Children Need Neighborhoods Where They Can Walk and Bike | Hacker News Reader

Children Need Neighborhoods Where They Can Walk and Bike

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132 pointsjseliger77 comments

Agree with this, but let's not forget public transportation. Yes, I biked and walked all over my region, but I also used buses to get to downtown(Seattle, from Auburn. Starting around 12 I think, in the late 80s).

Without getting into a debate about the safety of some modern city centers, buses are a great tool for 10+ year old kids to get around town to places where they can walk and bike.

12 year olds do not have that freedom anymore. People will flip out seeing kids that young doing something outside without adult supervision. They’ll call CPS on you.

We need a new campaign to let kids live. I used to walk to get a train and then walk from the station to school at 9 without and adult supervision. I had other kids around me on that journey, but you just get on with it. I don't ever remember not being competent.

In Europe it’s still normal. I very often see 10 year olds by themselves.

Even in Montreal in more Eropean-value influences neighbourhoods (eg Plateau) you can see this. I was shocked (in a good way) to see 7-8 year olds walking by themselves to school. That’s after living in other Canadian cities for 20 years.

In Sweden it's normal to leave children outside a shop in a stroller, unattended, when you go shopping... And at 15 they can drive A-Traktor, i.e. any commercial car with an ODB speed limiting dongle and a sign showing it run in A-Traktor mode...

12 year olds use public transit to get to school daily here in Chicago.

Not the case in socal, tons of kids use the bus, lausd even gives out a free pass.

I guess it depends on where you are, because 12 year olds (and younger) certainly do things on their own around me. For example, they tend to meet up at the local ice cream place to hang out.

I think this is okay.

People make unreasonable complaints to all sorts of law enforcement, and as long as CPS is telling them to adjust their expectations, nothing bad has happened.

That's the only way things will ever improve. Deliberately meeting the expectations of unreasonable people will only make things worse.

well, CPS (and other protection and service arms of the government) is not known for being famously good and competent at de-escalation :/

but yes, it's important to apply pressure to the bureaucracy (through - and to - the courts) too, to change the status quo. that said, when it comes to one's kids it's understandable that no one wants to "volunteer" their own kids for these challenges.

Consider that CPS etc al aren't known for de-escalation because that isn't news. We have no idea how many times they tell Karens and Kevins to stop interfering.

> They’ll call CPS on you.

So what?

What are they doing to do about it?

Your post is incomplete.

(Analogy: I can decide I don't like you farting in the street and call a policeman on you, though I doubt they would do anything about it either!)

They’re going to mess up your life.

“ The debate over the actions of Danielle and Alexander Meitiv, of Silver Spring, began in December when state authorities started investigating them for letting their children walk to school by themselves.

The Meitivs never thought letting their children, 10-year-old Rafi and 6-year-old Dvora, walk home from the park would spark a national discussion. The Silver Spring parents were interviewed when Montgomery County Child Protective Services began investigating them”

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/parents-debate-cps-decision-f...

Apparently cleared, eventually, but …

The point is, this isn't a problem of kids. The kids' situation is a symptom. The problem is the adults and the hypocrisy. We say "Kids should be outside. They need more exercise and less screen time. They need more unstructured play time. Etc." But then we cry "Nooooo. Stranger danger" and phone CPS if a child is "free ranging."

Furthermore, no parent wants to be known as the CPS parent. And certainly no kid wants to be their kid. What can CPS do? It doesn't matter.The question is: what will be the reaction of your parental peers, their kids, teachers, coaches, etc., and your kid.

> Furthermore, no parent wants to be known as the CPS parent

Given the posts suggesting CPS is not fit for purpose, one should be proud of standing up to them, not ashamed.

And once CPS gets their hands on you, they always have you. It's worse than most STD's. Let your kids walk home, and spent the next 10 years being interviewed. A friend of mine got called out. Their kid almost never missed school, got good grades and the parents were on top of their development.

Then ended up spending countless hours talking with CPS after they were caught letting their kids play at home, while they went to the corner shop.

Depending of the kind of bio-gas injected in the public place they might call NBC special operations and classify you as a public threat :D

A walkable and bike-able neighborhood will necessarily have to be dense enough such that public transit also makes sense.

