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Part of why I moved to the city was wanting to escape the car based nightmare of the suburbs. Couldn't do much of anything without a car or an extremely risky walk.
I could have walked a mile to the train station with no sidewalks , and then paid $20 for a ticket into the city on a train that stops at like 10pm, but all of that sucks. I stayed inside and played a lot of video games.
$20 a ticket??
Yikes.
What city?
I looked it up, it's $15 currently. Suburban NJ to Manhattan.
$15 is still kind of a lot when you're a kid
I hate when nature is absent. It's not just urban centers. Large suburban parking lots with no trees are a kind of hell for me.
In the US, compare a city like Houston, TX to a city like Portland, OR. Seems like two different planets.
You don't need to even travel. Compare downtown to Katy. Houston has plenty of nice parts with tons of nature, they just also have 50 square mile cookie cutter ranch house subdivisions.
bruh same. everytime i have to ride through suburbs im just like damn this is so depressing and ugly
I like urban centers even when they're relatively devoid of nature. What I don't like is when nature is pointlessly absent. A bunch of tall buildings providing living, working and recreational space efficiently to lots of people? Excellent. Asphalt to the horizon so that people can drive to Walmart and then drive to Applebee's? Soul-crushing.
This is why I want to move to the netherlands. Beautiful countryside, walkable cities. Shit, I could bike to nearby cities there if I wanted to.
I'll never be able to afford to leave the hellhole known as the usa, but damnit I'll dream.
I live in Norway. Growing up, some days in school were reserved for diverse activities. Some of my friends and I decided to bike to the swimming park in the city ~20 miles away. We didn't have to bike on car roads at all to get there, as bike lanes and good side paths lead us the whole way. Being able to get anywhere with a bike at the age of 14 is an amazing level of freedom.
Growing up in the 90s in the usa, movies and tv always showed kids riding around on their bikes and not coming home until dark. Where the hell did they go? To get from the suburbs into town would be 10-20 miles riding on the edge of the highway almost wherever you live. No shoulder, no bike lane, no nothing (I did this to get to work for about a year. it sucked, got hit by a truck twice in that time.)
Norway sounds great.
Riding bikes was a fun activity. The point wasn't to go somewhere.
Riding around in the suburbs get old fast if you can't occasionally go more into the city or out into the countryside or to some other interesting place.
I didn't feel like it ever got old, as a kid. I used to love riding down hills with my friends, with our feet off the pedals to see how fast we could go. Or we'd just ride aimlessly until we'd see some old building to explore, or an animal to try to catch, or a tree to climb, or an interesting person to talk to. I don't think I started feeling like we needed to be going "somewhere" until I was a teen. People aren't as nice about groups of teens riding around randomly.
i know a place that looks extremely similar to that
Yeah, it's called america. Unless you zoom in on a liscense plate, you don't know WHAT state that is.
Well.....I guess it's not Hawaii. Besides that though.....
"I guess it's not Hawaii"
Meanwhile hawaii:
You’re not wrong, but if not for the massive billboards and the american branded vehicles- ive been to a number of cities in Europe and the UK that look like this or worse, with more traffic and more, much larger buildings….(i currently live in Germany…) Also, places in Hawaii do look like this, too, unfortunately…mostly Maui and Hawai’i where there’s this much space, but Ohau’s south shore has been bad far a long time 😕
I'd put down money on Southern California but those medians and a few other things are off.
Reverse image search is yielding Colerain, Ohio. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/24/the-talisman-of-colerain
I'm sure there's some Geoguessr player who can tell you where there's a Subway by a Hertz rental car across from a Speedway gas station, but a stroad with nationally available brands along it doesn't narrow things down much.
It's depressing seeing this in my city. Full groves of trees and fields ripped up and destroyed for another McDonald's and more and more apartments. It never ends does it ?
sounds american
Here in the Europes, I find curbside parking similarly depressing. Like, man, it should be a human right for kids to be able to go outside for playing ball. But you can't do that anywhere around here, because wherever there's kids, you can be sure that someone's parking their precious car nearby.
Only sort of related but The Florida Project is a great film that shows children playing in the dismal misery of Florida, much like in this photo.
That's why I moved out into the forest to raise my boy.
