When it’s about cars, the “think of the children” machine suddenly breaks.
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.
Come on. Electing pedophile presidents ring a bell?
Or guns in the ’Murica.
“Not driving ar maximum speed”
Um… In US car drivers have sacrificed lives of their own children…
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.
There is a 1% of motorists who I feel did not meaningfully exist before like the early 2000s. They have some kind of mass psychosis. I have been intentionally hit, run off the road, had things thrown at me, from motorists who take it as a personal insult that I am using the same road as them. There is a tribe who feel a militant entitlement and are quite willing to use violence to enforce what they see as their natural right over vulnerable road users. It’s fucking insane. This did not happen when I was a kid, and I rarely have an excursion today without someone at least hanging out their car window and heckling me.
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
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.
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
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.
“I sacrificed my manliness to get a minivan to drive my kids around in. Whatchu talkin’ 'bout?”
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.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that parents are generally more concerned about traffic than pedophiles.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need … ‘roads’.” -Dr Emmett Brown
It’s been over 20 years since I heard about how industry had suppressed innovation. …How before cars and planes, we had balloons. And not only balloons, but some were innovating with the new marvels of electromagnetism, experimenting with high voltage faraday cages and things, finding ways to meddle with inertia, even to cancel out inertia… And once you have that, you’re only 1 step away from a rudimentary spaceship, if you’d only make an enclosure suited to being in vacuum. And indeed the development of such technology did continue. … I heard, back then, 20 years ago, that even by the 1930s, we could have had spaceships for everybody. And certainly now, and for many decades, … zero inertia propulsion. Zero-point energy. Can sustain human life indefinitely. Safe enough for a 2 year old to fly home. Can print another of itself instantly. … Such exists. By human innovation. ~ Unless of course it was all a cleverly constructed deception. … But considering the “cui bono” of it, especially in contrast to the “be very affraid, there are aliens” rap we get hit with, and the reports going around of grand plans of global domination enabled by a series of problem-reaction-solution manufactured catastrophes… It just seems silly to presume it more likely the narrative that gets pushed heavily in the corporate media. The narrative that has us disempowered, and dependent on big daddy government. Rather than, 1 in 10,000 humans can innovate something that supports the rest of us… If only the corporation would stop killing off the innovators.
The sacrifices we’ve all made, to have “cars”.
… They don’t even make it easy to fuel them with anything even remotely more clean and empowering, let alone the more advanced stuff.
Enshitification.
And now people are being denied the right to repair them too.
How much more environmental burden will that artificially accelerated churn for “profits” [wealth extraction maximisation] cause?
How long, how much worse, before we manage to break free of this, and restore VTOL, to eliminate the excessive footprint of roads on the planet…? …Maybe there are blessings in disguise here… But I really do like the idea of allowing habitats to reconnect, eliminating the death gauntlet between them, no longer mowing down wildlife and terrorising it away, whilst simultaneously freeing humanity to travel freely.
How about a third column to the sticker on the lamp post… Things drivers have sacrificed for the Corporation. …That might get even the selfish to rethink. Because I’m not sure the selfish narcissistic apaths would be swayed at all by their “win” of having sacrificed nothing for the children. But if maybe they saw how much they’ve been deprived off… Like the monkey in the cage seeing the monkey in the next cage get more fruit than they got, they throw an absolute raging fit at the injustice. If only we all knew how much the Agnotology Industry has taken from us…
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
