I think that having more kids also forces parents to let go. I have encountered ONE family besides ourselves in my entire life comfortable with letting kids walk over to another kids house unannounced and ask to play. It does not surprise me that they have four kids.
My admiration is immense for parents like Martinko who have the will and gumption to minimize screen time and steer their children to the much healthier activities, especially outdoors. There is nothing more sad than people, especially a family, around the dinner table with heads bowed, praying to their devices.
Your kids being in a good, fairly safe neighborhood, has a small bit of luck but a huge bit of parental choice on exactly, to the house, where to live. With that Location choice constrained by where sellers are selling, and budgets.
The US needs more “big new” housing developments, with lots more govt support for married couples with kids to get the nice new 2,000 (?) sqft 4 bedroom houses—owner occupied, not investment rental.
Wonk fantasy: govt loan, at Fed interest rate, with repayments creating 30% tax credits- $10,000 repayment creates a $3,000 tax credit. This loan would be one-time in both partner’s lives.
Max loan based on years married, and number of kids.
Example: $1,000 for each month of marriage (min. 20 months, $20,000). 5 yrs is 60 months so $60k, max. 10 years of $120k. Of loan, to buy a new house (first occupant).
$10,000 per child up to max 10, so max $100,000.
Most Econ support is too small to be decisive, so it “doesn’t work” since it’s not enough to overcome the culture. Most govt programs go to help “the needy” without making those self-INsufficient folk change their self-destructive life-style choices. This program helps the not-needy to be even better, so lower-middle or middle to go up a quintile to mid or upper middle.
New housing developments vary, but a lot of the good new ones even build share third spaces into the very concept. Park, pools, community centers, etc that are walkable.
We can knock the big developers (their actual building skill leaves much to be desired), but increasingly they seem to "get" what people want out of a community and not just a house. When your slamming down 1,000 houses in one place you can build amenities into the plan.
I think that sort of thing peaked, in my state, about 20 years ago.
There was a 90s development in or rather then just outside Austin that received much hate, for putting all this impervious cover on the aquifer. Which it definitely did, no mistake! - and contributed to the downstream consequences.
But in retrospect - with what has come along in the 25-30 years since - I’ve been forced to own that that development is a model of integrity and beauty … Paths and common areas and OG trees left through much of it.
Unfortunately I think what they are building now involves much greater scraping (often excavating, meaning there will never be trees shading the streets, just a local fact) and still more crowding and fewer amenities. The rationale I suppose is that it’s all for immigrants and don’t we all know what they moved away from and at least this is not a colonia? Wastewater is carried away underground! SFH - check! Doesn’t matter if it appreciates (or depreciates) less well than the new truck in the driveway. (Yes, actual colonias continue to be built …).
Your luck comes from it being before social media and having girls. My son had far more screen time than my daughter. I'm really glad I didn't have to deal with social media.
It’s very hard to live parenting in hindsight. I often wish I had been born 10 years earlier so that the iPhone and social media would’ve hit my family right when they were in their first or second year of college. I’ll never know the counterfactual, but it is now something I am very sympathetic towards. That families that manage to raise their children without social media and phones probably get things that I didn’t get and I am happy for anyone that can avoid the stuff. My family went through.
My kids finished high school in 07 and 09 so they were in college when it really started (smartphones and Facebook). Haidt dates it a little later yet to 2012 or 13.
I don't know what you went through but I think I have a pretty good guess. Sorry.
Facebook doesn’t become an website you can access if you aren’t a college student until late 2006 (ie didn’t have .edu email). Before that, had been at universities only (only .edu emails could enroll and only if it was at your school). And the iPhone doesn’t come out until 2007. Even then you don’t see immediate adoption of either. Facebook doesn’t go public until 2012. And they purchased Instagram just prior to that also in 2012. The front facing camera on the iPhone is iPhone 4 which was 2010. That was a major catalyst for Instagram social interactions and selfies.
