What our childhood shows taught us about cities

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.

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.

Not just Bikes talks a lot about the subtle differences that make life so much more enjoyable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

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.

In NYC, every day between 3-4pm, the streets and public transit are packed with groups of kids hanging out and getting home from school.

Then between 5-6pm it shifts to adult commuters, just as packed.

I’ve always thought that that was cool. There’s these two groups both using the system, separated by a few hours, living parallel lives.

And the kids seem to have a lot of fun here.

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.

Many people would love to live on Sesame Street. I think brownstones in NYC are so expensive because of childhood wish fulfillment, at least in part.

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.