“Not driving ar maximum speed”
Um… In US car drivers have sacrificed lives of their own children…
Not sure it counts as a sacrifice if that’s your preference.
Big Oil cares not where the blood comes from, only that it flows
to back this up, the Netherlands keep scoring highest in UNICEF’s child well being reports: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/child-well-being-unpredictable-world
And it’s not like there’s no cars in the Netherlands either.
Yeah this post is bullshit. I grew up with cars (I’m in my 30s). I did all those things that kids apparently sacrificed for cars.
Know why kids can’t/don’t do any of those things anymore? Parents helicoptering over them. Parents freak out when they get worried about their kids, where as me growing up in the 90s and early 2000s I would leave in the morning and not come back until dinner. I’d go to the beach, play with friends, wander around town and just hang out.
It’s not cars that ruined all these things for kids, it’s over protective parents who feel better parking their kid on the couch with a tablet than let them go outside and explore, play street hockey, football in the park, or otherwise be a fucking kid.
Well, it’s not entirely overprotective parenting.
Things were different in the 90s.
It was fine to be told off by another parent or even a stranger, there was more social awareness towards eachother and eachother’s kids out in the street, and cirtainly not the least, especially in relation to safety, people drove somewhat normal cars. Everybody needs SUV’s and pickup trucks now for some reason with absolutely trash visibility on what is directly in front of them.
But what helps particularly in the safety space is that the Netherlands does way more in terms of keeping people sperated from other forms of traffic with infrastructure choices.
Yeah but the cars are 3 times larger now. They are so high up you can’t see a kid in front of you if they are shorter than your hood. That’s why their parents don’t let them do those things anymore.
I got hit by a car on my bike as a kid. A small coupe. Everything now is an suv. Imagine an suv hitting me. I would have died
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There were tons of cars in the 80s and 90s and playing in the street was still very normal. You’d simply move out of the way when a car was coming. You taught your kids that the streets weren’t safe, since streets are made for cars to drive over and not for kids to play in and didn’t let them do that until they could do it relatively safely.
We see posts here about someone calling the cops on the neighbor kids over and over for simply being outside. That’s the dot to connect. It’s a societal change toward being batshit crazy, whether helicopter parents who must oversee every moment of their children’s lives to make sure they’re as safe as possible or obsessively controlling neighbors who think that’s the proper way to parent and that any time they see anyone under 18 without a parent they decide it must be child abandonment, or abuse, or runaways, or roving gangs of criminal kids and call the cops over it.
In a lot of places in the US cops will now ask groups of kids why they’re playing at a park. Kid’s aren’t going outside because no one will leave them alone to be kids outside.
Not that I disagree with you about helicopter parenting being an important part of it - but tons of kids were also killed by cars back in the day. It was a very real problem.
In the Netherlands, this was why they made their cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, and as a result, dutch kids move more freely than kids in other parts of the world.
Of course, that’s definitely important. In the US most cities aren’t designed to be walkable/bikeable at all. That’s dangerous and of course city planning should account for all sorts of transportation from walking and people in motorized wheelchairs on up.
I do agree with George Carlin on the push for safety, though. It’s not kind and cuddly to say, but I also believe natural selection has it’s place.
A large scale environmental change generally correlates with a larger than normal amount of animals in that region dying as those with the adaptations that best fit the new reality are selected for. The birds that can’t reach the seeds now die off and those with the longer beaks survive to pass on their genes and the species ends up with a longer beak than it had a few decades back.
Completely minimizing deaths in a radically different environment only causes more and more generations where the bulk of the population really isn’t suited for this environment and often suffers in varying ways because of that. Accepting that not all members of a species will do great in the new environment and that there will be deaths as a result of that leads to much quicker adaptation where a much larger portion of the population doesn’t have those issues.
Every aspect of human life has changed with an insane exponentially increasing pace over the last 200 or so years, so the environment almost all humans deal with every moment of every day now is almost nothing like what we evolved to deal with and handle. That alone will lead to deaths.
Hey man, I did too, but children got killed by cars quite often. Pretty sure that and drowning accounts for the majority of child deaths back in the '70s-'90s
Think about all of those near misses when you were a kid. Think about how much danger you put yourself in. That’s what they’re thinking about when they lock their kids inside. Growing up in the 90s was fun, dangerous and crime was much higher back then. You’re not going to turn into your dad if you give your kids the freedom they desperately need to develop their brains properly. You’re not putting your kids in danger if you’re smart about it and make sure they’re smart about it.