If your kids had finished high school in 07 and 09, then tbh, they completely missed all of it. It might as well have been it didnt exist. They would’ve been exposed to Instagram at the earliest in 2012 as before Facebook bought it, it was just an obscure photo sharing website. You want to ask where were your kids in 2013. Even then you’re not really in the worst of unless they’re constantly exposed and getting pulled in like a tractor beam unless it’s nonstop 7-8th grade. If anything your kids had the option to even contemplate being on it or off it — their brains were more fully formed, they likely had jobs or either had graduated college or were.
I just think even missing this by a few years is a completely different cohort. My oldest hit 8th grade 2013 and had skipped a grade. I felt like we were parenting a buzzsaw.
The birth rate was at its highest when houses were effectively more expensive in terms of hours worked (but land was practically free), the roads were dirt, there were no cars, or trains, and there was no electronic communication whatsoever, and the population density was the lowest in the civilized world. I feel the complaints about the high speed roads, though, because the only road out of my driveway is usually travelled at between 50-70 mph.
Our kids are all still babies, so it's just theoretical at this point, but our idea is no phones, no computers with internet, and no TV except on special occasions for movies. I think the internet probably gets a bad rap compared to cable TV, but the real issue is just the low value to me of cheap content. I can buy more printed content than any child could read in a year in minutes of working. It doesn't save me appreciable amounts of money to have oodles of "free" content for my child, and if they want to talk to adults, they can give me an email to send to them. I can buy more movies with a couple emails and a phone call than any child could watch in a reasonable time period. Unlimited Skibidi Toilet for one low price is just not a value proposition that works for me.
On walkable neighborhoods, part of the issue seems to be the definition of walkable. The suburb/development I live in is somewhat unwalkable because it doesn’t have sidewalks. Yet it was built in the ‘50s. I know logically that no one thought it was unwalkable for kids then, and honestly is isn’t that bad now if people stop walking in the bloody street and get up in the grass. Still, my wife wouldn’t let our under 10’s walk across the street alone to check and see if a friend wants to play.
So some of walk ability has to come down to how people define that.
I think the developers really imagined no one (meaning: adults) would be walking. And they were right.
It was only later that people started to jog (my mother used to say if we saw a guy running he must have been in the military, and it’s true that if you are picking your way sedately down a rocky park path, and a bunch of guys fly by bouncing off said rocks, they are still likely to be servicemen).
Only after jogging became a thing did those not inclined to jog, embrace the health walk.
People hardly ever even used to walk their dogs, in the suburban neighborhood where I grew up! And it has sidewalks, both sides, throughout - though not the pleasant grassy buffer of older areas.
It’s less the cars driving past that are the problem than the fact that everybody has multiple cars and trucks and a garage too full to park in so that the streets are often lined with cars especially in more modest neighborhoods.
Thus the kids can’t even cling to the curb.
Narrower streets make for slower traffic so wherever possible we should be slimming the road and adding sidewalks with grassy verge to further separate.
Urbanists should concentrate on the (disappointing) already-existing much more than they do.
You are probably right that the early days of joggers were mostly ex-military. I'm sure that's much less true today. And I agree that adult joggers, walkers, and bikers are much more common today. I suspect that explains why we seem to be playing catch-up regarding multi-modal roads. It could be the other way around but I don't think better infrastructure explains much of the increase even if there's some chicken and egg going on.
In college I took a pavement design course. There was no discussion of accomodating bikes and pedestrians. No other course did that either. Hopefully that has changed though I suspect it varies school to school.
I am not sure that I buy that people didn't expect walking. The elementary school is less than a mile from almost all the students, the middle school just two blocks down the road. I am not sure if they were built at exactly the same time, but it must have been fairly close. Likewise there are shopping centers nearby and churches, so people could walk to lots of places.
Although I don't disagree that people took cars a lot in the past, people also did a lot of walking, particularly children. Walking a few miles to get to school and back was not uncommon, nor to visit with friends or go to the fishing/ice skating pond. Whether walking or on bikes, the point is that there was a lot of non-motorized transit. More than there seems to be now with the exact same infrastructure.
