routed folks were driving carefully at 15-25mph on these sidestreets, I don't think anyone would care. But they're usually going 35mph or whatever is the usual speed limit on the main thoroughfare. Their mindset they just dodged some traffic and now's they need to make up some time.

And as a result homeowners need to ask the city to install traffic calming measures like speedbumps in their neighborhood to make it less attractive for re-routing.

Still the case in most of the 'developing' world.

This was a scene in Wayne's World, a major 1990s American movie set in American Suburbia.

Same experiences here. The biggest fun was to be on our own, unsupervised, learning by ourselves.

This still happens in gated communities within the US

Street parking IMO is a bigger danger than cars in quiet streets. They block sightlines for drivers to kids running out onto the street. I live in the middle of a quiet, single-block street. Without street parking, my kids could play out front of the house and any approaching cars would get loads of warning if they strayed onto the road. With more than 2-3 cars parked in the area, the situation changes dramatically.

Indeed, my street when I was growing up was like the parent's: Kids running around, on our bikes, or playing street hockey.

My parents still live in the same house, and so I get to see my old streets today. They are completely parked up on both sides, not just with cars, but the typical car is a full sized pickup truck, SUV, etc.

Exact same situation for me. We used to ride and skateboard on my parents' street, kick footballs, etc. 30 years later, there are cars on both sides to the point that it's hard to drive up the street let alone get a park out front.

I wonder how much of it comes down to people having more cars and parking them out front to avoid having to shuffle them in a narrow driveway. The risk of a break in is low enough that people have no qualms leaving vehicles on the street overnight. Without parking restrictions or costs, it will continue like this until it's cheaper to rent/call cars on demand.

I come from a small town in Germany, and in those towns it was very popular to build those kinds of streets in the 80s and 90s (I think, probably still is). It was definitely nice not to have heavy traffic around. But the images in the article made me laugh. None of that stuff they show ever happened around where I lived. We kids played in the back yards and in the gardens, but not on the street.

I come from a small german town too.

In times of the skateboard hype, we certainly played on the street, mostly because you could ride it down, hehe.

Of course this is all anecdotal, but in my small German town in the 90s we did play soccer on the streets. Well, we also played in the backyards and gardens, but soccer generally played in the streets where I come from. It was a town of less than 3000 inhabitants of course, and we would clear the street about every 10 minutes when a car would come through.

I recently went back to visit my parents, and had to drive very slowly because a couple of children were playing on the streets in a neighboring village, so I guess it hasn't died out yet.

There's a bit of a trend lately around destroying transportation infrastructure to achieve vague goals. What is wrong with playing in parks?

They got paved over to build a highway. Or in lots of places, were never built at all, or are too far away. So much infrastructure over the last half century is built for cars, not people. The trend you've identified is people realizing this situation and reclaiming some of the space for people instead of just cars.

I live in Los Angeles. There are three (what I would call "average-sized") parks within 1.5 miles of the street mentioned in the article, as well as two smaller parks. At least one of them just underwent major renovation over the past six months.

I couldn't say whether public parks in Los Angeles are going away in general. I'd say "likely". But I think this article somewhat incorrectly frames how dire the situation is with respect to public parks in L.A..

Would you let your 8 year old kid walk 1.5 miles to the park, on their own, in LA?

No, I wouldn’t. I’m merely suggesting that the author is mischaracterizing the public park situation around Fickett St., and not suggesting that kids in Boyle Heights walk 1.5 miles to their local park.

How is sectioning off a street for a single day "destroying transportation infrastructure"? This doesn't seem that different from when roads are sectioned off for farmer's markets or parades.

Historically, streets were far more than just "transportation infrastructure". They were the quintessential "public space", accommodating many different uses: transportation, yes, but not (just) cars but also bikes or pedestrians. Children playing, parents having an after-work beer with neighbors, street vendors, protests etc...

If parks are available within walking distance for every child then that's preferable. But from what I remember, it rarely is in the US.

Nothing, but not all children have a park in front of their homes.

And roads are transportation infrastructure, streets are to live on. That’s why the article talks about “reclaiming streets for civic live”.

Yes! The distinction between roads and streets isn't made often enough.

If that would be in San Francisco - they would be full of used syringes and aggressive psychos - not really suitable places to play in

That's a problem created by a different breed of well-intentioned idiocy around homeless policy.

Well-intentioned idiocy is handing over cities to cars so completely that average people can barely remember what a city is or could be without them -- so completely that the temporary closing of 15 minor streets for another use could be described as "destroying transportation infrastructure."

Automobile infrastructure has enjoyed primacy for about 70 years. What you’re really seeing is just a long-overdue return to the idea that other things matter, too. Neighborhoods aren’t places for other people to get through as quickly as possible. In other words, we’re “destroying” a bunch of transportation infrastructure that shouldn’t ever have been built in the first place (or that was originally built with a very different purpose in mind).

Turning it around, what's wrong with parking in a city garage, and reclaiming residential infrastructure that has been lately overrun with automobiles? Why give automobiles primacy over people -- Ford Prefect's blunder?

Those of us who can’t afford city-center/transit-connected apartments are also people.

Perhaps the problem isn't the lack of such streets, but lack of free spaces such as parks, due to density of development and high land use?

http://archive.is/7W4Hj

Golfers need their green, sorry kids. lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com