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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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