I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them.
My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house.
I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult.
I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs.
40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says:
Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design.
"Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well.
The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
The article cites the huge drop in children's mobility in England since the 1970s. Planning here pays more attention to making it safer to walk than it did in the 70s. The numbers show it is far safer. We still have that decline. Does that not show it has to be a cultural change in parenting?
It does seem like it. However, there's the game theory problem/positive feedback loop where each parent who defects and drives their kid makes it more dangerous for all the other kids who are still walking; iterate a few times and everybody has defected and is worse off than before.
Perhaps it was culture, but the above loop only needs cheaper cars and more income, both things present in the 70s as the effects of WWII wore off.
Its far safer to walk than it was in 70s despite more parents driving their kids around but we still have kids walking less. The feedback loop is possible, but its not what is happening.
I think its linked to a general feeling of safety. I live in a village where people feel they know each other etc. and lots of kids walk to school. Kids in cities are statistically as safe, but the atmosphere is different.
Seattle here, Ballard is ok but we still do a lot of dumb sh*t because of our car culture. We just aren’t very honest about speed, traffic density, and kid obscuring onstreet parking.
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement.
i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars.
Here's things our traffic engineer told me:
1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..."
2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way.
3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k.
4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign.
5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit.
My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
Americans and their cars are simply insane. Most cars here in Europe are, well, cars. Still dangerous tons of fast moving metal bullets, but in the US cars are essentially designed to efficiently kill children. The hood of many cars is so high that you ensure to hit the kid's head in an accident. And people drive these huge tanks in the city where there is zero need for them and they are just impractical in every way because you compete for limited space.
if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them.
they aren't tall enough to roll over the top, even a smaller sedan.
being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
> if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them.
That's not true. Obviously if you hit a child on the highway with 100km/h that child is gonna be dead. But when you're going 30 in a residential area and suddenly there is a child in front of you car, so you hit the break slowing down to 15km/h it makes a huge difference how your car is build.
> being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
Safety doesn't work by just teaching the weakest part to protect themselves while allowing everyone else to build more and more deadly machines. This car centricity that puts the blame on pedestrians for daring to walk in the sacred car reserved area that separates everything from each other is exactly the problem.
These huge trucks are dangerous for absolutely no reason and they also take away insane amounts of space for no reason. They make everyone unsafe, destroy the planet and make cities shittier.
You don't know what people use their trucks for.
They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods?
There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.
They’re talking about pickup trucks, not delivery semis.
And if you look at pickup trucks, they’ve gotten way taller since the 00’s, for no reason except style.
I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car.
In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal.
It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times.
Yeah, that's called living! I definitely got myself into one or two dangerous situations growing up. I couldn't imagine a childhood where everything is safety railings and padded walls.
It's called living, which has become insanely safe compared to what it used to be only a generation or two ago.
Looking at the statistics here in my native Norway, children killed in traffic is down a couple of orders of magnitude since the sixties - while traffic, at the same time, has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Same goes for drowning - drastically reduced rates compared to the sixties.
Of course, I guess one can argue that maybe it has become too safe - in the sense that kids aren't exposed to enough risk to learn how to evaluate it, leading to major crashes with reality later on.
Then again, as a parent, I kind of like the idea that there's never been a safer time to be a child.
That doesn't stop me from urging them to ditch the screen time in favour of heading out into the boonies to find something to do, though.
Living isn't putting your childhood self or your kids into mortal danger on the regular. There's quite a gap between unsupervised kids doing reckless stuff and knowing putting your kids out into a world not built for adult pedestrians, much less child pedestrians.
My kids still roam, albeit with check-ins, and a lot of training about streets, driveways, and people.
I don't fault parents who reach for trackers or are uncomfortable with letting young kids out of sight. Even back in the day a lot of horrible things happened that weren't reported widely. A family member of mine was nearly abducted off their bike as a teen, if not for a nearby neighbor opening the door when she knocked looking for help.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships.
