Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

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Tell your kids to not play in the street, to watch for cars when they cross the street, then stop worrying about it.

The absolute number of pedestrian deaths has been plateaued for 50 years despite the population size increasing: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.

30% of pedestrian deaths involved a drunk pedestrian. Tell your children not to get drunk.

https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pedestrian_safety/i...

73% of pedestrian deaths occur at night. Tell your kids to be home before dark.

17% of pedestrian deaths were on freeways. Don't walk on freeways!

https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli...

If you still find yourself worrying despite taking basic common sense precautions, then you should unsubscribe to whatever fearmongering echo chambers you're getting this fear from (reddit and youtube are common sources for this fearmongering I believe.)

> 60% of pedestrian deaths occur on high capacity urban roads. Kids in light residential neighborhoods don't deal with those roads. Tell your kids to stay away from heavily trafficked roads.

And when they have to cross one of those roads to get to school or a friend's house? What do you propose they do?

>What do you propose they do?

To participate in politics to end this farce in American urban planning when they grow up. Like the previous 2-3 generations should have done.

2-3 generations ago, parents weren't terrified of letting their children play outside in suburbia. Or if they were, it was because of previous moral panics like satanism and kidnappers, not cars.

Those aren't the kind of roads that suburbs are made of. Tell them to stay away from those roads. Kids in high density urban areas need to worry about those roads, but this discussion is about the viability of suburbia for children.

Okay, let's make this more concrete. Here's the school district map for Cherry Hill, NJ, a suburb of Philadelphia: https://www.chclc.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?module...

And here's a route from a residential street to one of the schools on that map within the same school catchment area: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/39.9349018,-74.9901605/Thoma...

I challenge you to find me a walking route between those two points that does not involve crossing a heavily trafficked road.

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