alt Hacker NewsFor a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently, sometimes with a football (soccerball) or fishing rod in tow. And this is a pretty wealthy area by most standards.
Here's a good livestream from my town - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujXqogC2zk4 (I share the livestream because that makes it harder to say it's cherrypicked)
Or here's a more polished, edited video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
We literally covered the world in asphalt ribbons of death and then we wonder why kids don't play outside.
What's crazy is how many kids are killed by drivers even _after_ kids stopped playing outside. It's like if the number of swimmers fell by 90% and drownings went _up_.
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houten is infamous in some circles as the antithesis of american living :))
I recently had a trip to NL and was very surprised to see jobs for children being advertised there!
In your analogy, swimmers may have gone down 90% but kids are still being submerged in water as much as ever if not more. The vast majority of traffic deaths are people INSIDE cars.
> For a counterexample, come visit Houten, NL (I live here and it's great) where you literally see kids around 10 years old biking independently
Or come to where I live in the midwestern united states and you see the same thing. I see kids as young as 7 years old riding bikes together on a bike path that has a very generous distance to the nearby road, and parents let them roam free.
Always remember: If you see a statistic about the US and think "wow, that sucks, the US must suck", remember, it's a very, very, very big country. The corollary to this is that if you see some small country with a really nice looking statistic, remember that the US probably has many, many, many places within it that also just as nice and share a similar statistic. If we were to lump the NL with all of Europe, I'm sure we could find some ugly looking statistics, and you would probably resent the idea of NL being lumped in with it.
Regression to the mean is a real phenomenon and I wish more people would understand it.