I am not clear how your point about cars parked in the street comports with your argument that streets should be narrower. Cars parked in the street defacto creates narrower streets, which is often a safety hazard if you have to swing into the middle of the road in order to get around a parked car (a common occurrence here.)
I agree that sidewalks are good to have in neighborhoods, but slimming roads to do so is a problem. We also should stop accepting that people can just treat the road like a sidewalk. (Here in PA it is technically illegal to walk in the road if there is a berm or area next to the road. Needless to say no one pays attention, and the hefty 5$ fine isn't much deterrent. )
"I am not sure that I buy that people didn't expect walking."
I would agree kids everywhere generally walk less than in the past, especially walking to school.
For adults, we should qualify comments with how long ago. If you mean before WWII, I agree with you entirely. After WWII, We need to look separately at city-urban, suburban/small town, and rural. I define city dwellers as the subset going where parking has a real cost or traffic makes other options better for most. I don't know how city dwellers have changed but they walk the most on average. I'm inclined to think their walking hasn't changed much but IDK. I'm also inclined to think rural hasn't changed either.
For suburban, I'd bet it runs strongly in the other direction for adults, especially walking for exercise with no destination, which it seems Luciaphile was mainly referring to.
I should specify that I am still talking about kids walking, not so much parents. I suspect as recently as the 90's parents still walked to friends' houses for barbeques or whatever, but that was probably much less common than in cities. For kids though there seems to be a huge drop in walking/bike riding around to visit friends and play vs having your parents drive you, even in the same area over time.
I'm sorry I was unclear. I last lived in a neighborhood where the streets were very wide, in particular the entrance street. As if the builder had supposed the street was going to end up going somewhere - which it did not. Just curved around in that non-grid way. A street 40 feet wide, though leading nowhere and lined with houses, encouraged people to drive much faster than they did in, say, the much fancier parts of town where the streets were made narrower pre-war.
There was a lot of unhappiness about this driving behavior on the part of the moms as these were the streets children used to walk or ride their bikes to school.
It was obvious to me that the abnormally wide street could have easily accomodated sidewalks on both sides, with buffer, and the visual effect would have been to slow cars.
Cars parked in the street wasn't our particular problem. This came home to me more when we began to think of moving, having no longer any need for "good school area". Neighborhood after neighborhood had this issue of cars lining the streets. (The narrowness or not thus no longer came into play being as there was nowhere to walk unless you owned the center of the road, which would make everyone hate you.) And the little driveways full of cars. Walking "up in the yards" would not have been possible. It was just as unpedestrian-friendly as you can imagine despite the slightly greater density than our own hood.
I was the chief walker in my neighborhood and it was often commented upon especially in the early years. I'd meet somebody and they'd say, "Oh, I've seen you walking ..." - quizzically.
That's because while plenty of women walked, pumping their arms for exercise - I was the only one who walked to the store, post office, etc. regularly and carried my groceries home. And in truth this walk was a little ridiculous - just outside what I felt to be a comfortable, non-time-sucking distance - especially given that it partly took place on some unpleasant roads and involved crossing an arterial at a light if I wanted to go to the grocery.
This changed some later on, with more people doing it as walkability entered the discourse, which I was pleased to see - but I knew that the distance really wasn’t right for everyday, for many people.
ETA: when you don't live in a grid, a roundy-round walk grows tedious. As much as anything I've always enjoyed having some destination.
I do agree that grids (or close to them) with stop signs, cross walks and sidewalks make walking a lot better. I don't much like the seemingly popular aesthetic of lots of curvy roads with no long range vision coupled with a lack of stop signs and sidewalks. I can only assume they are going for a more rural vibe, but growing up in the middle of rural no where, never knowing if some idiot pedestrian was going to be in the middle of your lane as you came around a corner was not one of the selling points. Predictability leads to safety in these cases.
