Having grown up in deep suburbia where I couldn't do anything without an adult + a car, I always marveled at the freedom that kids seemed to have in some TV shows. Even shows that weren't overtly urban always had these underlying assumptions that kids were meeting up without adults around to make it happen.
That sort of thing was impossible for me. No sidewalks, no pedestrians, barely any bikers. It was just cars everywhere all the time. One time I decided to make the 6-mile trip to the mall on foot. It was a harrowing experience, but I was a rebellious teenager and I just wanted some independence, even if it meant spending half a day walking just to go to a mall.
I had a bike, I love riding bikes. These days, I bike everywhere all the time (I don't drive) but I also live in a bike-able place now
The roads where I grew up had no shoulder and people frequently whipped around the windy roads at 35 mph. The only bikers I ever saw were fully lycra-clad race cyclist type of people. I never saw a mother biking with her kid, for example. I was afraid to be on a bike on the streets. At least with walking I could take a step or two off the road when a fast moving car was coming.
Go with the flow! Since about 10 to 11 years of age I could do 30mph easily.
I discovered this on a crappy folding bike with 2-speed duo-matic, while being in a hurry and thus angrily overtook a slow Citroen 2CV :-)
Looking at the speedometer from the outside. Showed 50kph, so I must have been faster, or the speedometer slightly wrong.
Whatever, that experience has shown me that I could do that, and from there on
it was in my 'muscle memory', ready to be used at will.
Which then went up to 40/41 on road bikes on flat grounds with no headwinds, for about an hour sustained. But I often did 44 to 47, always trying to push the needle of my speedometer as long as possible to the right.
Downhill easily 50 to 55. Highest speed ever(downhill OFC) was 95kph, which is about 59mph. Still doing that sometimes, but less often nowadays. Need to be in the Rockies for loong descents, weather has to be good, streets mostly empty, which they aren't when weather is good, and so on.
I guarantee you that you'd never let your kids ride a bike on the streets where I grew up. I have three kids and it would be downright irresponsible to let them ride on streets designed solely for fast moving car traffic with absolutely no space anything but cars. Virtually nobody cycled and nobody walked on these streets. Even adults were too afraid to do it. There was not a single sidewalk in my town. The culture around where I grew up was that if you wanted to take a walk you DROVE YOUR CAR to a park and then walked there. Nobody and I mean NOBODY just walked on the street. Even the track team didn't run on the streets because parents were concerned about safety
This isn't an issue of limiting myself. This is just an issue of safety.
Small towns and suburbs don't have to be huge road/car hellscapes.
I think most Americans don't realize how good it could be.
Towns with good walking paths, public transit, and, yes, safe bike paths are:
1. Cheaper for governments to maintain infrastructure - heavy road use leads to more requirements of maintenance. Road sizes in the US are also huge. Needlessly giant firetrucks keep building standards this way.
2. Cheaper for getting around - no gas/insurance/car required.
3. Cheaper for housing - car storage takes up a ton of space.
4. Much, much quieter - cars are the noisiest thing in any town.
5. Much more social and therefore more community oriented. This fosters a more trusting society - something we are in dire need of.
6. Easier to get around as things like grocery stores are built in walking distance to dwellings.
7. Just much more beautiful.
It's not just big cities that can benefit from these things. Small towns in the Netherlands are much better than Amsterdam in this way, for example.
A very small town can have a town square that you'll see your neighbours in as you buy groceries.
The model we've made for ourselves is extremely expensive and literally dystopic hell.
We don't need anything other than better organization to get to utopia here. We just lack imagination.
Europe could learn a lot from America in economics. But here is where America needs to learn from Europe.
Related note: It'd be great if cities were more child friendly. A big challenge is cars, the 4000+ lb fast moving metal boxes... It'd be great if there were more car-minimal areas in cities, enclosed areas with parks and restaurants that had parking on the outside, but no cars and parking on the inside. And, in areas where there are cars, it'd be great if it went: sidewalk, bike lane, barrier, parking, then cars. That way there's a big "margin of safety" between where kids walk and where the cars are.
You're making me think of malls in LA like The Grove which are simulacrum of walkable, people sized neighborhoods which aren't available in that region outside of Disneyland.
Also, public transit systems are very safe during commuter hours. That’s when they work best. If I were a parent, I would not be concerned about letting my children take public transit / walk home as a group during 3-4pm. The city really is filled with other kids doing the same thing.
This was my life as a kid. It was wonderful. I made and maintained some of my best friendships literally just going to or from home on the subway with schoolmates.
I grew up in NYC, down at the end of Brooklyn by Coney Island / Brighton Beach.
My entire life, I have always called the NYC Subway the “great equalizer.” For a tiny sum of money (75 cents when I was a kid, just over $2 now) you could get anywhere you wanted in the city. Transfers were free. The subway goes nearly everywhere.
I used the hell out of it, especially because students (aka anyone under 18) rides the subway M-F for free.
So while I didn’t have bikes or stoops, I did have access to see friends and do things that were otherwise completely inaccessible to me. Sure, I didn’t ride the subway alone until I was a teenager, but before that I had buses.
It’s different, but I don’t regret it. Once I got to high school, I went to a school in lower Manhattan, which opened up my world even more.
What a great article. The quality of life in America is not great is this is a big reason why. I grew up in the suburbs and pretty much every kid had a bike and did help but stuff was so spread out it was still relatively useless and I feel like the newer suburbs that are even further out a bike would prove to be less useful.
I grew up in a rather medium sized town in Eastern Europe.
Since I was maybe 5 or 6, my daily scheduled involved waking up, going outside with a gang of people of various ages (honestly it was all the way to college level at some points, they were the actual adults in the "room") and just having fun the entire day.
Around mid-day, if we were near our communist blocks you might hear our parents shout from the windows that it's time to eat, we'd sprint up and eat real fast and then go back down to continue mucking about.
We explored old forts, jumped with our bikes in the river, played hide & seek, climbed all sorts of buildings and trees etc. We sometimes hurt ourselves but were back on the street in record time.
The article reminded me of this, and I think it was an awesome way to grow up. And to link it back to the article. I don't get the diverse conclusion. I don't resonate with it at all. We were all relatively poor, of the same race and had very similar upbringings and possible futures. We were similar in more ways than different, and that was great.
> I don't get the diverse conclusion. I don't resonate with it at all. We were all relatively poor, of the same race and had very similar upbringings and possible futures. We were similar in more ways than different, and that was great.
You’re not wrong that you likely didn’t have much diversity where you grew up. My parents are Ukrainian and Belarusian and I grew up in Brighton Beach, so I get it.
But: the diversity I got from living in NYC was insane. By the time I got to junior high I had met every race and ethnicity, eaten nearly every possible cuisine, learned a bunch about every religion, and so on.
Contrast that with my wife who grew up in Columbus, GA, where they had one “ethnic” restaurant and it was the “Chinese” spot, and you can imagine there were a massive amount of differences growing up. I didn’t have to learn about other cultures when I got older; I had grown up immersed in them, and it made it so much easier to find common ground with literally anyone.
That sort of thing was impossible for me. No sidewalks, no pedestrians, barely any bikers. It was just cars everywhere all the time. One time I decided to make the 6-mile trip to the mall on foot. It was a harrowing experience, but I was a rebellious teenager and I just wanted some independence, even if it meant spending half a day walking just to go to a mall.