Sure, if you compare the teen and child death rate now to that of the 1990s it looks worse then. But if you compare that same number from the 1990s to the 1890s it also looks worse then. The 1990s were not an especially dangerous time in world history, they were actually an exceptionally safe time.
That’s true
I think the exponential growth of technology over the last century or two is starting to catch up with us. The oldest people alive lived through the vast majority of it. After millenia of evolution preparing us for a life and daily challenges and dangers completely unlike anything of today it makes sense that suddenly so many people are being diagnosed with ADHD and major depressive disorder and so many other things.
Parents are more neurotic because most of us are more neurotic and we’re just expressing and dealing with it in different ways.
When it’s about cars, the “think of the children” machine suddenly breaks.
Come on. Electing pedophile presidents ring a bell?
Or guns in the ’Murica.
These fucking people always uses “think of the children”, religion, and the Constitution for their own perspective but suddenly dismiss it when it comes to feeding children, children safety and freedom of speech of speech they don’t like.
They are hypocrites and they don’t care that they are.
Disarming the rich and powerful won’t ever happen. Disarming queer then black then poor folk will.
And ironically it’s one of the few cases where it’s a legitimate argument since the kids are actually being killed instead of merely exercising their autonomy in a way someone doesn’t like.
No, it just switches to “ten points each” mode.
Oh for cars it works, just not for anything actually benefitting children directly.
Parent Drivers: Sacrificed their free time, because now they have to fucking drive their kids everywhere. Once kids above a certain age could roam wild (pros and cons there, but on the whole a good thing IMO) and just come back for dinner.
My kid’s school pays parents $50 a month to drive them to school because there’s not enough bus drivers
$50 / 4.33 weeks / 5 days = $2.31 per day.
The official mileage rate for Ontario (my province) is $0.655/km.
This only makes sense if the drive is < 3.5km per day total.
Assuming this is trip chained (no extra mileage because of the detou, like a drop and back) that’s 1.75km per drop/pickup.
Minimum distance for bussing of gr 3+ in my area is 2.4km.
This scheme does not pay parents to drive children to school, it only reduces the burden.
Yes, it’s very stupid. I agree.
On the right column: “high speed limits near schools”, that’s their brave sacrifice
“sometimes slow down near schools”
* if they feel like it.
As if anyone obeys those signs.
Marquees Brownlee moment
To be fair, kids are not allowed to do most of those things because people are scared of pedos, not cars. 40 years ago we already had cars but I was allowed to disappear for whole days without anyone complaining. Now kids can’t go to the playground alone even if they don’t have to cross any roads.
That too is caused by car-centric design, though. It’s not as though there were no pedos before there were cars, of course, but when a city isn’t primarily designed around cars, there tend to be a lot more people outside, making it much harder to drag a child into an unmarked van.
This has nothing to do with design or actual crimes. People are scared because the media is scarring them. The numbers of abductions are actually dropping but people are more and more scared because child predators were made into the bogeyman of the XXI century. It’s a well known fact that crime perception in US does not align with actual crime statistics. Cars have nothing to do with it.
Jane Jacobs wrote about this in like the 1960s. More regular people on the street makes people feel safer. It probably actually makes people safer, too.
So, yes, car-first culture makes crime and fear worse. A local neighborhood with people walking about doing their business is safer than one where people just drive, park, and leave.
IMHO saying that “car culture -> less people walking -> more crime -> more fear -> less kids on the streets” is a bit of a stretch. I’m sure it can be true in some areas but is far from universal rule. European cities are very walkable yet no one lets small kids play outside alone. Many villages are way less walkable yet kids play outside alone without issues. This meme tries to imply that kids don’t play outside because of cars yet it’s only one of contributing factors and only in some places.
You can take it up with Jane Jacobs, I guess.
I don’t think anyone’s saying car dominance is the only factor, but it’s a big one.
IMHO saying that “car culture -> less people walking -> more crime -> more fear -> less kids on the streets” is a bit of a stretch.
That’s not the claim. The claim is “car culture -> less people walking ->
more crime-> more fear -> less kids on the streets.” The perception matters; the reality doesn’t.More people from more walks of life (pun intended) on the street probably does reduce some types of crime, though. You’re not going to be mugged on the street outside two busy restaurants and a record shop with a bunch of other people walking around.
I would argue much of Europe is pretty carbrained too. It just doesn’t seem so comparatively.
But it is an interesting point. In those few areas like Amsterdam where pedestrians are quite safe, do people let kids play unattended? And if not why not? Is it due to worry about crime? Because my perception is that European cities are also quite safe from the perspective of violent crime.