Also, during our 2 decades there, the city put up no parking signs in front of our house and the others all up our side of our street (which was the street the ultra-wide street T'ed into). This ultimately caused no one any hardship. It was a major cycle route where hundreds of bikes went past in a day and this way they didn't have to worry about car doors opening in their path as they moved to avoid them.
There didn't seem to be a similar creativity where pedestrians were concerned, though.
There was a wasteland ("greenbelt"/drainage or dry creek all full of invasive plants) behind our house and that too could easily have been made a footpath had anyone in America ever entertained the notion.
Ah! I volunteer for the group www.letgrow.org (Leonore Skenazy, Jonathan Haidt) = all about promoting childhood independence.
Yesterday, my 19 year-old introverted daughter, home from college for the summer, decided it was too much trouble to ask for the BATHROOM CODE at Taco Bell (yes, I admit going there), and she'd wait until our next stop. Uncomfortable with some categories of human interaction. She's a extremely resourceful college student, knows how to get things done. My extroverted, Gen X self is flabbergasted when these little things come up.
House blocks are 50-66pct smaller and roads are narrower.
Smaller blocks = less garage space = more cars parked on already narrow streets, adding sightline blocking and other hazard.
Smaller blocks = less footpaths across the front strips.
Smaller blocks and narrow streets = increased density. 2-3-4x number of people in same space = 2-3-4x number of cars on those narrow roads (with higher stressed out impatient drivers due to disastrous traffic management - one the top causes of stress - across the entire value chain).
Smaller blocks = less space for kids play areas in backyards, meaning they can't go to each other houses but instead have to go to a public park.
Yes, there is over-cautous parenting as a major issue. But the above factors in urban design do increase real risks to outside urban play, factors I rarely see talked about while everyone blames over cautious parenting pyschology....)
I think that having more kids also forces parents to let go. I have encountered ONE family besides ourselves in my entire life comfortable with letting kids walk over to another kids house unannounced and ask to play. It does not surprise me that they have four kids.
My admiration is immense for parents like Martinko who have the will and gumption to minimize screen time and steer their children to the much healthier activities, especially outdoors. There is nothing more sad than people, especially a family, around the dinner table with heads bowed, praying to their devices.
Your kids being in a good, fairly safe neighborhood, has a small bit of luck but a huge bit of parental choice on exactly, to the house, where to live. With that Location choice constrained by where sellers are selling, and budgets.
The US needs more “big new” housing developments, with lots more govt support for married couples with kids to get the nice new 2,000 (?) sqft 4 bedroom houses—owner occupied, not investment rental.
Wonk fantasy: govt loan, at Fed interest rate, with repayments creating 30% tax credits- $10,000 repayment creates a $3,000 tax credit. This loan would be one-time in both partner’s lives.
Max loan based on years married, and number of kids.
Example: $1,000 for each month of marriage (min. 20 months, $20,000). 5 yrs is 60 months so $60k, max. 10 years of $120k. Of loan, to buy a new house (first occupant).
$10,000 per child up to max 10, so max $100,000.
Most Econ support is too small to be decisive, so it “doesn’t work” since it’s not enough to overcome the culture. Most govt programs go to help “the needy” without making those self-INsufficient folk change their self-destructive life-style choices. This program helps the not-needy to be even better, so lower-middle or middle to go up a quintile to mid or upper middle.
We need more help for married folk with kids.
We moved to a cul de sac in a new housing development. If I had it to do over again, I would... move to a cul de sac in a new housing development.
New housing developments vary, but a lot of the good new ones even build share third spaces into the very concept. Park, pools, community centers, etc that are walkable.
We can knock the big developers (their actual building skill leaves much to be desired), but increasingly they seem to "get" what people want out of a community and not just a house. When your slamming down 1,000 houses in one place you can build amenities into the plan.
I think that sort of thing peaked, in my state, about 20 years ago.
There was a 90s development in or rather then just outside Austin that received much hate, for putting all this impervious cover on the aquifer. Which it definitely did, no mistake! - and contributed to the downstream consequences.
But in retrospect - with what has come along in the 25-30 years since - I’ve been forced to own that that development is a model of integrity and beauty … Paths and common areas and OG trees left through much of it.