Still remember my first independent bus ride

I grew up in a suburb development where you couldn’t walk to anything. It was pretty isolated, until I had a car it was difficult for me to visit friends or do anything outside the house. I’m now living in an area that’s super walkable and has a community feel. My young kids bike every day to one of the four playgrounds nearby. They see friends every day too even if it’s just when they walk by our house. For me it highlights how lonely and isolating the suburb experience can be I don’t think I could go back to that and having experienced it the other way I would not want that for my kids.

Maybe our definitions of suburb are different. I live in what I would consider a suburb now. I see kids outside playing every day. I see teens playing basketball and tennis at the neighborhood courts. And, now that it's warming up, people at the pool. There is a grocery store at the entrance to the neighborhood, but for anything else someone would have to drive. I just fail to see how the local kids are harmed or isolated.

Some American suburbs are set up in the way you describe, but in my experience they're a tiny minority. A simple test is whether or not kids can walk to school. If not, how are they able visit their friends from school who don't live in the same development? Are they safely able to walk or ride bikes, or are they isolated by car infrastructure that makes them dependent on parents driving them around? It sucks not being able to visit your friends.

We can walk to our local elementary, but about half the kids can’t, but we live in a very walkable neighborhood (my kids can walk to a grocery store, Starbucks, toy store, library, chipotle, tennis courts, basketball courts, baseball field).

But all our schools are fairly large, 600 elem, 1000 middle, 3000 high school, so even with density friends are far flung.

Smaller schools would help, but now it’s hard to build more schools because of that density! (There used to be more elem schools but they closed a bunch when GenX went thru and school population dropped temporarily)

It is important to differentiate between suburbs and sprawl. Many of the old suburbs are still dense, walkable, have a diverse mix of single and multi family housing with some small retail scattered in. However, that is not what most people think about when they think about American suburbs.

Lot sizes have not changed between old suburbs and new for the most part. sure there are some mansion lots around but look at all suburbs in a better sample.

Even in the suburb suburbs, a lot of households had kids, and they would get together and bike around, play basketball in the cul-de-sac, or just go to each other's houses and hang out. I lived way out in the bush comparatively speaking where the nearest neighbor was like a quarter mile away, and I used to envy those suburban kids.

Then I guess some time ago that all stopped, and the late millennial/zoomer /r/fuckcars bughive lovers are all like "it's the suburbs, man, the suburbs killed childhood".

Fertility rate dropped, parents are more anxious to let kids roam, kids now have a lot of alternatives to spending time outdoors. There are just fewer kids around, and this drop is then amplified by suburbs' low density.

In an Australian Suburb right now. Closest store is 2km. Closest skate park is about 3km (2miles). No basketball or tennis within 15km(10miles)

TBH, I think we all wish we lived in what you're describing, but most of us live miles from anything we'd consider a playable area.

This should be obvious but not all suburbs are created equal. Check out Florida suburbs to get a feel for what hell is

The theory in my country is that if the roads ever aren't safe enough for kids to be walking/biking to school, they'd need to be made so.

Unless that requires culling magpies.

If there are magpies about it's every child | cyclist for themselves.

The magpies were there before the roads, so even if the land title registry doesn't explicitly note it, their ancient usage since time immemorial means under common law that they have swoop-of-way.

Everyone here is saying cul de sac suburbs do not give kids freedom, but they do for kids younger than 12. We moved to this "mc same" neighborhood when my daughter was 5 and she's been able to leave in the morning on her bike and be back by dinner, playing with friends around the neighborhood. Now that she's 8 she can take her 3 y.o. brother to the park down the street. If we lived in a denser, walkable neighborhood I wouldn't allow any of that to happen until she was in middle school. (the is east coast US for context)

The main problem is that the cul-de-sac neighborhoods are often poorly designed. Two houses which are a stone's throw separated can be a 30-minute walk away, simply because nobody bothered to add pedestrian / cyclist shortcuts. The entire neighborhood is designed around cars, so any kid walking down the street is forced to interact with cars.

Also, there's no reason why a cul-de-sac neighborhood can't be dense and walkable. Street layout and density are only tangentially related.

When you are a kid playing in the suburbs you often make shortcuts neither the developers nor current homeowners realize are there

Absolutely, crawling over neighbor fences were no big deal getting to my friends house to cut a trip around the sidewalk.

