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Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

But why is that? Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city. So what does the fraction look when we take children playing outside and be healthy instead of just children?

The chance remains the same but for the ones that survive there is a better quality of life.

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The disconnect between city folk and rural/suburban folk is wild. We've got comments below saying (paraphrased, my interpretation) "well of course kids play in the streets" followed by "well not literally, I mean on the sidewalks, who on earth would literally play in the street where cars drive".

My neighbors have a basketball hoop facing their street. They consider the street, the street that cars drive on, a basketball court. And the neighborhood I grew up in was dotted with cal-de-sacs. Which, again, are streets that cars drive on, and all of which were baseball diamonds by kids' God-given right.

Half of you know that I literally mean every word of what I said and half of you are equally certain I don't.

A typical two lane road is a great width for a street hockey rink

Yep we played lots of street hockey with nets in the street. Part of the game was clearing all people/sticks/balls and the two nets in <5 seconds whenever a car showed up.

All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.

That said, as kids we’d be equally fine with a dedicated lot specifically to play various types of street ball. As long as it allowed random pickup games, always had a free spot for us, and didn’t require us to pay $100/mo each to some sports league organization.

Abundant free sports facilities for each neighborhood are fine. We don’t need to play in the literal street.

> All drivers in the whole neighborhood understood this as normal.

But the fact remains that kids get hit in suburbs more often. We feel like drivers in suburbia understand this, but the roads are actually designed to encourage speed, and accidents happen.

Yeah that neighborhood was impossible to speed like today's suburbs. Blocks were 300 ft from intersection to intersection, and no road was longer than 3 blocks. Going to my house from the main road was literally: "First left, then first right, then second left, then first right, then the third house on the left".

I did some OpenStreetMap work recently with aerial imagery in the US in such a suburb and was a bit surprised to see that the streets where people lived (not arterial roads through the suburb) were about 10 m wide. I feel the residential streets here with 5.5 m are already a bit too wide, and the main road through the village (with bus traffic and until recently lots of traffic to the motorway) is about 7 m wide.

That people tend to speed when you build a road as if it were a 100 km/h rural road doesn't seem too surprising, sadly. Now, as a parent I still think people are driving too fast, especially around the kindergarten (30 km/h speed limit doesn't automatically make that the desired default speed for that street), but it's probably night and day compared to American suburbs.

On my first trip to the US, early 2000s, my business partner and I were slowly driving around (I think) Palo Alto on a Saturday admiring the houses and he suddenly asked “WHERE ARE ALL THE CHILDREN?”

I couldn’t unsee it. This pristine suburbia, optimized for families, perfect weather, but no kids to be seen. It seemed so weird to us who’d grown up mostly outdoors. In Ireland.

So true. The Bay's suburbs are definitely lacking kids.

Mostly, I think, because those areas are where tech workers live and they tend to skew younger and childless (or few children). So you end up with tech bros crammed into single family homes, with no need for the front/back yard.

Areas around FAANG campuses really just need higher density zoning. It's stupid that the neighborhoods surrounding all Google, Apple, Amazon campuses are single family homes when there is a massive demand for tech workers to be as close to the office as possible.

Just to clarify - do you think that situation is a positive thing, negative thing, or no opinion with regards to it?

I say this as someone who grew up around some places that fit your description.

And let me emphasize that's still suburban, not rural. I live 8 minutes from a good grocery store, 30 minutes from a city of 46,000 people. Small roads aren't paved here (the nearby highway is, and the in-town streets are), and the 20 mph road maintained by nobody else but a couple of residents with tractors is 400 feet from the house.

(And the trade-off for this level of remoteness, for those wondering, is I have about 200 square miles of public lands walkable from the house without crossing a highway. Ever taken a two-hour walk from your house, with your dogs off leash, without seeing another human?)

that sounds really nice… without “blowing up the spot”, could you give a vague location?

That's really a question of pick your climate. Colorado's mountains get a lot of snow in the winter, Arizona's deserts never get really cold, Utah gets both snow and hot summers. All of Southwest has quiet spots if you look for them.

I'm an hour south of Colorado's mountain ranges, in a little pocket of microclimate where most storm clouds sweep past you on both sides, where winter still exists but where you don't need to shovel snow, and where summer days stay below 100 F. We looked at houses in 3 states before settling on this.

Look into Arizona, New Mexico, Utah (Moab is an outdoor sports mecca), California (around highway 395, and on the coast outside of big cities, are some pretty areas), Colorado (if you love skiing etc), maybe Texas (e.g. "Hill Country").

And if you want more free space, move to Wyoming or Montana (but good luck with the groceries).

