this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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[off topic?]
Just read an interview with the young actors from 'Stranger Things.' They said that one of the craziest 1980s thing they did was get on bikes and just ride around town, unsupervised. One said he looks around now, and never sees kids just riding bikes.
We even did that without maps. If we got lost, we just rode around until we recognized something familiar.
I've noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go... anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
That sounds awesome, bicycles give you superpowers in landscapes that aren’t violently hostile to anything that isn’t cars. I grew up on the side of a highway, I could only bike up and down my driveway basically.
Now I take so much pleasure in just shooting over to the grocery store on my bike. Every single time I do it I am thankful because of how much that capacity was utterly denied by where I grew up.
Must have been a wonderful chaos to tool around on a bicycle as a kid like an idiot going wherever you wanted. Every single god damn thing I ever did had to be mediated through a car and thus an adult directly facilitating a specific activity I wanted to go do. There was zero capacity to spontaneously just go and roam.
oh, absolutely. I've never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it's still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80's - 90's) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.
Actually the area I lived was pretty rural, that was precisely the problem. Roads were high speed, car exclusive roads with no sidewalk and if there was one people would look at you like you were a criminal for not being in a car so it felt wrong to use them anyways.
It didn’t matter if there was awesome woods to roam around in 5 minutes down the road, walking/bicycling there not only felt like doing something wrong based on the behavior of 100% of the adults around me, it also was extraordinarily dangerous and just not worth the discomfort of feeling like I was going to die any second from a 4000 pound metal box slamming into me at 45mph (and running me over because the hood is 5 feet off the ground for no reason other than it looks cool or something).
The lack of traffic on rural roads just made this problem worse because instead of a line of cars all seeing the cars in front of them move out of the way of something on the side of the road, or the general presence of traffic keeping people driving from absolutely as fast as they could possibly go, you would just have a car whip around the corner every once in awhile going near highway speeds on a windy back road in a way that left them zero chance to swerve out of the way and not hit you if they weren’t paying attention. I also remember literally being yelled at and taunted by (usually pickup truck) drivers the few times I did ride a bicycle on a road because that seemed to make them angry.
There was plenty of space around you, iffff you had a car. If you didn’t, you might as well have been stranded on a space station.
I was born in 1993 and I did that with my neighborhood friends too.
I posted because I have seen it go from expecting a bike rider to be a kid to expecting them to be an older adult. But I guess it's different depending on where you live.
It definitely is. Kids bike down my street every day, though much more on weekends, I think because most schools near me don’t allow walking or biking to/fro anymore. Some kids getting run down on rural roads because they’ve been paved and turned into highways made it too unsafe for many kids to walk or bike to school, and it was too big a headache to have selective rules.
I’m in a suburban area between rural and city where kids don’t have to worry about high speed traffic or much violent crime, so kids are still free-range here. They videogame, too, of course.
Back in 1993 I used to ride my bicycle on the highway that had a 55 mph speed limit.
It was so far out in the country though, that there were only about 4 cars per hour.
I was 10 years old.
I see kids doing that in my neighborhood all the time. There's some that go with poles down to fish in a nearby creek. It all depends on where you live.
Hell I was born in the mid to late 00s and i grew up in the 2010s, but I still did this, we did have dialup internet (i lived and still live in the middle of nowhere, but now we get satellite internet) and I distinctly remember the time we went with my sis and some friends and a fucking massive storm appeared, I thought we were gonna die lol, I think I was like 10 or 11 at that time
Yes I am an European, specifically one of the eastern kind
True, I rode all over the place when I was a kid. We let my daughter ride everywhere she wanted within our (very large) subdivision, but it's semi-rural and the entrances are both country roads that cars hurtle down, so we didn't feel safe letting her down those. When I was a kid, I lived in town, so it was different. Maybe kids in town aren't like that anymore though.
The problem is that there isnt really anywhere for kids to hangout any more. Playgrounds are for small kids, but even just biking to the library is completely out of the question for most middle schoolers/early teens who dont have a car. There's no malls, few small public parks, no arcades, small local dinners/ice cream joints, or any other "third places"that aren't just school or home. We, as a society, have spent the past 40 years destroying the concept of a public space and are now shocked that we dont see kids hanging out in non-existent spaces.
Yeah, it sucks for my daughter. There's almost nowhere to go. And worse, there's almost nowhere to go that doesn't cost money and we're down to a single income. There was so much to do when I was a teenager growing up. There was a small park downtown where all the punk, goth and alternative teens hung out. I must have spent half my teenage years in that park.
My daughter is in online school now. I don't even know where she should go to make friends.
Dude, this is the thing that depresses the hell out of me. When I was kid there were skating rinks, arcades, malls, etc. Granted, those things cost money as well, but most of us could make a $5 last all day.
They can hang out anywhere they want actually. We didn't have any kid hangout places back in the 90s and we biked and skateboarded all over town. We hung out with friends in parking lots and stores, wherever we wanted to basically.
The problem is the frame of mind that they need a structured environment to do their activities when they don't.
For real. Cemetery. Storm water culvert. That's about it, outside of someone's back yard, the cemetery and the storm water culvert. And I grew up in a fairly urban place. Not a city, but certainly not back country. Hop on bike, find somewhere without adults.
When I was a kid in the 90s, we biked all over. Loved going 5 miles down the highway to the surplus store. It wasn't a busy highway though and had a big shoulder.
I'm squarely gen-z and I did that all the time in the 2000s and 2010s. I was also lucky enough to grow up in a less car dependent city with good cycling infrastructure which helped a lot. Seeing how the incidence of pedestrian and cyclist deaths due to car collisions has steadily risen over these past decades (accounting for more deaths than from both drugs and thugs combined mind you), I'd also argue that kids don't do that anymore because it's now a lot less safe to exist outside if you're not in a car. Not every problem can be blamed on that damn phone.
Not an expert, but it sounds like a vicious cycle. More car vs. bike accidents means fewer bikes on the road means drivers don't look out for bikes which causes more accidents.
And no, I'm not telling you to go out and ride until you get hit to raise awareness.