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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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