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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.

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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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

This still happens in gated communities within the US

>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.

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