Unfortunately I think what they are building now involves much greater scraping (often excavating, meaning there will never be trees shading the streets, just a local fact) and still more crowding and fewer amenities. The rationale I suppose is that it’s all for immigrants and don’t we all know what they moved away from and at least this is not a colonia? Wastewater is carried away underground! SFH - check! Doesn’t matter if it appreciates (or depreciates) less well than the new truck in the driveway. (Yes, actual colonias continue to be built …).
Your luck comes from it being before social media and having girls. My son had far more screen time than my daughter. I'm really glad I didn't have to deal with social media.
It’s very hard to live parenting in hindsight. I often wish I had been born 10 years earlier so that the iPhone and social media would’ve hit my family right when they were in their first or second year of college. I’ll never know the counterfactual, but it is now something I am very sympathetic towards. That families that manage to raise their children without social media and phones probably get things that I didn’t get and I am happy for anyone that can avoid the stuff. My family went through.
My kids finished high school in 07 and 09 so they were in college when it really started (smartphones and Facebook). Haidt dates it a little later yet to 2012 or 13.
I don't know what you went through but I think I have a pretty good guess. Sorry.
Facebook doesn’t become an website you can access if you aren’t a college student until late 2006 (ie didn’t have .edu email). Before that, had been at universities only (only .edu emails could enroll and only if it was at your school). And the iPhone doesn’t come out until 2007. Even then you don’t see immediate adoption of either. Facebook doesn’t go public until 2012. And they purchased Instagram just prior to that also in 2012. The front facing camera on the iPhone is iPhone 4 which was 2010. That was a major catalyst for Instagram social interactions and selfies.
If your kids had finished high school in 07 and 09, then tbh, they completely missed all of it. It might as well have been it didnt exist. They would’ve been exposed to Instagram at the earliest in 2012 as before Facebook bought it, it was just an obscure photo sharing website. You want to ask where were your kids in 2013. Even then you’re not really in the worst of unless they’re constantly exposed and getting pulled in like a tractor beam unless it’s nonstop 7-8th grade. If anything your kids had the option to even contemplate being on it or off it — their brains were more fully formed, they likely had jobs or either had graduated college or were.
I just think even missing this by a few years is a completely different cohort. My oldest hit 8th grade 2013 and had skipped a grade. I felt like we were parenting a buzzsaw.
Ok, thx for adding detail to what I already said. Unless you misunderstood me, I'm not sure the purpose but sure.
I must have misunderstood you.
I was pretty succinct but let make shorten it further. My kids were out of high school when it started so I can only guess what you went through.
The birth rate was at its highest when houses were effectively more expensive in terms of hours worked (but land was practically free), the roads were dirt, there were no cars, or trains, and there was no electronic communication whatsoever, and the population density was the lowest in the civilized world. I feel the complaints about the high speed roads, though, because the only road out of my driveway is usually travelled at between 50-70 mph.
Our kids are all still babies, so it's just theoretical at this point, but our idea is no phones, no computers with internet, and no TV except on special occasions for movies. I think the internet probably gets a bad rap compared to cable TV, but the real issue is just the low value to me of cheap content. I can buy more printed content than any child could read in a year in minutes of working. It doesn't save me appreciable amounts of money to have oodles of "free" content for my child, and if they want to talk to adults, they can give me an email to send to them. I can buy more movies with a couple emails and a phone call than any child could watch in a reasonable time period. Unlimited Skibidi Toilet for one low price is just not a value proposition that works for me.
On walkable neighborhoods, part of the issue seems to be the definition of walkable. The suburb/development I live in is somewhat unwalkable because it doesn’t have sidewalks. Yet it was built in the ‘50s. I know logically that no one thought it was unwalkable for kids then, and honestly is isn’t that bad now if people stop walking in the bloody street and get up in the grass. Still, my wife wouldn’t let our under 10’s walk across the street alone to check and see if a friend wants to play.
