There’s a lot of interesting ideas in here! One of the biggest changes about raising kids now versus when I was growing up is the duration that you’re in a car seat. When shoulder seat belts in back seats became mandated, kids needed booster seats until age 8 to properly position the belt. When I was a kid, a car seat was only used until maybe age 3. That’s a significant change.
Your piece also reminds me a bit of why we loved visiting Disney World when our kids were infants. No car seat on the plane, no car seat on the bus to the resorts (which also used to be a free trip and included luggage delivery), and no car seats on the monorails, buses, and boats around Disney. It was easy to explore with a young child- visiting lots of different hotels and restaurants with little to no friction. On some forms of transit (like the monorail), we didn’t even have to collapse our strollers, so the baby could nap while we traveled. Coming from a car dependent suburb, it was pure bliss!
Reston, VA is a pretty car-dependent place. It's a cluster of office buildings surrounded by sprawl, or at least that's the impression it gave me. So while I can totally see the appeal of being able to walk out your back gate to a neighborhood pool, that is more like "good ruralism" or (even good suburbanism) than good urbanism. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any urban environment about which the sentence could be written: "I saw a mother and her two young children open the gate to their backyard fence, step onto the walking trail, and head towards the public pool a few hundred feet away." Being able to dedicate land to a public pool in the first place is generally a luxury of low-density development, too. (Okay, cities have public pools, but the mechanics of getting to them are way less idyllic than opening your back gate and taking a walking trail, to say nothing about how far from idyllic the public pool is once you get there.)
That said, in a striking example of synchronicity, not two days ago I happened to arrive too early to pick up my oldest from school. So I took the dog for a walk around the soccer field, where I'd never been, and found at the other end a gate to a walking trail! It went through a short distance of garden and woodsiness, along with a little creek, before depositing you in the residential neighborhood around it. Today, this school serves families from all over the region, including ours, but when it was first built it would have been a neighborhood school, and a walking trail connecting the local kids to it free from any traffic danger would have been a great feature. We need more of this, and of course there is no reason it needs to be limited to sprawl neighborhoods. Our DC neighborhood has backalleys for garbage trucks; if we can find the land for that we can also find the land for walking paths and bike paths.
As far as the car seat thing, the period of child development in which they are a pain in the ass really isn't that long. Also, 95% of the pain in the ass is the result of standard car-door height causing adults to bonk their head while trying to strap Jr. in - but those big SUVs we all love to hate don't have this problem. So, I wouldn't invest too much in using car-seat inconveniences as the persuasive hook for reimagining much of anything, other than car-seat laws (the age requirements are absurd).
To your last question, would we do auto-dependence all over again if we knew about modern safety mechanisms like seat belts (and all of the other things)? As long as that knowledge is only about safety and does not include the consequences that you illustrate in this blog, I would say most emphatically YES and that safety understanding would strengthen that yes. We all have to remember the context of the time. I think there is a quite a bit of revisionist history in urbanism circles about going all in on the auto centric suburban experiment and that we should have known better. The context of the time after WWII was that this idea was the greatest thing since sliced bread in the upcoming technological era. Sure there were market forces (both "good" and "bad") pushing us in this direction but the zeitgeist was this change is a good thing and is "progress" in the new technological world. You know, the next step is flying cars so let's charge ahead. Having safer cars would have accelerated this (pun intended). I think a modern day analogy is the proliferation of handheld internet devices and social media. 20 years ago the internet was the unquestionable and inevitable good that was going to change society for the better so we all rushed in head first. Like automobiles, the technology has been a good thing in many ways, but we are now starting to see the negative consequences of those choices (most importantly the effect on teenagers brain development). If you look at that analogy and then consider your question with the same lens you come to the conclusion we would not have done auto-dependence differently with better safety equipment.
There’s a lot of interesting ideas in here! One of the biggest changes about raising kids now versus when I was growing up is the duration that you’re in a car seat. When shoulder seat belts in back seats became mandated, kids needed booster seats until age 8 to properly position the belt. When I was a kid, a car seat was only used until maybe age 3. That’s a significant change.
Your piece also reminds me a bit of why we loved visiting Disney World when our kids were infants. No car seat on the plane, no car seat on the bus to the resorts (which also used to be a free trip and included luggage delivery), and no car seats on the monorails, buses, and boats around Disney. It was easy to explore with a young child- visiting lots of different hotels and restaurants with little to no friction. On some forms of transit (like the monorail), we didn’t even have to collapse our strollers, so the baby could nap while we traveled. Coming from a car dependent suburb, it was pure bliss!
I grew up very rural and we kids would pile into the open beds of pickups to get to games. 12 to 14 of us in the open bed of one pickup.
Okie, I dunno about this one...
Reston, VA is a pretty car-dependent place. It's a cluster of office buildings surrounded by sprawl, or at least that's the impression it gave me. So while I can totally see the appeal of being able to walk out your back gate to a neighborhood pool, that is more like "good ruralism" or (even good suburbanism) than good urbanism. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any urban environment about which the sentence could be written: "I saw a mother and her two young children open the gate to their backyard fence, step onto the walking trail, and head towards the public pool a few hundred feet away." Being able to dedicate land to a public pool in the first place is generally a luxury of low-density development, too. (Okay, cities have public pools, but the mechanics of getting to them are way less idyllic than opening your back gate and taking a walking trail, to say nothing about how far from idyllic the public pool is once you get there.)
That said, in a striking example of synchronicity, not two days ago I happened to arrive too early to pick up my oldest from school. So I took the dog for a walk around the soccer field, where I'd never been, and found at the other end a gate to a walking trail! It went through a short distance of garden and woodsiness, along with a little creek, before depositing you in the residential neighborhood around it. Today, this school serves families from all over the region, including ours, but when it was first built it would have been a neighborhood school, and a walking trail connecting the local kids to it free from any traffic danger would have been a great feature. We need more of this, and of course there is no reason it needs to be limited to sprawl neighborhoods. Our DC neighborhood has backalleys for garbage trucks; if we can find the land for that we can also find the land for walking paths and bike paths.
As far as the car seat thing, the period of child development in which they are a pain in the ass really isn't that long. Also, 95% of the pain in the ass is the result of standard car-door height causing adults to bonk their head while trying to strap Jr. in - but those big SUVs we all love to hate don't have this problem. So, I wouldn't invest too much in using car-seat inconveniences as the persuasive hook for reimagining much of anything, other than car-seat laws (the age requirements are absurd).
To your last question, would we do auto-dependence all over again if we knew about modern safety mechanisms like seat belts (and all of the other things)? As long as that knowledge is only about safety and does not include the consequences that you illustrate in this blog, I would say most emphatically YES and that safety understanding would strengthen that yes. We all have to remember the context of the time. I think there is a quite a bit of revisionist history in urbanism circles about going all in on the auto centric suburban experiment and that we should have known better. The context of the time after WWII was that this idea was the greatest thing since sliced bread in the upcoming technological era. Sure there were market forces (both "good" and "bad") pushing us in this direction but the zeitgeist was this change is a good thing and is "progress" in the new technological world. You know, the next step is flying cars so let's charge ahead. Having safer cars would have accelerated this (pun intended). I think a modern day analogy is the proliferation of handheld internet devices and social media. 20 years ago the internet was the unquestionable and inevitable good that was going to change society for the better so we all rushed in head first. Like automobiles, the technology has been a good thing in many ways, but we are now starting to see the negative consequences of those choices (most importantly the effect on teenagers brain development). If you look at that analogy and then consider your question with the same lens you come to the conclusion we would not have done auto-dependence differently with better safety equipment.