They'd go outside more if they could WALK anywhere
They'd go outside more if they could WALK anywhere
90 comments
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Part of why I moved to the city was wanting to escape the car based nightmare of the suburbs. Couldn't do much of anything without a car or an extremely risky walk.
I could have walked a mile to the train station with no sidewalks , and then paid $20 for a ticket into the city on a train that stops at like 10pm, but all of that sucks. I stayed inside and played a lot of video games.
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I hate when nature is absent. It's not just urban centers. Large suburban parking lots with no trees are a kind of hell for me.
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bruh same. everytime i have to ride through suburbs im just like damn this is so depressing and ugly
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I like urban centers even when they're relatively devoid of nature. What I don't like is when nature is pointlessly absent. A bunch of tall buildings providing living, working and recreational space efficiently to lots of people? Excellent. Asphalt to the horizon so that people can drive to Walmart and then drive to Applebee's? Soul-crushing.
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I know it's not quite nature, but in my neighborhood in SF there's trees on every sidewalk and multiple parks within a 5 minute walk
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I hate it when they remove nature and don't even provide shade or evaporative cooling
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Awww that's so sad. Having to be in a parking lot without trees sounds like the worst hell on earth there possibly could ever be 😭
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This is why I want to move to the netherlands. Beautiful countryside, walkable cities. Shit, I could bike to nearby cities there if I wanted to.
I'll never be able to afford to leave the hellhole known as the usa, but damnit I'll dream.
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I live in Norway. Growing up, some days in school were reserved for diverse activities. Some of my friends and I decided to bike to the swimming park in the city ~20 miles away. We didn't have to bike on car roads at all to get there, as bike lanes and good side paths lead us the whole way. Being able to get anywhere with a bike at the age of 14 is an amazing level of freedom.
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Growing up in the 90s in the usa, movies and tv always showed kids riding around on their bikes and not coming home until dark. Where the hell did they go? To get from the suburbs into town would be 10-20 miles riding on the edge of the highway almost wherever you live. No shoulder, no bike lane, no nothing (I did this to get to work for about a year. it sucked, got hit by a truck twice in that time.)
Norway sounds great.
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UK here, not perfect but we did have quite a few paths that either don't allow cars or don't have many so cycling around was pretty easy. Cars make people lazy. Many people I know will drive to avoid an 800m walk.
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samsies <3 Netherlands looks wayyy mor intrstng <3 <3 <3
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I could stare at the streets and walkways in a typical netherlands city for hours. I love good brickwork. Sometimes I get on google maps and just digitally walk though places. I don't want to point at amsterdam, because everyone knows amsterdam. Try lelystad, built on land that was underwater not that long ago but reclaimed by modern dutch engineering.
I'd gush about how beautiful their streets are, or I could link a video that does a much better job than I ever could.
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i know a place that looks extremely similar to that
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Yeah, it's called america. Unless you zoom in on a liscense plate, you don't know WHAT state that is.
Well.....I guess it's not Hawaii. Besides that though.....
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"I guess it's not Hawaii"
Meanwhile hawaii:
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You’re not wrong, but if not for the massive billboards and the american branded vehicles- ive been to a number of cities in Europe and the UK that look like this or worse, with more traffic and more, much larger buildings….(i currently live in Germany…) Also, places in Hawaii do look like this, too, unfortunately…mostly Maui and Hawai’i where there’s this much space, but Ohau’s south shore has been bad far a long time 😕
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I'd put down money on Southern California but those medians and a few other things are off.
Reverse image search is yielding Colerain, Ohio. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/24/the-talisman-of-colerain
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I'm sure there's some Geoguessr player who can tell you where there's a Subway by a Hertz rental car across from a Speedway gas station, but a stroad with nationally available brands along it doesn't narrow things down much.
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Stroads are the worst thing america ever invented.
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What the fuck is a stroad? Why is there a distinction between a street and a road?
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Summary:
Street = Has businesses, houses, shops and sidewalks. Designed for humans.
Road = Higher speed limit than streets, generally no businesses or sidewalks, as it's just there to connect areas. Designed for cars.
Stroad = A connection between areas that also has businesses. You have higher speed limits, minimal sidewalks and it's dangerous/impossible to cross on foot. The only way to get around to different businesses along a stroad is by car.
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If you go to any old town in Europe there are a lot of roads with practically no cars. You can just walk along this wide road through the town fit for dozens of people. The problem is not that there aren't enough pedestrian sidewalks, the problem is everything in modern infrastructure is being made for cars, and roads are seen as both meant for pedestrians AND cars.
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It's depressing seeing this in my city. Full groves of trees and fields ripped up and destroyed for another McDonald's and more and more apartments. It never ends does it ?
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sounds american
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Only sort of related but The Florida Project is a great film that shows children playing in the dismal misery of Florida, much like in this photo.
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Here in the Europes, I find curbside parking similarly depressing. Like, man, it should be a human right for kids to be able to go outside for playing ball. But you can't do that anywhere around here, because wherever there's kids, you can be sure that someone's parking their precious car nearby.
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I've seen cops hassle people for walking down the median before.
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That's why I moved out into the forest to raise my boy.
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...so that he'll need to be driven by you to be able to hang out with any of his friends? Sorry, I don't really understand.
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I'm only 3 miles out of town. My boy is 3, the kid across the road is 5. They're already living their best childhoods like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They know how to identify and harvest edible mushrooms. They pick blackberries and huckleberries by the bucketfuls in the summer.
My property is a few acres, has a pond with fish. It backs up to a state forest. All redwoods. A healthy salmon creek runs right by the property. There are fire roads and logging roads webbed all through the forest, so we can hike and mountain bike to our hearts content all from our front door, no driving.
