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Comment by hahajk | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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