[Sohcahtoa82]

> I understand that we live in a different world

Do we, though?

Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.

I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.

[Aurornis]

> Do we, though?

Yes we do, and it's covered in the article.

It's not kidnappers. It's distance to school.

80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.

[alistairSH]

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10917142/

And yet, even for students who live within 0.25 mile of school, a minority walk.

[scruple]

Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.

People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.

[alistairSH]

Yeah, it's just insane that within .25 mile of a school, there is insufficient sidewalk and signaled crossings to allow walking. It's a complete failure of urban planning.

[scruple]

Honestly, it's frequently hard for me to not attribute it to malice.

[pridkett]

Growing up we don’t have sidewalks on most of the roads around school, but they were mostly low volume residential roads.

What we did have was the sixth grade kids acting as the school safety patrol. Those kids would be dismissed 5-10 minutes early, walk in pairs to pick up these bright orange flags, and then fan out around the school to a number of intersections where they were trained in how to be a crossing guard.

It made it safer for even the littlest kids (I walked to school by myself for half day kindergarten in the 80s) both at the crossing and along the roads because you had kids watching kids.

Today my kids’ school has one adult they hire to work about 90 minutes in the morning and afternoon to watch one intersection at the middle school and one at the elementary school. Would be much easier to have kids do it.

[micromacrofoot]

It doesn't, in the early 90s I was even younger in the US and I had to walk to school about a mile along a busy street. There was no other way for me to get there, no bus or anyone around to drive me.