So some of walk ability has to come down to how people define that.
I think the developers really imagined no one (meaning: adults) would be walking. And they were right.
It was only later that people started to jog (my mother used to say if we saw a guy running he must have been in the military, and it’s true that if you are picking your way sedately down a rocky park path, and a bunch of guys fly by bouncing off said rocks, they are still likely to be servicemen).
Only after jogging became a thing did those not inclined to jog, embrace the health walk.
People hardly ever even used to walk their dogs, in the suburban neighborhood where I grew up! And it has sidewalks, both sides, throughout - though not the pleasant grassy buffer of older areas.
It’s less the cars driving past that are the problem than the fact that everybody has multiple cars and trucks and a garage too full to park in so that the streets are often lined with cars especially in more modest neighborhoods.
Thus the kids can’t even cling to the curb.
Narrower streets make for slower traffic so wherever possible we should be slimming the road and adding sidewalks with grassy verge to further separate.
Urbanists should concentrate on the (disappointing) already-existing much more than they do.
You are probably right that the early days of joggers were mostly ex-military. I'm sure that's much less true today. And I agree that adult joggers, walkers, and bikers are much more common today. I suspect that explains why we seem to be playing catch-up regarding multi-modal roads. It could be the other way around but I don't think better infrastructure explains much of the increase even if there's some chicken and egg going on.
In college I took a pavement design course. There was no discussion of accomodating bikes and pedestrians. No other course did that either. Hopefully that has changed though I suspect it varies school to school.
I am not sure that I buy that people didn't expect walking. The elementary school is less than a mile from almost all the students, the middle school just two blocks down the road. I am not sure if they were built at exactly the same time, but it must have been fairly close. Likewise there are shopping centers nearby and churches, so people could walk to lots of places.
Although I don't disagree that people took cars a lot in the past, people also did a lot of walking, particularly children. Walking a few miles to get to school and back was not uncommon, nor to visit with friends or go to the fishing/ice skating pond. Whether walking or on bikes, the point is that there was a lot of non-motorized transit. More than there seems to be now with the exact same infrastructure.
I am not clear how your point about cars parked in the street comports with your argument that streets should be narrower. Cars parked in the street defacto creates narrower streets, which is often a safety hazard if you have to swing into the middle of the road in order to get around a parked car (a common occurrence here.)
I agree that sidewalks are good to have in neighborhoods, but slimming roads to do so is a problem. We also should stop accepting that people can just treat the road like a sidewalk. (Here in PA it is technically illegal to walk in the road if there is a berm or area next to the road. Needless to say no one pays attention, and the hefty 5$ fine isn't much deterrent. )
"I am not sure that I buy that people didn't expect walking."
I would agree kids everywhere generally walk less than in the past, especially walking to school.
For adults, we should qualify comments with how long ago. If you mean before WWII, I agree with you entirely. After WWII, We need to look separately at city-urban, suburban/small town, and rural. I define city dwellers as the subset going where parking has a real cost or traffic makes other options better for most. I don't know how city dwellers have changed but they walk the most on average. I'm inclined to think their walking hasn't changed much but IDK. I'm also inclined to think rural hasn't changed either.
For suburban, I'd bet it runs strongly in the other direction for adults, especially walking for exercise with no destination, which it seems Luciaphile was mainly referring to.
I should specify that I am still talking about kids walking, not so much parents. I suspect as recently as the 90's parents still walked to friends' houses for barbeques or whatever, but that was probably much less common than in cities. For kids though there seems to be a huge drop in walking/bike riding around to visit friends and play vs having your parents drive you, even in the same area over time.
Kids: yes, I agreed with you.
Right or wrong, Luciaphile change the topic to adults and your response seemed to imply she was talking about kids.
I'm sorry I was unclear. I last lived in a neighborhood where the streets were very wide, in particular the entrance street. As if the builder had supposed the street was going to end up going somewhere - which it did not. Just curved around in that non-grid way. A street 40 feet wide, though leading nowhere and lined with houses, encouraged people to drive much faster than they did in, say, the much fancier parts of town where the streets were made narrower pre-war.