I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.
I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.
I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUX6LABCEA
I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.
I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOk2Akqb3CI
Now I'm actually really careful about any type of spills or grease in my kitchen even though I rarely move around big pots of boiling water.
I don't really understand how being scared/traumatized by videos of bike accidents will increase that child's visibility.
The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand.
Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves.
Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
> Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall?
The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
> The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks.
Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.
> It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, it tends to be a little too difficult to cross an entire street at once, so the way you cross is lane by lane, as if you were playing Frogger. (Except that you'll rest on lane dividers as opposed to right in the middle of a lane.)
Pedestrians getting run over while doing this is not a noticeable problem.
When I was in China I got nearly run over walking on green light because someone decided they were in a rush and run a red. It's apparently socially acceptable if you have enough money to afford the fines and you honk your horn while doing it. Unregulated crossings are another level of rolling the dice.
Not a noticeable problem because they are Chinese and there are so many of them it doesn't matter if 4k die while trying to cross at crosswalks?
https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/how-dangerous-are-china...
How does it compare to other countries, though? 4000 is high, but it's out of 1400000000.
i agree with your latter point but i must state that kids probably should be scared of being squashed by american blimp trucks
I don't think you need to show videos, but definitely discuss street safety with your children when they are young. Possibly several times at different ages.
When I was young my dad took me out to the curb and warned me about the dangers of being on the street. He pointed out how fast cars were going, how being hit could be really damaging, how animals not infrequently died from being hit. He also warned about getting excited while playing games and inadvertently running into the street. Even bicycles were a danger. Everything changes at the curb. Having a good imagination, I took the lesson to heart.
I walked the mile or so each way to school from the age of 5. I'd usually never see another soul on the sidewalk, even though it was all rows of houses. There were plenty of cars about, and I had to cross a bunch of intersections, but I had some sense about me. All the kids had some vague story about knowing someone who had been run down by a car because they didn't look properly when crossing.
About a block away from me is a private community pool that is highly used during the summer. Across from it and another block down is a park with some trails. There is a cross walk between them, but there is no lighting for it. Basically no one ever stops at the crosswalk when they see pedestrians waiting. It's a steady stream of cars just flying by at 35-40 mph. It's to the point where I don't even want to stop for them because I don't trust the other lane to stop and I don't want to "encourage" pedestrians to walk out because they see me stopped but the other side won't respond leading to an even more dangerous situation. I've even seen cars who stop get passed on double yellows because who would dare slow down a car driver trying to get somewhere. Crazy that two such popular community features are separated by thousands of pounds of steel flying by without a safe way for kids or even families to get across. To reach a protected crossing, you've got to walk about a mile in either direction to reach a stop light intersection.
Maybe show that to drivers, too, every time they have to renew their license.
Maybe, instead of trying to scare (scar?) children you should just teach them to make eye contact with the driver so you are sure they have seen you before you put yourself in the path of their car?
How much of our "safety" culture around kids is because people don't have basic life skills and aren't passing them on to kids?
So many scenarios where this doesn't save you. SUV driver makes eye contact, stops, kid starts crossing the street, impatient driver behind them (who can't see past their big rear) gets tired of waiting and floors it around them into the open lane, not realizing that the driver in front was stopped for a valid reason...
You can only mitigate risk so much. At some point life is for living and there is a risk involved in it. Sequestering oneself or one's kids to home seems outright inhumane to me.
Making eye contact and waiting for a vehicle to actually respond to the conditions at hand will eliminate the vast majority of "assumed" mistakes. Trying to be 100% aware of traffic and understanding that folks can be even bigger aggressive idiots is also part of it, but not perfect.
You just have to accept that in some rare instances the swiss cheese holes will line up regardless of what you do. And be at peace with it.
I suppose since this seems to logical and "not a big deal" to me means that I am extreme outlier on the subject.
Where I live, overtaking at a crosswalk is illegal because of that risk.
