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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.

That's why you have an emergency backup child for redundancy in case of failure of the main child.

Ah, the Spare. You must be British royalty.

I had to go look it up, because in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort orders Cedric's murder with: "Kill the Spare!"

It turns out that Cedric, being superfluous to the "Resurrection Ritual" and Voldemort's plan of revenge, is actually a spare. In fact it was unexpected that two boys get through the whole thing with the Portkey and all. Harry was the only one who was supposed to end up there with the Death Eaters in the first place, so Cedric's appearance was quite unfortunate for everyone involved.

But Cedric's "spareness" certainly didn't have to do with expendability as far as his Dad was concerned, which you can clearly understand once his Dad gets going in the mourning for his death.

The only people who find this joke funny don’t have any children.

You can have humour and children at the same time...

My dad told it to me. I was the second backup.

There's a star trek fan who has a primary dog and an emergency backup dog. There's also the british 'heir and a spare'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rU64yq-zU

Third string

Or people who have a sense of black humor. Never heard dads make dark puns and jokes of similar nature?

Six kids here, I use the “we needed some backups” joke all the time.

Sounds like a game of Paranoia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

As a father, this is false.

10000% false (another father) :)))

I think I’m between the comments here. I think it’s funny to say we have a spare but I also think it’s not as funny to say “oh you have a spare”. It’s like a fat guy can joke about his fatness but you can’t.

Remember, they're cattle, not pets.

Riight! I was wondering why some people had more than one. Like, I wonder that every single ever-loving day

I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I wanted at least two so they had another kid to play with at home, and hopefully be on good terms with a family member they can relate to into their old age.

only slightly serious. children are a joy! right? right??

Children are human beings, and are the full range of what humans are. When small, the fun of it is seeing them unfold into that fully formed version- sometimes painfully, sometimes joyfully.

When I was a kid I was taught not to walk in the street.

When you walk, you go in the opposite direction of cars and can see them coming and, if necessary, move off to the side more.

I know it's survivorship bias, but it worked for me.

Now I get that population density is increasing, and probably so is traffic. Though so are automatic safety features that cause cars to brake rather than hit things.

Are there statistics on vehicular fatalities in suburbs?

Pedestrian traffic deaths are going down again after peaking in 2022. Accidents are less survivable in the US due to bigger cars and higher hoods.

Quote from CDC

During 2013–2022, U.S. traffic-related death rates increased a relative 50.0% for pedestrians and 22.5% overall, compared with those in 27 other high-income countries, where they declined a median of 24.7% and 19.4%, respectively. Across countries, U.S. pedestrian death rates were highest overall and among persons aged 15–24 and 25–64 years.

The cars are getting bigger. That means that the impact is more deadly, and the line of sight is higher - making it easy to overlook a child. The sensors often won't react at low speeds which are common for residential neighborhoods, and at high speeds they are late anyway.

>The cars are getting bigger

Wasn't there a trend in the US away from pompous SUVs and towards smaller cars, people even starting to re-evaluate some European-favored "city" cars more?

Also aren't cars also getting ligther, with less heavy / metallic exterior over time?

There is some bimodal distribution. I routinely encounter trucks where I cannot see over the hood. I suspect most of these vehicles have never carried so much as a 2x4 in the bed.

We have a regulatory regime that requires that SUVs be bigger each year. It saves the environment that way.

This is not true at all. People who buy cars were willing to pay higher prices for cars where they sit higher up and take up more space, even specifically as a defensive maneuver to be safer in the event of a collision.

Obviously, as a business, you have to give customers what they want or else you will go out of business.

The government is, however, very lax on prioritizing the safety of people outside of vehicles (which would mean limiting vehicle size and speed and enforcing harsh penalties for unsafe driving).

It's not even "in the street" I'm worried about -- it's the lunatics who drive like they are the main character in a single-player RPG. Not looking for bikes or pedestrians, crashing into parked cars and houses.

I don't think roads were ever considered a safe area to play. Even in cities in 80 the bugger roads were too busy. This is why cities need spaces for people including youth and teens not just playgrounds for toddlers. Yes traffic is more dense and faster, cars get bigger etc. but aren't cars also safer? I have heard the cars in the USA are crazy big which has larger dead angles particularly bad for smaller humans.

Cars are safer for those inside of them. For those outside of them, well, it's their fault for not having crumple zones!

Cars on the roads in the '80s were very low to the ground. Even a child standing on the sidewalk could easily see over the hood of a car parked on the road. Now, hoods have gotten so tall that neither can the child see past it to what's on the other side, nor can the drivers see the children.

This is so true. It’s much harder for drivers to see pedestrians these days. And walkers now have to deal with E-bikes and electric scooters flying down the sidewalks at high speed and silently. I’ve nearly been hit many times even as a very visible adult.

Of course; that's the only reasonable conclusion from a straightforward reading of the risk profile for children after they age out of drowning and before they age into opioid overdose.

The lion's share of loving a child is intervening in proportion to actual risk.

As a society, that means, more than any other single reform, relieving our cities of the burden of maintaining lethal, taxpayer-funded compatibility with the auto industry's machinery.

For real. Way too many people drive around our neighborhood way too fast and looking at their phone the whole time. Of course they’re also driving their enormous pedestrian-crusher trucks.

> My biggest fear of letting my young kid play alone outside is getting hit by a car.

It is frightening once they learn to drive, isn't it?

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