Car culture turns children into prisoners in their own homes.
I am so happy I didn’t grow up in the US… Lots of biking and walking, a bus to go to town, school friends that tag along in the evening
Meanwhile every wannabe city planner on this site tells me how great winding burb roads are
It does not matter how windy or straight burb roads are.
What matters is that they aren’t culs-de-sac for pedestrians/cyclists, allow mixed use zoning(!!), and are dense enough to support a diversified economy.
See: streetcar suburbs.
Hate to upvote someone from Lemmy.ml but for once you’re totally right.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. That was hilarious and perfect content for a shitpost community.
I’m dead serious. You assholes chased me around and downvoted everything I posted for two weeks straight. So I made a new account.
Nothing but bad things from lemmy.ml, you’re a cancer on the fediverse.
I’m sorry to hear there were folks who did that. I just chose this server because I wanted a general purpose one that seemed to have a decent chance of sticking around for the long term. I have no interest in harassing people or getting into server wars.
It’s not server wars, it’s a server designed to spread authoritarian propaganda behind a veneer of communism. But maybe you’re not part of that… if so good luck.
I mean even if you are old enough to drive, how are you supposed to get home after getting shitface drunk?
Me:
Ah yes parents teaching their kids to drive at 16 and scary traffic, this can only be the US…
This one hurts. It wasn’t my experience, but it’s too common and I hate it.
It was mine. From 2013 to 2018. It still affects me to this day.
OP literally me. 🥹
How does it affect you?
Bold of you to assume that we have parents? :-P
Hah, or you can be me. I grew up in New York City with the ability to go pretty much anywhere unsupervised and I never did - I spent all my free time either reading books or playing videogames anyway. I had almost zero interest in the real world (I think it’s pretty boring even now that I’ve been an adult for a while) but I still feel like there was something wasteful about not bothering to experience things that so many other kids would have really enjoyed.
The worst part was college. I attended a famous party school but went to zero parties, zero dates, etc. At least I managed to graduate in three years with a double major. (By the time I got to college, I did want more social interaction but I thought that I was incapable of it so I didn’t try.)
what a sad life
It actually hasn’t been bad overall. Those were my missed opportunities but there were also other opportunities that I didn’t miss.
(I do live in New York City again and I do still think it’s really boring here. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn’t involve a crowd of strangers which ruins it for me. The main reason I’m here is to be close to my family but even visiting them requires a miserable two-and-a-half-hour round trip on the subway. I got to live in a small town for a while and I liked it a lot better - having a house with a big yard, being able to drive everywhere, and easy access to nature were great.)
Ha. I grew up across the road from the beach so just surfed every daylight hour not in school. No friends, no cool things around, no games, no hobbies, but didn’t care at all because surfing trumped anything you could offer a kid.
I’m 27. This has basically been my life for the last 10 years.
Lack of reliable tech or computer made me explore my city on bicycle with friends. Good times.
As someone who’s had a teenagehood like this, what should I do? I have friends abroad and I travelled to visit them by myself a few times. It doesn’t make the other 350 days of the year any less boring though
Study for college. Seriously, just allocate many hours a day for it. it’s boring at first but gets better after a while. You don’t have to go to an Ivy League, any mid-range state college will have cool people and walkable infrastructure. If you don’t have a lot of money, do the first couple years at a community college and talk to counselors to make sure the credits transfer. Once you’re in college, be proactive and seek more advice.
Don’t forget COVID
this was my youth, we still fucking walked / biked everywhere, even in the deep south’s 100+ degree temps. people who think europe is an non-automotive utopia: this is a recent trend - it took time to build out the infrastructures (PLURAL) that replace driving everywhere, and even then it’s taking time to get the cars out of the cities.
https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-myth-netherlands-is-great.html
It’s something we have to work at together, and the vroom-vroom crowd who want to murder cyclists with their coal-rollers are very much in the way.
Ouch.
That is extremely American looking
I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe and all is true except the outside picture and the fact that there isn’t anything to walk to (except if you want to take a 20km hike trough a forest to get to the city, and then do another 20km back)
I’m In middle of nowhere north east amarica and replace walking through a forest your climbing hills steap enough to be considered cliffs, and you have my childhood. It amazes me that I biked all that just to visit a ice cream stand.
Same, just change to Croatia and closest “city” being 8km away.
This was my adolescence except miles removed from Cowtown, the second largest municipality in Pigshit County, Ohio. People wanna talk about car culture and how the suburbs ruined everything, and I get it, but rural life as a teen was depression on top of the depression I’d already developed in elementary school.
If I hadn’t been able to drive my busted-ass ‘85 Toyota Van when I was 17 I don’t know if I would have made it to 18, I was hanging on by a frayed thread. Even then, my hometown was utterly worthless, I’d have to go at least half an hour on the highway to go somewhere with a veneer of life.
I would love for the semi-rural suburb where I currently live to modernize and become walkable and bikeable, but I’ll still take this any day over what I had 25 years ago.
