I find these stories of kids not walking (or biking) outside wild! Hundreds of kids in my neighborhood walk, bike, or public transit to school everyday with no issues.
I do worry about car on pedestrian crashes but the city has crossing guards and traffic calming for just this.
Where are these places that you can’t be outside as a child?
I was aware of this in the abstract before I had kids. Now that I have them, it can be really terrifying. We go for walks even in places with big wide sidewalks and they are oblivious, they would jump out in the street at just about any moment if we weren’t holding hands and teaching them constantly to be afraid of cars.
It’s really sad. Kids nature is to want to run around and burn off energy, and right outside our door it’s safe for adults to do that, but it’s still not safe for young children because you still have to stay in the limited pedestrian zone and carefully cross streets.
I’ve wondered a lot about trying to build a car-free neighborhood with a commuter bus to downtown. I wish that existed, I’d move there.
To be fair, NYC is very, very different from the rest of the US. Reading over many of these comments, the people saying that kids can't roam in their areas are living in suburban places where you need a car to go anywhere, and it's simply not safe as a pedestrian. NYC is not like this: everyone takes the subway or walks all over the place there, and many people do not have cars, or use them within the city if they do. It's totally walkable. So I can see how kids walking around by themselves won't have people worried the way they would in suburban areas.
I am interested about your experience since mine is quite different. In the last 10 years I have lived in Vancouver, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Sunnyvale, Saratoga and now in Spain. I was also choosing “walkable” neighborhoods and in my experience there is almost no places in the US or Canada I would feel safe letting my daughter ride her bike to school. For example, I was biking ~4 days a week from Saratoga to Mountain View and the schools surroundings were the most dangerous section of my commute. Lines of parents dropping their child's with gigantic SUVs ready to right hook my ass. I was having close calls almost every other days and this is in some of the wealthiest zip code in the US. I am sure there is some places where walking and biking is possible but this is the exception.
Aside from getting run over by a car, are there that many places a kid isn’t safe in the US? Yes, there are rough neighborhoods - I’m asking about normal suburbs and white collar neighborhoods?
The school drop off line is absurd in my neighborhood. The school complex (K-12) is on a shared property. It’s less than a mile from my house. No road crossings at all to get there. Yet the kids bused or driven.
It all depends. Some towns (or parts of towns) are walkable and some are really not.
In my town there are certainly young kids (i.e. elementary school age) who walk or bike to school on their own. Sometimes there are parents walking with them, but I think they do it because they enjoy a walk with their child rather than any real concern for safety. There are crossing guards at walkways where kids will need to cross busier roads.
In other areas, schools are just too far away to walk, or there are other difficulties such as major roadways with a lot of traffic. Then kids ride a bus or parents take them.
Where you live can the kids get to anything other than single family housing? Because there are definitely suburbs in the US with low enough traffic to be safe, but they don’t allow important freedoms like biking to schools/libraries/shops
You didn't need to. I bet most places in the US are safe for your kids to bike to school. I see kids walking and biking to and from school all the time in my neighborhood. Never heard of any problems with it.
Wow! My town has a 2 mile walk boundary before they will bus you and I live in the U.S. Midwest where winters can be brutal!
As a result many kids ride their bikes to school. In my neighborhood elementary school kids and middle school kids are crossing 4 lane roads to get to school. The elementary school has a stoplight, so that helps, but the middle school does not. I'm amazed no one has ever been hurt!
Thats a problem with messed up North American culture. Kids should be able to go outside by themselves in cities. They do exactly that all over the world. In places much more dangerous then normal city in US. I commuted to school at age of 9, having to switch streetcars and walk for 15 mins. Total time of about 40 mins one way. Often I would walk back through the city instead, this would take about 2 hours of wondering through city of more then 2 million. I love cities, but I also love countryside in different way. I despise suburbs.
So it's safe to walk and ride your bike, but you have nothing close by worth biking or walking to? Sounds counter productive. What do you do, bike in circles?
Or my guess: you have to drive everywhere. Hence no autonomy for the kids.
That's great to hear! Unfortunately I think it's quite rare in the rest of the country for children to be able to walk to school. I've only ever been to places where school buses / cars are the norm.
I was interested to see if studies have been done. I found an article [1] claiming that as of 2009, only 13 percent of American children walked/biked to school.
In Australia we have crossing guards ('lollipop men') on the roads near schools to stop the cars. Pretty safe for most kids to walk from early primary onwards.
This is a really bad exchange though. You cannot walk in your neighbourhood and your kids get run down by traffic.
Back yard? That does not exist in the US. You get a tiny garden which is not enough.
In Europe we have the various sport fields you can reach on foot or via light rail, not even going into a car. Therefore your kids do not have to drive at age 12.
You can reach work via train, I know people who ride in excess of 200 km daily.
Heck, schools and universities are reachable via such transit.
We have big parks in the cities.
I am not talking cities the density of Hong Kong either. NY is not quite walkable either, it lacks walkability due to grid street design with no accommodations for crossing them easily and safely.
Lots of kids ride their bikes to my daughters elementary school, where we live in the United States. Safe small towns with functional sidewalks, for kids to ride bikes on as necessary, still happily exist in some places in our nation.
I don't know what the percentage is, but having a school withing walking or biking distance is definitely not uncommon in US suburbs. At least in the areas I've lived (in multiple parts of the country), schools are generally built close to large neighborhoods, and have dedicated infrastructure to help kids walk to school. Grocery stores are less likely to be within walking distance. But then, even if I could walk to a grocery store, I'm not sure I'd want to, because I would be limited by how much I can carry back, which means I'd have to go shopping more often.
Conversely, I have traveled to Europe and Japan. At least in the areas I went to, it didn't really seem any safer for kids to play outside than many parts of America. Yes, public transit was much better, but there were still lots of cars on the streets, and there were areas that weren't very pedestrian friendly. And in some cities it was quite difficult to find playgrounds. I don't doubt that there are places in Europe and Japan where kids can play outside without worrying about cars. But such conditions are not universal.
This is 99% of it (other 1% is fear of other parents scolding you). There's a beach bike path near us with only one street crossing in 5 miles. My 6 and 7 year old are free to explore the whole thing unattended provided they avoid that crossing. It has playgrounds and all kinds of stuff they can stop their bikes at.
But I won't let them cross the street we live on because none of these drivers are thinking about pedestrians and even if they were I doubt any of the lifted trucks could even see a 4ft tall kid.
Parents in walkable cities also want extracurriculars for their children. It's the suburb that makes the shuttling to/from required.
Sidewalks are illegal for cycling, and even if a stroad had a shoulder, the vehicle speeds make it far too dangerous for a not-yet-fully-mentally-developed child to cycle along. And even within the suburb, vehicle speeds are often 60-70 kmph and drivers are often inattentive. Cycling on roads within suburbs in all but the most limited sense is not safe for children.
It just takes one wayward glance at your mobile phone for me to be attending the funeral of my son. Cars and bikes don't mix.
NotJustBikes did a great video on how safe streets are amazing for a child's freedom. Sadly I know of no location in the US I'd let my child cycle to school.
I do worry about car on pedestrian crashes but the city has crossing guards and traffic calming for just this.
Where are these places that you can’t be outside as a child?
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