alt Hacker NewsPlenty of cars in the 90s and we played outside all day.
The biggest change since then is two things.
One is that there’s way more to do inside now, mostly games and shows.
The second is that baseless kidnapping panics convinced society that children can never be unattended. The main vector was daytime TV and now true crime podcasts. The reality is that kidnapping is statistically extremely rare and more than 95% of all child sexual or other abuse is perpetrated by someone the child knows. Most kidnappings are also by someone the child knows.
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While I mostly agree with you, cars then and cars now in the US are not the same.
The typical car back then was a 5 door sedan, think ford crown, Chevrolet lumina, etc. These days almost everyone is driving pretty much a light truck.
Totally unrelated, but awesome username!
We did, but some kids got killed or badly injured as a result. It was pretty common where I live.
And while speeds are a bit lower now, the median driver attitude and aggression level seems to be a lot worse. I'm not sure whether that's because of phone distractions, or they're stressed out by exploitative employers, or have cooked their brains online, or some demographic change in who does the most driving, but when I'm on foot, being driven AT is not an uncommon experience at all.