...so that he'll need to be driven by you to be able to hang out with any of his friends? Sorry, I don't really understand.
I'm only 3 miles out of town. My boy is 3, the kid across the road is 5. They're already living their best childhoods like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. They know how to identify and harvest edible mushrooms. They pick blackberries and huckleberries by the bucketfuls in the summer.
My property is a few acres, has a pond with fish. It backs up to a state forest. All redwoods. A healthy salmon creek runs right by the property. There are fire roads and logging roads webbed all through the forest, so we can hike and mountain bike to our hearts content all from our front door, no driving.
I'm building zip lines and tree weaves for the kids, I'm turning the off-house 3 car garage into a pub with a bar, taps and pool table. So long story short, all his classmates and their parents drive out here to play, not the other way around. This is the place to be.
That's the same outside that was there in the 80's. Kids just do other things that aren't outside to be social, now. When I was a kid, if you wanted to play with other kids, you pretty much had to go be outside.
The same outside but even more car and distracted driver.
Yeah, that's ugly but it isn't a residential neighborhood. Kids don't go outside because cell phones exist.
My cousin went for a walk in their aunt's residential neighborhood, and someone called the cops on them.
I remember visiting family in Michigan a few years back (well, right before COVID), and someone called the cops on my cousin and I sitting on the driveway shooting the shit at 9pm in the summer, like, wtf?
The media is a fear machine.
A college friend of my sister and friend were walking on the sidewalk on a road like this in Buffalo NY and a cop car rammed into them paralyzing one of them from the neck down.
Jesus Christ, that's awful. I wish that your friend will recover, though I know all too well how slim those prospects are. How many days of paid vacation did the cop get / which department did they move to?
They moved to a dept in another county :( The county (so the taxpayers) did pay the family like 1 mil but she needs a nurse pretty much permanently which costs a lot
Small tangent, but dude, NextDoor is a hell app. I used it for less than one day before I deleted it for being a festering cesspool of breathless Nancy Grace energy. "YOU GUYS MY RING CAMERA CAUGHT SOME TEENAGERS WALKING DOWN THE STREET AND THEY WERE LAUGHING?! WHAT WERE THEY LAUGHING ABOUT?!" Straight up, besides the caps, not exaggerating.
To an outsider the whole zoning approach in US seems weird.
I visited Taipei and I was surprised to see no free-standing single-story homes even relatively far from the city center. People lived in row-houses four or five stories tall, and the first floor of pretty much every single one of these houses was occupied by a small store or restaurant. Many streets were very narrow and mopeds were common but cars less so. It was much livelier there than in a US suburb (or even many US city centers) and I enjoyed my tourist experience. Still, I would prefer to live in a quieter, less dense American-style suburb and drive if I needed to do anything except enjoy my property, but I can see why many people would prefer the opposite. I think it might be like being an introvert or extrovert.
American style subdivisions are the absolute worst for kids, nothing to do at all.
Walk around the same 5 streets with 150 houses around, get kicked out of all of the common areas by Karens and HOAs.
Kids don't go outside there either because there is not much of a point, if you're lucky there may be a tennis court that you can hang out at.
Good luck going to see your friends from school though, even though they live in the neighborhood across the street, the street in question is a 5 lane highway with no pedestrian bridge or tunnels.
Wanna go somewhere with other kids your age, better hope you can have someone drive you.
It’s not just the kids’ cell phones. It’s the 24 hour outrage and fear driven by the news and/or social media. So their parents won’t encourage them to wander off, and as others have mentioned the neighbors will call the cops on them if they do wander.
I live in a residential neighborhood. The main demographic that can afford to move in to the suburb is people already nearing retirement with grown up kids. My kids are constantly bored out of their heads outside because there's nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nobody to play with. We've hosted seven exchange students and the number one culture shock is the loss of independence that goes with moving into a car dependent suburb. Our city design, pretty much everywhere in the US, blows ass. We could be doing so many things so much better, and it would actually cost everyone, taxpayers included, less money. We are all literally paying orders of magnitude more to do the stupid shitty thing and pretending that it's great.
I've seen cops hassle people for walking down the median before.
And this could be anywhere in the USA, this could be California, Texas, Fucking Virginia or even Puerto Rico.