We spent just under 3 years roaming the Western US with a motorhome. I've seen a lot of natural beauty, you just have to leave the cities and it's there. The rest is mostly a matter of what climate, plant life, etc you prefer, and how close do you want to live to a good hospital, groceries, UPS & mail delivery, etc.

Children do play on city streets, however one of the big differences is sight lines. Suburban streets tend to be dangerous due to visibility issues and often lack well connected sidewalks etc.

A core reason for this is developers want to maximize the number of houses they can fit on a given plot of land which will often have odd shapes etc. So kids simply walking to a friends house are often in real danger.

Some anecdata here having moved from a suburb to Boston metro:

I regularly have to slow down for children riding bikes, playing basketball or hockey in the street, etc. to this day when I visit my mom in the suburbs. I have never seen a single child playing in the streets in nearly five years living near Boston.

To be clear, in the city kids don't play literally in the streets. They're on the sidewalks and playgrounds. It's the fact that suburban kids are often in the actual street that is part of the problem, and the fact that the streets are actually roads and designed for cars to go fast on.

I thought about this as I posted my story. There’s a park on the street next to mine. When weather allows, kids play basketball and baseball there and play on the jungle gym. We never had that growing up. For us, there were two or three parks in town, but none were within walking distance of our house, so we didn’t play there. If areas were set aside and accessible for kids to play safely, I’d imagine more would do that.

Where in Boston did you live? That’s definitely the case in the fancy parts of Boston and definitely not the case in the minority ghettoes like roxbury, JP, and dorchester

I'm not the original commenter, but I do live in Boston.

Could give a lot of anecdotal stories, but here's the stat -- Boston is the 3rd worst in the nation for auto accidents.

https://dailyinfographic.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Citi...

This kind of data is less than useless without knowing the details of how they measured.

Typically they're just using insurance reported events which has a huge bias against areas where cars are newer on average (rich areas and against states that heavily use road salt) because nobody reports when two 20yo shitboxes trade paint but everybody calls in The System(TM) when two expensive new cars do (and these sorts of small accidents make up the majority of collisions).

Even if we knew it's still skewed heavily against dense metros because it uses miles instead of operating hours.

And this is coming from someone who hates the people of Massachusetts and wants to believe they are rightfully at the top of the list...

There's reversed arguments to every one of these...

> nobody reports when two 20yo shitboxes trade paint

And few people drive lambos around in Boston winter, the salt wrecks really nice cars. Also, SF is richer and ranks lower.

>skewed heavily against dense metros because it uses miles

If people are going slow, the accidents are more minor and they would be less likely to need reporting. Also, NYC is denser and ranks lower.

Anyway, this has gotten too far from housing discussion.

edit for formatting

In my neighborhood of Washington, DC, I do see kids playing in the streets now and then--throwing a football, throwing a baseball, shooting baskets on a hoop at the curb. I also see grumbling about it on the neighborhood listserv. This is a residential neighborhood of free-standing houses, with a few duplexes thrown in.

I'd argue it's wide suburban streets that encourage high speed driving. The road I live on is not wide enough for two cars to pass each other if there are also cars parked on each side, and driving even 20mph feels way too fast. But when I go visit family members in the suburbs, the streets are wide enough for two lanes of parked cars, plus 3 lanes of driving cars. Driving under 50mph feels like you might as well get out and walk.

This is called "traffic calming", the notion that you have to design the streets so it's impossible for drivers to go at unsafe speeds, rather than making wide straight roads and plonking down a "pls no speederino" sign.

Leave wide straight roads for segregated highways and build streets for people, not just cars.

> This is called "traffic calming"

That sounds like the PR branding for a positive externality of developers making streets narrower because they can and it allows them to maximize the space they get to charge for when they sell.

I live in one such neighborhood, and enough people park on the street that even without two cars needing to pass each other it feels unsafe even at slow speed, because if you're taking a turn you can't see oncoming traffic, and if some kid ran out from behind a car there would be no room to maneuver to avoid them without hitting something else, even at a slow speed.

If it wasn't about money they would just put speed bumps in, like they do in lots of places.

The fact that it feels unsafe is what makes it safer. You're prompted to slow down and pay attention to what's in front of you.

You might slow down but that’s offset by the roads being it’s inherently unsafe. Real world statistics frequently show such designs underperform compared to the expected payoffs and sometimes reduce safety.

I'm interested in these statistics, can you suggest a source?

It's not PR branding, cities actually spend time and energy and money actually making streets "worse" for cars. A common technique, for instance, is to alternate the side that cars are parked on. This creates a sinuous road where you're constantly doing little turns, instead of a straight-away.

