In every health food store there's some woo-woo magazine with reiki healers and astrology but that doesn't mean you should just shrug and eat McDonald's.
It has changed some. I walked to school when I was 5. That wouldn't happen now.
I walked to school when I was 5. My son walks to school. With an adult, sure, but that's been a thing far longer than technology. Cities have been around for generations now.
Sure. But that's a cycle that's been going on longer than handheld devices. The people who optimise for this will optimise for anything that isn't a literal cave hermit.
I walked to and from school alone at the age of 5. The amount of traffic on suburban streets particularly around schools is vastly different from 40 years ago.
Fair, I didn't realise it was that different the generation before. That said, I didn't have a computer until I was ten, and a phone until some years later. So stuff was changing around me, well before my kids started using technology.
I think particularly with cars it was. When I was a kid not every family had a car and 2 car families weren't my parents income strata.
Completely different if you talk to older people. Even different from when I was a kid and now. Actually saw a big change from the early 90s when the neighborhood kids would meet before dinner and the mid 90s when we didn't, but one street doesn't tell all. I would guess the national trend lurched hard in the 90s, maybe 00s in areas slower to get electronics
We're always shaking the dice. But it's us that should be, and not the kids, if that makes sense.
Good channel all about best walkable/bikeable cities
I grew up in a walkable town which is basically surrounded by a sea of car-centric developments, because there is a large community of Haredi and Hasidic Jews in the area who cannot drive to temple on the Shabbat but must walk. So the town could not be designed in such a way that a car is the only way to get around.
And I had a pretty "free range" childhood: I walked about a mile to school alone starting in about fourth grade (age 9-10 for non-USians) and my friends and I rode bikes all over and had explored all around the town and surrounding area, basically as far as you could go before running into dangerous-to-cross highways, by the end of middle school (age 14 or so).
I think, following @schlaufuchs, if you want walkable towns with kids playing outside you have to do something to get rid of cars or failing that you must not have completely car-centric infrastructure, it must be possible to walk around without being pulped by these things:
(btw trucks this size should be illegal, if you have a truck this size, go fudge yourself)
Sometimes I see building contractors use those trucks where they use them to bring in supplies they buy at a hardware store in bulk (they may carry lumber, draywall, a pallets worth of concrete mix, lawn stones, etc) to their job site. Where a use of a van is too large for their needs. So they are somewhat useful in an urban setting if it’s being used to transport materials to a job site for construction or a building renovation. Especially when driving a semi truck in an urban center to deliver building materials to a job site located in a densely populated urban center is too unwieldy (try delivering an order of drywall to a renovation project in an apartment in the middle of Manhattan on a semi-truck).