I'm building zip lines and tree weaves for the kids, I'm turning the off-house 3 car garage into a pub with a bar, taps and pool table. So long story short, all his classmates and their parents drive out here to play, not the other way around. This is the place to be.
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Depends on the age why not give the benefit of the doubt
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How can a poor fella like me do the same?
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That's the same outside that was there in the 80's. Kids just do other things that aren't outside to be social, now. When I was a kid, if you wanted to play with other kids, you pretty much had to go be outside.
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The same outside but even more car and distracted driver.
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And this could be anywhere in the USA, this could be California, Texas, Fucking Virginia or even Puerto Rico.
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That very much not solarpunk. Where is the positivity? Or at least the reflexion for a solution?
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Commercial streets like this existed back when I played outside 40 years ago too. If you are going to talk about kids playing, use a photo of a residential area.
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Change the picture to a normal suburban playground but set it on fire and have an old hag calling the cops on the kids for having the audacity to enjoy life and it'll be thousand times more accurate.
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It's depressing to think that you're right. 40 years ago it looked like this, and now it looks like this too. We have civil engineers and research all around the world that shows how to build better, more human infrastructure and transportation, but America decides that this is what it needs to be. 🙃
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Okay. I hear what you're saying, but, given that everyone "needs" to be in the office and the office is in a major city, very few people live in the suburbs in the current workforce.
Most of the suburbs are owned by people either soon to be, or already retired.
When those houses get handed down to the person's progeny, generally the place is liquidated, bought by either a flipper or a landlord, and either ruined, run into the ground or otherwise trashed and taken off the market, possibly to be replaced with either a condo building, a "luxury" rental that nobody can afford, or something similarly terrible, like the house being renovated into single room "suites" for rent....
New developments are no longer an arm and a leg, but rather: both arms, both legs and at least one kidney, just for the down payment.
New "homes" are still being made and those that aren't snapped up by someone looking to make it into an "income property" are either going to rich folks from out of town that moved to the area because it's cheaper, and they sold their home in (insert large city name here) for millions of dollars.
There's a lot wrong with the housing market, and bluntly, neighborhoods have gone to shit. Parks are frequently unmaintained, and I never see anyone using any parks anymore, so many of them are getting omitted from new developments, so the number of local parks is shrinking. Add that to the growing number of people forced to live in the city where they work because commuting is a nightmare and they simply are not allowed to work from home because the boss doesn't want them to, and I'm sure we're getting more and more kids growing up in this kind of urban landscape.
The older generation can only blame themselves for doing it too... Which is likely not you, I'm talking about the people who started their career in a union, then when they decided to start their own business, got in there to union bust.
There's a lot of capitalists that drove entire markets into the dirt so they could have a bit more.
I blame reality TV
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Yea, it's always somebody else to blame.
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Same people built the Internet. You're welcome I guess.
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Yeah, that's ugly but it isn't a residential neighborhood. Kids don't go outside because cell phones exist.
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My cousin went for a walk in their aunt's residential neighborhood, and someone called the cops on them.
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Small tangent, but dude, NextDoor is a hell app. I used it for less than one day before I deleted it for being a festering cesspool of breathless Nancy Grace energy. "YOU GUYS MY RING CAMERA CAUGHT SOME TEENAGERS WALKING DOWN THE STREET AND THEY WERE LAUGHING?! WHAT WERE THEY LAUGHING ABOUT?!" Straight up, besides the caps, not exaggerating.
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I was walking on my street until some lady going 80mph almost hit me. My road elevation changes enough that at that speed you don't see someone until its too late at that speed.
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To an outsider the whole zoning approach in US seems weird.
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I visited Taipei and I was surprised to see no free-standing single-story homes even relatively far from the city center. People lived in row-houses four or five stories tall, and the first floor of pretty much every single one of these houses was occupied by a small store or restaurant. Many streets were very narrow and mopeds were common but cars less so. It was much livelier there than in a US suburb (or even many US city centers) and I enjoyed my tourist experience. Still, I would prefer to live in a quieter, less dense American-style suburb and drive if I needed to do anything except enjoy my property, but I can see why many people would prefer the opposite. I think it might be like being an introvert or extrovert.
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It is. I'm currently fighting my city about it, because our zoning is actively bankrupting the city and making it a worse place to live. It's crazy, it feels like trying to persuade someone not to shoot themselves in the head because they think it's just what you're supposed to do.
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It’s not just the kids’ cell phones. It’s the 24 hour outrage and fear driven by the news and/or social media. So their parents won’t encourage them to wander off, and as others have mentioned the neighbors will call the cops on them if they do wander.
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American style subdivisions are the absolute worst for kids, nothing to do at all.
Walk around the same 5 streets with 150 houses around, get kicked out of all of the common areas by Karens and HOAs.
Kids don't go outside there either because there is not much of a point, if you're lucky there may be a tennis court that you can hang out at.
Good luck going to see your friends from school though, even though they live in the neighborhood across the street, the street in question is a 5 lane highway with no pedestrian bridge or tunnels.
Wanna go somewhere with other kids your age, better hope you can have someone drive you.
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I live in a residential neighborhood. The main demographic that can afford to move in to the suburb is people already nearing retirement with grown up kids. My kids are constantly bored out of their heads outside because there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nobody to play with. We've hosted seven exchange students and the number one culture shock is the loss of independence that goes with moving into a car dependent suburb. Our city design, pretty much everywhere in the US, blows ass. We could be doing so many things so much better, and it would actually cost everyone, taxpayers included, less money. We are all literally paying orders of magnitude more to do the stupid shitty thing and pretending that it's great.
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90 comments