This isn't just because of the width of the roads, because these didn't exist 30 years ago (in the states at least; they were starting to become common in the UK 30 years ago), but the houses haven't suddenly merged closer together.

I see in another reply you say these underperform. Citation? Fatalities are still lower in cities.

Speed bumps make it harder for fire apparatuses to respond to calls. Traffic calming is preferred because the expectation is for opposite ROW traffic to yield to the fire apparatus.

I'm not sure I agree that a high quality of life requires playing in the streets. Perhaps an issue is that many rural areas lack adequate pedestrian pathing and recreational areas? Maybe an even larger issue is that parents generally feel unsafe leaving their kids alone outside.

Probably bikes right? Children surely are doing less biking in cities per capita compared to suburban areas.

I'm sorry, I don't know what you are responding to with "Probably bikes right?". Cities that are built for living typically include massive investments in pedestrian infrastructure, including bikes, if that is what you are saying. Biking is not feasible in most suburbs because of the distance. Cities that care about reducing traffic, such as Amsterdam, absolutely have more children biking than a suburban area. Unfortunately a lot of cities in the United States were built for cars and not people.

I'm an avid cyclist. Just from personal observation, outside of high density urban areas I see very little people on bicycles.

Now I moved out of NYC to the suburbs - I know every cyclist in the area, and that's me plus 2 other people. I barely ever see bikes...

Urban sprawl by definition takes up a lot of space, meaning that if parks and other shared areas are planned in support of a specific amount of people, many of those people will have to travel farther to reach it than they would were it a more dense neighborhood.

Higher speeds. Suburban streets/roads/stroads optimize for traffic safety, not pedestrian safety.

The wide roads and large front yards promote higher driving speeds. For a long time the thinking was even that front yards can work as a place for cars to stop safely if they fly off the road.

They talk about this in Strong Towns iirc

I think it's more likely because there are very few kids playing outside in urban areas. There are kids in the Pearl and the South Waterfront in Portland. It is rare to see them play outside, much more rare to see them playing in the street. On the other hand, kids playing catch or riding their bikes on suburban streets is a daily occurrence in my neighborhood. That's definitely going to drive up interactions with cars, but the motor vehicle rates you cite above are still exceedingly low.

That's just not true though. There are tons of kids playing in the street here in chicago. Maybe you just don't live near many children?

Really? I grew up in the suburbs of chicago and we didn't really play in the streets. We played basketball in one of our parents driveways or at the local park and played football in one of our parents front/back yards or at the local park.

Now I live in Lake View during the summer and I haven't really seen any kids playing in the streets either.

Where are you at in Chicago and what do they play if I may ask?

I'm in Oak Park, just across Austin from Chicago, and kids play in the streets all the time. Basketball and baseball, mostly. The comment upthread suggests kids aren't even riding bikes in the streets. I mean, come on.

Kids play outside on the sidewalk/street in urban Chicago? I've never been to Chicago, but my wife went to school at University of Chicago, and she says she never saw any such thing. The area around the university is pretty rough, but still. And I'm in downtown Portland all the time, and no, there are no kids playing on the sidewalk/street. Not even in the little urban parks, or at least very, very few.

What's "urban Chicago"? The loop? Kids do not play on the street in the loop. This is what the loop looks like:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/jackson+and+lasalle+chicag...

Most of Chicago doesn't look like the loop. It's a big city.

The University of Chicago is in Hyde Park, 10 minutes south of the loop. It's one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. This is what Hyde Park looks like:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7995114,-87.5981733,3a,75y,1...

Kids play on the sidewalks and in the streets in Chicago all the time. I mean: of course they do? It's a city of 2.7 million people. Did you think all the kids were just kept inside all the time?

That second link sure looks to me like the R-1 developments the activists seem upset about. Yes, I would expect kids play there.

That second link is what most of Chicago looks like. See for yourself: this site will generate totally random addresses in Chicago, and you can just copy them to Google Maps to see the street view.

https://il.postcodebase.com/random_address_city/CHICAGO

The point, I think, is that the elimination of zoning is meant to upset the R-1 style of development you say is prevalent in Chicago and that I agree is conducive to kids playing outside, on and off the street. Where you have high density mixed-use urban development, outside play of that nature is much, much less common, as evidenced by my examples in Portland.

No, the alternative to R-1 development isn't "high density mixed use", it's 2-, 3-, and 4- flats. Pull up any random address from that site that's in Lakeview --- entirely RT-4 and above --- and you'll see kids playing on the street the same way.

