Driving and disconnection from others

From the Bellingham Herald article "Few students walk or bike to middle school."

Being in a car, instead of walking on a street, or in a transit vehicle with others, allows for a great deal of disconnection. Tony Hiss writes about this in the book Experience of Place. And on the newmobility e-list, a thread ran recently with the header "in your car, no one can hear you scream."

I found some paragraphs in today's Post story, "Discovering A World Beyond The Front Yard: Some Parents Defy Trends, Allow Kids to Roam Unsupervised," very interesting, because they jibe with this idea of disconnection and anomie:

According to center statistics, about 115 of 260,000 child kidnappings a year nationwide fit the classic scenario most parents fear: children snatched by strangers. Most kidnappings are done by family members or by people the children know. Still, high-profile cases of abduction by a stranger have sowed fear, especially since cable TV and 24-hour news have made the details easier to disseminate.

Jane de Winter, president of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, said she lets her children walk to a nearby park, but she theorized that she and other parents worry more because they know more about potential dangers.

"In my neighborhood . . . there have been people who have been registered sex offenders, and that puts a damper on whether parents want to let their kids outside," she said. Regardless of whether there actually are more sex offenders now, she said, "once you know someone is there, can you responsibly let your kids be out there without an adult?"

Hart calls such fears an example of "moral panic" -- a collective fear fueled by the mass media until it becomes self-perpetuating.

But he said there are also valid explanations. "In a more globalized world, people feel generally less secure about place, because the world becomes more and more anonymous as it becomes more mobile," he said. "It feeds on itself, and if you watch more and more television, you have more sense of these dangers. And there's less and less engagement with community. Outside has become more dangerous, because there's no longer multiple eyes on everything."

Accordingly, the freedom to explore and improvise -- which he called crucial to children's cognitive development -- has been reduced dramatically.

While I need to look into the work of the Children's Environments Research Group at the City University of New York, where Roger Hart is the director, I think it's not globalism as much as it is disconnection. Living in subdivisions, often far apart from your neighbors, shopping in antiseptic malls instead of a corner store, driving everywhere instead of being out and about with friends, television, and now computers and videogames, which most often are solitary rather than shared entertainment experiences.
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Note: the CERG website looks pretty interesting, and leads to a plethora of other good stuff or threads, such as this British paper:

Mackett, R. and Lucas, L. and Paskins, J. and Turbin, J. (2004) Cities for children: the effects of car use on their lives. In: Walk21-V cities for People Conference, 9-11 June 2004, Copenhagen, Denmark.
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The same kind of disconnection seems to have been the "driving force" behind the rise of SUVs (well, until the price of gasoline escalated), based on my reading of something that Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 2004, "Big and Bad: How the SUV ran over automobile safety":

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in High and Mighty—perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"—what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it. " Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that."

According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
AP photo by Mark Lennihan.

Richard Louv's work, mentioned in the Post article, finds that children are allowed a span of control 1/9 the distance of that typical in the 1970s. I've cited it before in discussing bicycling. The industry is booming, although children aren't allowed to ride unsupervised. See "The Bicycle Loses Ground as a Symbol of Childhood Liberty," from the Wall Street Journal (1996) and "Bikes Are Flying Off the Racks, Not Down the Streets: Worried Parents, Sprawling Cities Reduce Riding" from the Washington Post (2003). From the Post article:

Though bicycle sales may be increasing, thanks to cheap imports, bike riding has been declining according to an annual survey by the National Sporting Goods Association. The organization surveys 10,000 households annually on biking participation among people ages 7 to 17. It found that about 20.4 million children in the United States rode a bicycle six or more times a year in 1991, and 16.8 million did so last year. Experts blame suburban sprawl, concerns over safety and bike-unfriendly neighborhoods as the reasons behind the decline.

As a child living in Detroit we roamed around after school, on the city streets, to the corner stores and the shopping district a few blocks away, without real supervision.

And I've heard plenty of tales from old-time Washingtonians back in the days of streetcars, when parents let their children use the weekly streetcar pass on the weekends to travel wherever on the system, without adult supervision.

Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking