@cvcalhoun 191417 wrote:
When I was a kid, bicycling was the way you got freedom to get around the neighborhood without having to have your parents drive you, when you were ages 6 to 17 (i.e., before you could drive a car yourself). These days, parents often believe that kids can’t be on their own at all at those ages. So the parents drive them to “play dates,” instead of letting them roam the neighborhood on their bicycles. I consider this a terrible development in all sorts of ways, the diminution of biking among kids being just one of them.
The flip side of this is that we’re actually getting multiple collisions involving kids (on bikes or on foot) and cars every year in my area. It’s a lot harder to make the case for free roaming kids when there actually are sociopathic drivers speeding along VDOT’s stroads, and kids in the neighborhood have to cross those stroads to get to, say, the library. (But at least the county provides crossing guards for a half hour a day when school’s in session–that fixes everything! [until the crossing guard gets hit–true story])
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