This is the problem with the zoning debate: people exclude the middle, and say that zoning is either good single-family regions where kids can play on the streets, or terrible industrial zones that look like Giede Prime. We don't have to carefully reason through the alternatives --- good, functioning cities are full of them.

What about this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7994972,-87.5942747,3a,75y,9...

Thats 3 blocks from the original link. Thats a park on the right that I saw kids playing outside in today when it was 2 degrees (F) out.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8009554,-87.5937668,3a,75y,2...

Is the street I saw the pickleball kids playing on last summer. It's one block away from my first link.

Lol. I’ve lived in Hyde Park or Woodlawn (the neighborhoods around UofC) for over 20 years. It’s not rough and kids play in the streets and sidewalks all the time. Soccer, baseball and hockey are very common, along with skateboarding and variations of tag. I’ve recently seen kids playing pickle ball which seems like they should be made fun of for. Basketball is less common than where I grew up in Indiana but that’s because there are a ton of courts in the parks.

Cole said while he doesn't believe he was targeted Tuesday afternoon, he has been shot at in the past, in 2018 and in June of this year as well.

Kilwins, a popular Hyde Park ice cream shop, was damaged in the shooting.

The shop's owner and employees spoke Wednesday about their safety concerns in returning to work, and Cole returned to where he was shot at.

"We need the partner in federal government to step up. Somebody has to have a sense of urgency," he said. "You can't nonprofit your way out of this. We can't program our way out of these shootings," he said.

According to the city's Violence Reduction Dashboard, as of Nov. 8 shootings in the neighborhood have more than tripled compared to 2020, with 16 this year compared to five last year.

The same data shows that for violent crimes of all time, Hyde Park has had 196 so far this year, up from 155 in the same period in 2020.

Kilwins owner Jackie Jackson said the most recent violent crime, along with increasing rent and fewer customers, may force her to close the business she opened nearly 10 years ago.

https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shooting-hyde-park-u-of-c-ja...

You're referencing an article about one of the most shocking violent incidents in Hyde Park memory. In 2021, Jahmal Cole was a congressional candidate who was shot at (though not injured) while visiting Hyde Park in a crime they never determined the motif for.

If you go look at the actual Violence Reduction Dashboard referenced in the article you'll see that Hyde Park has less shootings per capita than the loop and the near north side. Its tiered in the safest neighborhoods in Chicago. Its used as an example of what the Dashboard calls "The Safety Gap" to distinguish how much safer some neighborhoods are than others.

Chicago has a violent crime problem, in some neighborhoods its an absolute multiple generation failure and an outrage. But if you aren't comfortable with Hyde Park's crime rate, you aren't comfortable anywhere in Chicago or you have some other bias at play. Thats fine! Feel free to make your own choices about where you go but Hyde Park isn't rough by any American statistical observation.

And it certainly isn't germane to whether kids play outside! You'll find that in the absolute roughest neighborhoods in Chicago as well as the poshest.

kids living in the pearl district or anywhere on the west side south of there, up to and including lake Oswego, are going to be living in million dollar-plus homes and condos, and have parents with plenty of resources to keep them busy in safe environments outsude school.

May also be type of vehicle. Big farm truck in suburbs/rural, can't see anyone under ~3ft well when they're right up on you unless you're really intentionally looking down. Also could be the children are improperly trained. False sense of security, whereas in the city it's basically entrenched in anyone that as soon as you set foot outside that the cars are trying to slaughter everyone so kids & adults alike are always on alert. Whenever I live in the city I basically assume if I'm not in a city park a car is on the prowl to run me over at any minute, which means I'm not really caught unawares.

I live on 3 acres in a rural area and "if you go in to the road a driver will slaughter you" was the most important lesson we had to teach our kid.

Yes that was the lesson. Not "if you go outside a driver will slaughter you" which is the lesson in the city, and probably a more accurate one. You still go outside but you know you're in the slaughterhouse. Farm kid by your own admission doesn't realize they're still in the slaughterhouse when off the road.

That may have been the case like 30-40 years ago, but it's not the case now.

Sure children can be trained, but children will still go in the road because they are children. Based on current laws, this is acceptable collateral damage so that cars can go fast.

> Maybe because children don’t play on the street at all in the city.

They absolutely do

Lol what? Where do you see kids playing close to downtown or in the streets of a heavily urban center. Examples?

Cities are not just dense downtown cores with arterial streets. Most families living in cities live on side-streets that don't get much through traffic, and children frequently play in them.

There is also a significant ant difference in the absolute numbers.

Not to mention people tend to be much lore cautious in high traffic areas.

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