When it's about cars, the "think of the children" machine suddenly breaks.
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.
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.
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
Not helicopter parents. They are part of the problem, but that’s not it. I have kids, and the reason they’re not outside is that most everything can be done inside now to meet with friends. Video calls, gaming with Discord, etc. They regularly just phone up and hang out. For us “old people” we had a household landline, that’s it, and meeting up with bicycles or stickball in the street or whatever was the only way we could hang out.
That’s why. Times change.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that parents are generally more concerned about traffic than pedophiles.
"Not driving ar maximum speed"
On the right column: "high speed limits near schools", that's their brave sacrifice
"sometimes slow down near schools"
* if they feel like it.
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.
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.
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.
Given the sheer size many trucks and SUVs have ballooned up into now, pedestrians should be armed with bricks crossing the street now.
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