When I was a kid, my dad and the neighbor put a gate between our yards, so we could play with each other

Yeah, I live in New York City, which is much more walkable than the suburb that I grew up in…but still feels less viable for letting my kids range freely. There are just so many more cars, and there is always construction and/or otherwise obstructed bike lanes and sidewalks—you have to be extremely aware and defensive on a bicycle. On the other hand, I grew up in a little cul-de-sac that was perfect for kids to bike around precisely because cars were infrequent. We walked to and from grade school and middle school unsupervised, with our friends who also lived in the neighborhood. In NYC, parents are a bit nuts about schools, so they rarely just walk their kid to the nearest school—they end up taking the train and/or driving to whatever place they think will maximize their kid’s college prospects, which results in a lot of unnecessary transportation.

When children do do those things, people who have nothing better to do call the cops on the parents, and the cops actually respond. Many parents are afraid to let their kids out to do normal kid things and wont even let their kids walk home from the school bus stop. We've gone from a society where it was normal for kids to spend all day out and about without supervision, so one where play is highly regulated and monetized, and supervision is suffocating.

This is why children also need free range parenting laws:

https://letgrow.org/

Adults need it too. Why is locomotion considered something only a child would do? Walking should be a human right. People should be able to walk and not regress into blobs that need wheelchairs to get around.

Cars are awful. The only way to get away from them is to get a car yourself. And even then you've you too get a big one because everyone now has a bigger car than you. Oh and don't forget insanely powerful or you're never going to win your way on to a roundabout. It's a race to the bottom.

We need to take back our living places from cars. Why do people need to drive right up to their houses every day? Put car parks out of town and ban cars from towns. Imagine how much more space we'd have. Let people drive in at 15mph to drop stuff off at their houses, but it gets parked out of town. Use a bicycle to access your car when you need it.

Unfortunately you just can't take a single thing away from people. Literally everyone will tell you they hate cars. They hate the noise and the pollution. They'll tell you it's the number one reason they don't cycle anywhere. But take away their car?! Never!

You can't guarantee positive human rights as vague as walking, especially when public opinion is against you. It's unproductive and meaningless to people who aren't already on your side enough to know what something as bizarre as "walking should be a human right" means.

Huge problem: CPS will arrest the parents for allowing their children to walk around the neighborhood. When I was a kid, I went all over the neighborhood, made friends everywhere. Today, that's not possible. Karens will call the police, and the government will fine the parents, or worse take the children away.

https://komonews.com/amp/news/nation-world/cps-called-after-...

https://reason.com/2015/01/14/cops-and-cps-threaten-parents-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/maryland-coup...

This depends on location. Kids walk and bike where I live, but the streets are narrow and drained by open ditches, so there is more risk than streets with pedestrian access built in. Drivers are usually considerate of this and go slowly, though.

Push for free range parenting laws or move to a state that has them:

https://letgrow.org/states/

A lot of europe in general, and Prague especially, is perfect for this. Well, bikes less so, but walking and public transport, absolutely. Plenty of little kids (from age 7 or 8, I'd guess) walking and taking the tram/bus to school in the morning, without supervision, and without worry. Just this one fact by itself demonstrates what a stable and safe Czech society is (sure it has other problems like any place).

Better than other places maybe, but certainly not perfect.

The rise of the SUVs and car crowded roads in the cities speak against it. And also Prague have them, last time I checked.

I am in the decision of moving from rural to city, but the cars and their danger for my children are the main reason to object.

As a parent of a 9 year old who bikes two km to kayaking club and back three times a week, I see how much he likes it and how autonomous he instantly became. Me and my wife also got a couple of hours of freedom every day because we no longer have to transport him and wait in between. It looks like a small thing, but it feels almost life-changing. Previously, I was against multi-storey residential development and planned to own a private house in the suburbs. But then I got kids and moved to a place with dense civil infrastructure and started to use it daily. And I realized that if you can bike to school, shops, parks and a clinic in a couple of minutes, then for me it's much cooler than living at home and getting in the car every time you need something. Every time I think about my son crossing the road, I get scared as hell. But I have to be strong to step aside and not interfere with his growth =)

Well, currently I can also get everything by bycicle or train, as I live close to a train station.

The city close by is just dead. So we are looking for nice rural home outside a vibrant city close to a frequently run train station. Problem is, everyone is doing this nowdays, so hard to find something, that ticks all the boxes. I know my children can handle traffic, I just want to save them from it as much as possible. Fumes and noise are also not exactly healthy either.

Good luck of finding such place! I also noted that friends of my son were initially all from the same courtyard (obviously). Now the majority of them lives in a three kilometer radius. He has friends in a school, courtyard and in a sport club. They intersect only by a half. At this age you easily make new friends and also easily get rid of those with who you doesn't fit. I think, that the more people you meet being young on a different activities and can easily visit by a bike, the more chance that you will find the ones who will be your real friends through the life and the wider your world will be. This is another point to live in a crowded but cyclable area.