I would personally have no concerns letting my kids play outside unattended if there weren’t cars in the mix, so I find this mindset very strange. And my city has a lot more violence than most places in Europe, last I checked.
Not Dutch but Estonian here. I grew up playing outside, but I’m from a quiet street in a small town. In the cities, one of the actually positive influences of the soviet empire is that they built playgrounds between large apartment complexes so as far as I know, kids played outside unattended there too, but it would’ve likely been slightly older kids, not like a 5 year old being let out with his 8 year old friend (yes, talking about myself here).
Not sure how it is these days though. I see fewer kids running around on the street than when I was a kid. Suspect it has little to do with traffic or crime and more with the availability of entertainment via TV or phones. 25 years ago over here we had like 3 TV channels, for anything else you would’ve had to pay Viasat or someone - which a lot of families couldn’t afford. Of course there are also just fewer kids in my hometown (at least on my street) and I have no comparison data for the bigger cities at the time of my childhood.
Sure, but the media can only scare people if they can imagine it being true. It’s a lot easier to imagine someone who would do their children harm actually going through with it and succeeding when the kids are wondering around suburban cul-de-sac hell where the only other people are zooming past in a car.
EDIT: I’d like to add that the urban design also changes how people deal with this fear. For example, in Japan it’s common for elementary schoolers to have a buzzer on them with a cord to pull in case of stranger danger. So clearly this fear exists there too, but you still see kids going around town without adult supervision. The reason why the buzzer can give peace of mind is because they can pretty much count on there always being people close by enough to hear the buzzer go off.
I was going to mention that none of the streets have changed where my parents live from when I grew up but it does seem much sketchier. There’s more roaming homeless people from nearby freeway encampments, and cars appear to drive more dangerously or the drivers are distracted with their phones
It’s all very anecdotal but where I lived you could get from my apartment building to the playground without crossing any streets. All kids were just running around unsupervised starting at 6-7yo (for me it was closer to 5yo). The entire playground was just communist style metal constructions. I cut myself on rusty nails, was hit by a metal swing and twisted my ankle while jumping off the top of a slide. Today the entire playground was replaced by wooden, safe toys and I can’t imagine kids playing there unsupervised. Times have changed. It’s simple as that.
What I had:
What kids have today:
In my country these fancier playgrounds are like a few per city, whereas the soviet ones were (are) much more common, so a side effect is that you could’ve gone to that top photo without crossing any streets, versus your parents would take you to the bottom one (either walk you there or go by car)
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that parents are generally more concerned about traffic than pedophiles.
Not in my country. All the things on the left are still true, but predators isn’t really something parents are (or need to be) worried about. Also, there are a lot more cars now than 40 years ago.
In my country it’s true the fear of both cars and pedos and arguably, cars made it worse because now there is less people around that can prevent any pedo from acting- there aren’t many pedos but the fear is there.
Our cities were not designed around cars like in the USA.
To the right column, I would add, “Occasionally getting stuck behind a school bus, and not being allowed to pass as the stop every block”. It’s not much, but I think having 1 thing in the right column is a little bit funnier.
This implies drivers stop for buses
https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/school-bus-safety
Fair point. I don’t even need to click the link, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law both drive busses. I thought drivers blowing past would MAYBE happen every few years but apparently it happens to them at least every week.
They need to start fixing deck guns to the bus. The kids can run it! Teach 'em while their young!
I can’t let my child ride their bike on our street because of the assholes that speed down our road. I saw a biker almost get hit the other day by some idiot driver.
Given the sheer size many trucks and SUVs have ballooned up into now, pedestrians should be armed with bricks crossing the street now.
“I sacrificed my manliness to get a minivan to drive my kids around in. Whatchu talkin’ 'bout?”
Would be awesome if instead of govs pushing age verification and similar bullshit they would shift the focus to cars
That won’t be profitable, or increase the amount of surveillance.
There’s already age verification for cars.
White text on a black background… serious ink.
ok but who tf using they planet anyway rn /s
I know I’m going to be publicly beheaded for saying this, but I somehow doubt the kids aren’t playing in the street any more for a different reason.
Kids play on dead end streets in my neighbourhood, but not on streets with multiple access points.
I wonder why that correlation exists.
My quibble is that the streets wouldn’t exist without vehicle traffic (including horses). I’m sure it was safer to play in a street meant for horse traffic though.
Streets go back to the earliest large human settlements, long before vehicles.
