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Comment by favflam | Hacker News Reader

Regarding socialization, suburbs are anti-social. There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers.

Even small countryside towns are more social b/c there is a main street where people hang out on the street.

If you have to get in a car to "do something", your chances of spontaneous interactions go down exponentially.

I washed my bicycle outside last week and some 70-80 year old started up a conversation with me. Other times, going to the laundromat, some 80 year old lady chatted with me. But if I had to get in a car to get coffee or ride my bike, these kind of interactions would not happen. I want to live in a city when I get old and die on my feet.

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I agree with your point about car oriented suburbs, but I’m also not convinced living in cities is necessarily social particularly in America.

I lived without a car for 5+ years and I didn’t find it led to spontaneous interactions. I think there’s other cultural and socioeconomic factors at play here.

I live car-free in a dense Canadian urban center and it doesn't lend itself to social interactions with strangers, indeed. Going outside means being assaulted with loud, dangerous car traffic and an absence of places where strangers can, for lack of a better word, "loiter".

If we want to facilitate impromptu social connections we need our streets to be pleasant and and safe from cars so that people want to stay around. Trees, benches, playgrounds, flowers and fountains. This is nothing new, it is how towns have been built for centuries until we sacrificed them in the name of cars and of economic output.

Might depend on your stage of life, or what you make of your environment. I live in a relatively suburban area and constantly have spontaneous interactions at swim meets, local bars/breweries, baseball games, coffee shops, community events, parks, playgrounds, etc. There are plenty of hang out spots to meet new people.

I also play in some adult sports leagues with active older people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Also know lots of grandparents so regularly interact across generations. I’ve lived in large cities as well as small towns, and don’t feel like I’m missing much. Spending time at a laundromat sounds awful to be honest.

I expressed a similar observation on here about how I’d witnessed a change in people putting up higher fences and becoming more insular in their lives, and it seemed some people thought I was talking about how things changed as all people got older, it never clicked that I was talking about generational change. I now realise that millennials can’t even fathom what social life even was before the internet.

> There is almost no chance for spontaneous interactions with strangers."

My family lived in a suburb of an east coast US town. The "town" was about 30k residents in just under 5 square miles. It had a well-developed downtown, but driving was still the norm. In the five years I lived there, I ran into an acquaintance (neighbor, parents of our child's friends, etc) while "out and about" about 1-2 times.

When we moved to the city, running into someone we knew was a daily occurrence. Even after school was out for the summer, we went close to 40 consecutive days of running into a classmate. Most hilariously, I was on the subway with a coworker and explained out I ran into more people I knew in the city than in the suburbs. As we exited the subway, the father of my son's best friend rode past on a bicycle and stopped to chat for a bit.

While these weren't strangers, I felt more like I was part of a community in the city than everywhere else.

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