alt Hacker NewsIn the US cars jockey for space with guns to claim the title of leading cause of dead kids.
But we often forget that cars kill kids at an astonishing rate -even though kids stopped playing outside-. In that light, the bloodbath that is American suburbia becomes much more clear. When pedestrian deaths go up even as miles walked (in aggregate) goes down, the situation is even more dire than it seems.
My kids play outside. But we moved to the Netherlands so they could. And even here, large SUVs and even -bafflingly- giant American Dodge Rams are becoming distressingly common.
Replies
There was an interesting plot I saw somewhere reversing the old thing about Halloween being the deadliest day for kids by dividing the number of dead kids by the number of kids on the street on a given day. It turns out that Halloween ends up being by far the safest day per capita.
One of the things I like about some of the overseas malls is they have places designated for kids to run around and play. I've even seen that as a common amenity in restaurants (play room).
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12
A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"
I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"