If every driver abided by traffic laws at all times we would have a lot fewer accidents.
If you’re breaking the law it’s harder to call it an accident.
I would live for this to be the answer - it’s definitely helpful, but I know a number of people who have made eye contact with a driver who has then proceeded to drive directly into them. I’ve had near misses like this too. It’s hard to imagine until you’ve experienced it, but incredibly scary to see someone who is looking directly at you and still somehow not reacting.
Both scar(r)ing them AND telling them to make eye contact seems better to me. People don't appreciate low-likelihood or abstract risks. I bet children appreciate them even less than grown-ups. They've never witnessed someone being hit by a car but they've witnessed thousands of people NOT being hit by a car. How do you think they would really internalize the rule to make eye contact without any evidence? Hell, even I'm more likely to make eye contact with the driver after yesterday's spike in my heart rate, and I'm not 5 years old
In my experience, the practice of eye contact is natural and generally pretty effective. "I see you, you see me. Acknowledged."
[dead]
Drivers will still hit people who make eye contact. But besides that, this doesn’t help much if your kid is a runner.
Or drivers could look where they're going.
It never ceases to amaze me how many drivers appear to not register blindingly obvious objects in their path.
Ranging from the understandable, but unacceptable (Say, CBDR/Constant bearing, decreasing range, which makes a lot of drivers misidentify an object as stationary even as it is moving towards them on a collision course) to the flat out unbelievable - I've been almost run over in a lit pedestrian crossing. While wearing hi-vis clothing. Pushing a baby stroller, also hi-vis. AFTER having made eye contact with the driver and even gotten a nod from her. After the car slowed down. Sigh.
In the latter case, it turned out she had assumed that us making eye contact meant that I had seen the car and would wait until it had safely passed the crossing. At least that was what she claimed when I asked why, oh why she'd approached the crossing, slowed down, made eye contact with the pedestrian - and yet proceeded to drive through...
Oh, and don't even get me started on the proliferation of touch screens forcing the driver to take his or her attention off the road to interact with the car. This was a solved problem, using physical buttons you soon learned the exact location of so you could reach for them while still keeping your attention on what was in front of you.
Yes, but as a pedestrian, do you want to bet your life on that?
And slow down too.
or maybe drivers should stop being reckless and dangerous
Suggestions should remain in the realm of the possible.
I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress.
No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit.
It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.
It's important to have good sound engineering along with the lights.
* https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close...
* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38
They have cross walks that have lights when pressed, but not traffic lights, just the warning orange ones.
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n
As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater).
In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people.
I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car.
Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.)
If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.
You might see if he would be OK with a flag on a stick attached to the back wheel.
I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.
We have trucks, but almost no one has a truck as a family car because they are expensive and inconvenient.
They are here too... we just have this epidemic of abject stupidity.
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.
So should the driver be watching out the windshield, or starting down at the screen?
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities.
I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier.
I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
Small nitpick, abs isn't there to reduce braking distance, it just prevent someone who panic brakes from losing the ability to steer. Technically it even increases minimum braking distance a bit, but if someone is locking their brakes up anyways they were already incapable of achieving that peak braking performance because you need to maintain about 10% wheel slip and most drivers are not practised race car drivers.
40 years ago there was ABSOLUTELY ABS.
ABS in aviation goes back to the 1950s in planes and the late '60s in cars.
But what percentage of cars on the street had it. I understand it existed but not even disc brakes were nearly as ubiquitous as they are today, let alone electronics control of them.
They came in pretty quick. They were standard on every Cadillac and optional on many Fords by 1971, for instance.
Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier.
It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
The chart there is certainly worrying but it lacks a per 1000 column (but does include it in this quote, "The rates of pedestrian crash deaths per 100,000 people are highest for people ages 20 and over.").
Population is up but less people are walking (probably). Is it more dangerous to be a pedestrian now than it was at some point in the past? That chart doesn't have that information.
You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.
Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted
> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs
This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard.
And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?"
All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.