A lot of the old, central parts of the city (think Zizkov) is not great for kids because it's very dense and cars drive everywhere.

But the new residential developments and often even the old commie blocks are great for kids with a lot of free space, walking / no-car zones etc, plenty of playgrounds. For older kids, good public transportation and general safety are important too.

The problem with the US is how uniformity the urban planning is. Of the hundreds of cities how many is walking, biking or public transport the primary means, or even a decent alternative, for your commute. We can't try out any new ideas in a few places before rolling them out to other places no everything has to be the McSame. I don't know why this is. Maybe the same 51% of voters win out everytime everywhere or maybe it's lobbying from the automotive industry. Maybe the argument always goes that we shouldn't invest in bike/train infra because someone tried it in the US and it was bad ironically because it was bad because of underinvestment.

I'm not saying "because they are lazy!" but, I think it is a combination of a large portion of people wanting a large piece of land and planners just using cars to fill in the gaps on convenience. I do think that a lot of folks would prefer to have better public access to things like parks, it would mean a lot less personal maintenance. But this is a hard sell for some people that have a vision of a certain lifestyle. And for planners, they are probably working with some very tight budgets and timelines to deliver. It is just easier to produce yet another grid of McSame because they know there is an audience for it and it makes their jobs a lot easier.

I do wonder where this will lead in decades down the line but for many that is not an issue they are considering.

> people wanting a large piece of land and planners just using cars to fill in the gaps on convenience.

The US fed gov also did well to incentivize suburban home ownership in various ways. Suburban growth was a post-war feel good national narrative. The idea was as much sold it was bought.

Yep, like most things it is no one single thing driving it. They arise mutually.

And mass group-think is a thing. Get an idea going and few are willing to say, "Wait. Let's think about this a second..." Instead, "everyone is doing it" becomes the norm.

We had walkable American cities for centuries. It was the norm. Kids played in alleys and walked to school, neighbors chatted over the back fence, we reaped the economic benefits of density and proximity. Then millions fled America's inner cities in the 1960s due to skyrocketing crime and racial violence. The suburbs were seen as an inferior substitute by many from the start; the upshot was that their kids would be safe from muggings on the street, gunfire in schools, and race riots. Chicagoland writer Ray Hanania (no relation to Richard) wrote about his family's experience with this in Chicago:

https://suburbanchicagoland.com/2016/01/29/midnight-flight-c...

"Yes, it’s wonderful. And, instead of placing your garbage cans in the alley where the stink and unsightliness of the trash would be hidden from view, you will place all that on the front lawn. At the curb. Next to your new mailbox. Oh. I didn’t tell you that your mailbox was a metal little box on the top of a wood poll in your lawn in front of your house along the street? Where any Tom, Dick or Harry could drive by, reach in, and easily steal your Social Security check any time they want?"

The suburbs were spaced out and isolated on purpose. The alternative was worse:

https://suburbanchicagoland.com/2016/01/29/midnight-flight-c...

"When I returned to Bowen High school that fall, there were more Black students registered at the school and there were frequent gang fights between Black and Hispanic students. The Spanish Kings were really up in arms, painting street gang symbols insulting Black gangs, and vice versa. The increase in Black and Hispanic gang violence at the school only fed the stereotype and the growing fears of Whites in the area."

"One day, there was a shooting in the lunchroom. That was bringing it real close to home, so to speak."

The people who by their own actions and choices ruined America's inner cities have never been held accountable. Instead we blamed ourselves, the auto companies, skip-floor elevators in public housing... The same antisocial patterns of behavior continue. They make Memphis, Philly, New Orleans, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. what they are today. And today we blame TikTok, drill rap, ourselves again...

Milwaukee's murder rate in 2023 was ten times the rate back in 1920, before antibiotics and modern medicine and 911 emergency services:

https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay

For as long as this continues the suburbs will remain a preferable alternative for many, especially families with young children. Young childless people can tolerate more urban anarchy, and today more people in cities are childless, but this is not how to sustain a civilization.

> Then millions fled America's inner cities in the 1960s due to skyrocketing crime and racial violence.

