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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

Is that the fault of the parent, or is the state trying to cover up incredibly bad transportation and land use planning? Kids should just be able to walk to stores without getting hit by cars.

It is basically crazy how car obsession has turned America into such an unsafe place for children, and the statistics show it;

> In 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school. In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school.

http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...

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> Is that the fault of the parent [...] ?

Yes, it is.

You can complain all you want about land allocation, but when there are 2 tons vehicles going 100+ Kmh/h somewhere and it's closed to pedestrian you don't let your kid got there. Period.

Similarly, if they are reintroducing wolves and grizzlis in a forest near you, and they close it off for trails etc, you don't organize a weekend camping trip there.

Sometimes it's about common sense, stop blaming "society and the government" for your inability to function as a reasonable human being.

Bingo. What happened to teaching your kids to not play in the street?

When I grew up we used to play in the streets all the time.

Well, they are for cars. So play at your own risk.

I played in the streets and rode my bike every summer day (still do just not as much). But I also knew that 2000lbs of steel traveling at 30mph is not going to stop for me so my life was in my hands and I needed to be vigilant.

> Well, they are for cars.

That's a mistake, I think. They are for traffic and that includes kids, adult pedestrians, people on bikes, people with dogs, mopeds, and yes, cars. And as the driver of one of those you have a responsibility towards all those lesser protected members of society.

No they aren’t.

How many hours did you spend playing on the highway ?

this is a matter of opinion, but ...

Yes, streets should be safer.

No, that does not mean we should just let everyone act like they are safe, when we all know they are not.

The more cycling on a street, the safer the street. The causation is in that direction.

We've departed far afield from the topic of conversation if we're talking about adding bikes to make streets safer.

Is that stat accounting for distance to school? I.e is it comparing within the same distances(ranges of)?

You’re describing the same problem. The distance is the issue. This is the result of decisions we’ve made and that we can unmake.

In that case, is there data that shows people walking to schools when it is sufficiently close to them? If not, then distance is not a relevant factor, and some other things like civil unsafety can be looked at as potential reasons.

You're asking for data that shows that people walk to schools when they're close? Seems self evident that if you're half a block from school 0% of people will drive and if you're 15 miles from a school, 100% of people will drive.

But okay...

Distance and traffic danger (also a function of urban planning decisions) are by far the strongest predictor of whether kids walk to school.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917142/

> self evident

not if there are other factors e.g lack of civil safety.

But yes, the data does show that most things are held relatively equal when grouping reasons into <1mile and >1mile. So distance seems to be the clear factor. Nice article.

One other thing to note is that in older suburbs, there tends to be a school within the boundary of the arterial road grid, which is often about mile spacing, so increasing the distance to school also substantially increases the amount of heavy traffic streets to walk alongside or cross.

It's the size of an empire, there are going to be highways.

America is pretty unique in that highways plow through urban and suburban areas with few safe crossings.

Urban arterial roads (not quite streets, not quite interstates or grade separated freeways) account for half of all crashes in the US.

> Kids should just be able to walk to stores without getting hit by cars.

The problem specifically for stores is, small classic mom'n'pop stores cannot compete with big retailers like Walmart, Costco and whatnot - they simply cannot get even close to the scale of purchase that the big ones do, and so people prefer to use cars to get to a big retailer because it is more economical.

It's not just purchasing scale that prevents smaller businesses from competing; the infrastructure that supports those big box stores is heavily subsidized at the municipal, state, inter-corporate and federal levels in a way that is unattainable for local businesses.

It's not that it's subsidized so much as that 1-500k of hoop jumping makes financial sense when your goal is to turn a forested lot on the side of the highways into a Costco or Target or some other Mecca for people with lots of money to spend.

The amount of hoop jumping is the same if you're putting in a family mini golf with a restaurant and bumper cars. But you'll never make it back so the development never happens...

Municipalities and states frequently offer tax abatements, pay to build the road and utility infrastructure to the middle of nowhere, and rebate sales taxes in ways that they never would for even a non-brand-name store, much less a store that could fit in the middle of the town.

True. My town did that for Walmart 30 years ago, and recently did it again for Amazon. Meanwhile, small businesses that have served the area for decades get no breaks.

They also tried to stick a massive apartment building in a nice nearby residential neighborhood to house the cheap workers Amazon will bring in, but the residents caught wind of it and managed to get it stopped. For now.

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