There was a lot of unhappiness about this driving behavior on the part of the moms as these were the streets children used to walk or ride their bikes to school.
It was obvious to me that the abnormally wide street could have easily accomodated sidewalks on both sides, with buffer, and the visual effect would have been to slow cars.
Cars parked in the street wasn't our particular problem. This came home to me more when we began to think of moving, having no longer any need for "good school area". Neighborhood after neighborhood had this issue of cars lining the streets. (The narrowness or not thus no longer came into play being as there was nowhere to walk unless you owned the center of the road, which would make everyone hate you.) And the little driveways full of cars. Walking "up in the yards" would not have been possible. It was just as unpedestrian-friendly as you can imagine despite the slightly greater density than our own hood.
I was the chief walker in my neighborhood and it was often commented upon especially in the early years. I'd meet somebody and they'd say, "Oh, I've seen you walking ..." - quizzically.
That's because while plenty of women walked, pumping their arms for exercise - I was the only one who walked to the store, post office, etc. regularly and carried my groceries home. And in truth this walk was a little ridiculous - just outside what I felt to be a comfortable, non-time-sucking distance - especially given that it partly took place on some unpleasant roads and involved crossing an arterial at a light if I wanted to go to the grocery.
This changed some later on, with more people doing it as walkability entered the discourse, which I was pleased to see - but I knew that the distance really wasn’t right for everyday, for many people.
ETA: when you don't live in a grid, a roundy-round walk grows tedious. As much as anything I've always enjoyed having some destination.
I do agree that grids (or close to them) with stop signs, cross walks and sidewalks make walking a lot better. I don't much like the seemingly popular aesthetic of lots of curvy roads with no long range vision coupled with a lack of stop signs and sidewalks. I can only assume they are going for a more rural vibe, but growing up in the middle of rural no where, never knowing if some idiot pedestrian was going to be in the middle of your lane as you came around a corner was not one of the selling points. Predictability leads to safety in these cases.
Also, during our 2 decades there, the city put up no parking signs in front of our house and the others all up our side of our street (which was the street the ultra-wide street T'ed into). This ultimately caused no one any hardship. It was a major cycle route where hundreds of bikes went past in a day and this way they didn't have to worry about car doors opening in their path as they moved to avoid them.
There didn't seem to be a similar creativity where pedestrians were concerned, though.
There was a wasteland ("greenbelt"/drainage or dry creek all full of invasive plants) behind our house and that too could easily have been made a footpath had anyone in America ever entertained the notion.
The thing preventing walkable neighborhoods is land–use regulation. Most other factors are noise.
Ah! I volunteer for the group www.letgrow.org (Leonore Skenazy, Jonathan Haidt) = all about promoting childhood independence.
Yesterday, my 19 year-old introverted daughter, home from college for the summer, decided it was too much trouble to ask for the BATHROOM CODE at Taco Bell (yes, I admit going there), and she'd wait until our next stop. Uncomfortable with some categories of human interaction. She's a extremely resourceful college student, knows how to get things done. My extroverted, Gen X self is flabbergasted when these little things come up.
House blocks are 50-66pct smaller and roads are narrower.
Smaller blocks = less garage space = more cars parked on already narrow streets, adding sightline blocking and other hazard.
Smaller blocks = less footpaths across the front strips.
Smaller blocks and narrow streets = increased density. 2-3-4x number of people in same space = 2-3-4x number of cars on those narrow roads (with higher stressed out impatient drivers due to disastrous traffic management - one the top causes of stress - across the entire value chain).
Smaller blocks = less space for kids play areas in backyards, meaning they can't go to each other houses but instead have to go to a public park.
Yes, there is over-cautous parenting as a major issue. But the above factors in urban design do increase real risks to outside urban play, factors I rarely see talked about while everyone blames over cautious parenting pyschology....)
the smugness of the upper middle class about their child rearing fads is just ...
what about the null hypothesis?