Let’s make sure we keep the cause-and-effect straight here. White flight was what created the crime, not the other way around. Inner cities in the US became poor, losing their business and tax bases, because of the racially-motivated flight of white people to avoid coloured people. Policies that facilitated white flight were done with the explicit purpose of creating white suburbs and preventing coloured people from following suit. It was not people making rational decisions about crime statistics.

>White flight was what created the crime

This is ahistorical libel against millions of families who fled their homes in rational fear for themselves and their children. You may read the last link in my above post for a near-complete refutation of such a view. Incidentally, many successful middle-class black families also fled to the suburbs around this time. Here's another primary source collection, there are many:

https://www.city-journal.org/article/white-ethnic-flight-fro...

When in doubt blame white people right?

You blame the people that architected it: Racist & oportunistic politicians, bankers, and real estate agents.

Who were predominately white, yes. Not sure why that makes you feel so defensive.

It's true that some white elites took a hand in destroying ethnic white urban neighborhoods, particularly among Italian, German, Jewish and Eastern European communities. Most Americans affected by redlining were white. "Urban renewal" destroyed not only certain poor black neighborhoods, but many ethnic white enclaves. It was a big government money faucet that tempted even the leaders of such communities to raze perfectly good homes and blocks in exchange for federal redevelopment funds.

One example that tells the story in Burlington, VT. Practically zero black or brown people lived there in the 1960s. It was a homogenous white town of mostly Anglo-European heritage. Nevertheless city leaders razed entire blocks and long-established neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. Parts of downtown have arguably still not recovered.

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/news/before-burlington-town-cent...

>> We had walkable American cities for centuries. It was the norm.

Two centuries ago in America, walkable cities were not the norm. Cities were not the norm. 95% of the population was rural.

You're right, I should have been more specific. Dense urban living was the norm for people who worked in cities. Suburbs were not a significant part of urban living until later.

> The people who by their own actions and choices ruined America's inner cities have never been held accountable.

Who are these people?

The criminals doing crime and the people who enabled them in the name of inter-ethnic conflict.

It’s interesting how you keep up the divide between „us“ (good, law-abiding, educated, friendly and most importantly white people) and „them“ (evil, criminal, murdering,rioting, shooting black and Hispanic people). There’s only a thin intellectual veneer on top of your racism.

Did you ever wonder how it came to be that non-white people ended up in a worse position than whites?

>It’s interesting how you keep up the divide between „us“ (good, law-abiding, educated, friendly and most importantly white people) and „them“ (evil, criminal, murdering,rioting, shooting black and Hispanic people).

You can read the primary historical sources and decades of public statistics for yourself. You can walk down the streets of West Baltimore, West Philadelphia, Anacostia, the south side of Chicago, or Northwest Milwaukee on your own and see what has become of those environments. The prior inhabitants of those areas managed to create thriving, safe neighborhoods without youth centers, constant media pandering, or massive public wealth retribution.

Recognizing the truth of history is of course distinct from blaming entire ethnic groups wholesale.

Implying an ethnicity is linked to elevated crime rates and quoting statistics is no different from blaming ethnic groups straight away. Both display your reasoning just the same.

> The prior inhabitants of those areas managed to create thriving, safe neighborhoods without youth centers, constant media pandering, or massive public wealth retribution.

The prior inhabitants are not descendants of slaves; they did not suffer a collective trauma, decades of strategic abuse and discrimination by the government and those nice people you’re talking about.

I can’t even fathom how void of empathy one has to be to assume the massive imbalance white people actively created won’t leave deep scars that take time to heal. Merely changing the laws and pretending everyone’s equal now won’t cut it.

This sort of historical and emotional incontinence helps no one. You talk as though white urbanites were unfairly prejudiced or deserved the uprooting and destruction of their neighborhoods. That's simply not true, but I don't expect you'll believe me even if I explain with abundant sourcing, so I won't bother.

Seems like a suburban/urban mentality to me, probably reflecting the background of the people who think this. Given my background, I think kids need neighborhoods where they can run around in the woods.

Ok sure, but the point about autonomy and exploration remains.

I lived in a part of the city with great infrastructure (if it works), parks, etc. which I used heavily as a kid/teenager.

Nowadays many of those places I would avoid visiting after dark if at all possible. If I had kids I would not let them go there alone, even rapes have happened there.

What did children do before 1817?

> Children Need Neighborhoods Where They Can Walk and Bike

Land is too expensive to be wasted on playgrounds. /s

Children still walk and bike?

In my neighborhood, if it isn't battery powered, the kids don't want it.

It's a pity to hear

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