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Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

The Not Just Bikes [1,2,3] YouTube channel also has an excellent series of videos based on work from Strong Towns. I link to these videos whenever a friend asks why I chose to leave the United States. :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o

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He recently did a great interview on the strongtowns podcast! Just got my EU citizenship and considering Utrecht. The US is a horrible place to try to raise an independent kid.

Indeed! I grew up in a typical suburb where my agency as a child was strictly limited by my parents' ability / willingness to drive me places. Most parents don't realize how hard this is for their kids, mine certainly didn't. It's no wonder kids trapped at home end up spending so much time on the internet.

I'm not old enough to really be thinking about kids, but I would never, ever inflict the suburban lifestyle a child of my own.

Counterpoint: I moved to England to a walkable town, but my kids still want to spend all their time on the internet. When I limit "screen time" they just want to hole up in their rooms and read the same books over and over again.

I grew up in suburbia, but starting in high school just rode my bike everywhere. In retrospect it's hard to believe I survived, taking the lane on 55 mph roads (around northeastern Sacramento suburbs) was really dumb, in retrospect.

Sounds like your parents? The suburbs were great childhood for me. Lots of families so other kids to play with, lots of big parks, with a bike you could go anywhere.

Yeah, you're right there are other factors. My neighborhood had busy roads on both ends, and was mostly empty-nesters. There are certainly worse places to grow up, but I don't think we should be satisfied with the baseline set by suburbs either. In places like Germany and Japan, children walk themselves to school as young as 6 years old! I only experience that freedom after getting a license at 16!

I live in fairly typical wealthy US suburb, my kid is 7 (1st grade) and goes to school on her own - school is around 0.5 miles away. I have to pick her up from school (parents are required until 3rd grade to check out kid) but often just leave her on playground to play with other kids (unless she has activities that day - which frankly she has more and more of - chess, math, soccer, gymnastics and ballet right now). She walks back home whenever she is done playing. I see kids 10-12 years old biking everywhere and hanging out in Starbucks/restaurants on their own. There are busy roads but you can go around them on secondary roads with low/non existent traffic.

While not majority, there are quite a few people who give the same freedom to kids as us. So far we had zero problems but i am thinking about getting smart watch with GPS for piece of mind.

Might I ask roughly what region this is, or when it was developed? This sounds kind of like old-style suburbs, which were indeed quite nice. In most of California you can't buy a quart of milk without going over half a mile.

It’s in Westchester, NY - built mostly around 1920-1940 or about that time as train commuter suburb. I think it not unique - Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Bay Area are very comparable and very walkable/bikeable too.

For us closest grocery is 0.8 mile away which is borderline walkable but we bike quite a bit (highly recommend Radwagon - great for shuttling 2 kids around and light groceries).

Town is still car centric so still lots of driving but we carve out enough for us by biking/walking to not need car every day.

Sounds lovely. My favourite suburbs are streetcar suburbs - South Park in San Diego for instance. Narrow streets, shorter setbacks, rowhouses, and just nicer places to exist.

Depending on your need, I think the Airtag is a good usecase for this, since it doesn’t require a monthly subscription. I had the same question with my dog ;)

It's not about the nation, it's about the group psychology of parents in a local region. In NYC, nearly a million kids of all ages walk, skate, bike, whatever to school every day. Many take the bus or subways. While younger children can use a school bus, the city encourages independent use of public transport by children with free passes for them (and I think are allowed to ride alone by age 11 or 12). I'd be very surprised if other American cities didn't have similar systems in place.

That's great to hear! Unfortunately I think it's quite rare in the rest of the country for children to be able to walk to school. I've only ever been to places where school buses / cars are the norm.

I was interested to see if studies have been done. I found an article [1] claiming that as of 2009, only 13 percent of American children walked/biked to school.

[1] http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...

Could you share which destination city you chose and/or why?

Tokyo! I'm not sure if I'll stay here forever, but so far I really enjoy life here. I had many reasons, including:

* Car culture was really grating on me. Before I moved to Tokyo, I lived in Atlanta, a city carved up by I-75/85, where getting almost anywhere takes a 15+ minute drive on the highway. Highway traffic regularly spills onto neighborhood streets, and I felt like I was risking my life every time I went out walking / biking. I've also lived in downtown Seattle and suburban Michigan, and the situation was slightly better, but with the same car-first paradigm.

* As I've gotten older it started to dawn on me how isolating American cities can be, especially without the community structure imposed by a school / university. People talk about America losing its "third place", and with permant-WFH we now seem pretty eager to get rid of our "second place" as well.

* By comparison, Tokyo is designed at human-scale. I have everything I need within a 5 minute walk, which means I regularly run into the people who live near me. When I want to go farther I can always choose the appropriate mode of transportation for the journey: feet, bicycle, train, car, all in perfect harmony. For this reason, I also found it easier to maintain and build friendships -- no need to organize transport, just hop on a train.

* I'm still young with few obligations and I want to learn more about the world before I choose a place to settle down. I know what life in America looks like. I'm learning about Japan. I hope to spend some time in Europe, eventually.

* The political situation in the US concerns me. I'm not confident the US will be a nice place for me to live/retire 40 years from now. So for me, choosing to stay put seemed at least as risky as moving somewhere unfamiliar. Even if I eventually decide to return, I'd like to know that it was my own choice and not just inertia.

The tax strings which tie me to every former country I’ve lived in is what keeps me from changing again… This, and retirement which is tied to a country, I can’t spend 4 decades in 4 countries and hope to have enough retirement at the end.

Interesting. Do you mind if I ask which countries? I did hear that the IRS 'gets you' where ever you are but I assumed it was sort of unique in that.

Aren't most countries either no longer interested in you once you leave (tax wise) or have tax treaties with one another? Including government pensions in the treaty?

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