But, this isn't just for kids. If we build safer places for kids, we build better places for all of us. Places that are safer for kids, by their very nature, encourage more investment, more small businesses, and more housing.

Look at your neighborhood - truly - from a kid's perspective.

To build better places for kids, we must slow down the top speeds of cars in our neighborhoods. With well-known design principles, we can temper vehicle speed while not meaningfully affecting overall commute times.

Travel times shouldn't outweigh kids' healthy lives, but that's the way it goes.

Constantly doted-on kids won't meet new and diverse friends on the sidewalk or independently explore. This has significant cognitive and mental health implications.

We've known this is harmful for a long time. This article is about suburbs, but it's true for MOST of our country.

When highway standards are adapted to neighborhoods, drivers of cars are given all the cues they need to understand they can operate their vehicle faster.

When vehicles move fast, parents are obviously going to be concerned about letting their children independently move near/across the street.

Cars are heavy and fast. It has been a conscious decision to build our streets to ensure that cars can go fast with minimal interruption.

Kids are not heavy, and they don't go fast. It has been an unconscious (I hope) decision to build our streets to ensure that kids can't use them independently.

It might be trite, but Strong Towns got me going down this (st)road.

Over the past several years, however, I've focused my attention to how and why people choose to engage with their neighborhoods. Most often in America, the answer is "they don't," and we're all worse off for it. With that:

This thread was inspired by today's article from @theatlantic.bsky.social

I want to stress this isn't a shot at Amtrak - train travel is actually enjoyable, as opposed to driving and flying which is tolerable at best. But until it's more frequent and dependable, how many will ever experience it?

Without buses or trains, how can anyone unable or uninterested in driving visit another city?

And without buses or trains, we will keep polluting, getting in car crashes, and living in our isolated "only interact with the people we choose to" bubbles. It's grim, lonely, and dangerous.

I live in Ohio, and if I want to visit friends in ANY neighboring city, I have no option. Our intercity bus service, much like so many other cities, has been recently relocated to the outskirts. We haven't had a train since the 70s. The cities in Ohio with train service get 2 per day, tops.

I am here to say that the subsidies that go into car driving have made Amtrak's uphill climb next to impossible. Budget airlines continue the assault on Amtrak.

Union Stations across America have been demolished, and with that metaphor, the options to get from city to city have disappeared.

I'm not here to blast Amtrak. I've taken it several times and generally had a very positive experience. There were delays, but the whole experience was superior to driving or flying. I had the luxury of absorbing delays, and I always spent that time having some BYOB adventures.

I recommend it.

I do think it's important to understand what counterarguments are being made, whether they're in good faith or not. And I'm absolutely open to having my mind changed on any specific point.

I don't know what I don't know, but I do know that article ^ is a doozy (and not in a good way).

Just for fun, point out your favorite logical fallacy from this article.

A standout: identifying the very real problem of urban heat islands, but saying people should just drive away from them.

It's a very flippant, disingenuous point, and if people heed the advice, the problem worsens.

It should be no surprise that LOUD CAR NOISES are not felt uniformly across our cities. Low income neighborhoods majority nonwhite neighborhoods have much more consistent exposure to loud car noise.

Now, imagine a society in which everyone didn't need a car to get a loaf of bread.

It's obvious that cities are louder than rural areas, but it was an epiphany for me when I first was shown that

cities aren't loud, cars are loud

In fact, this video from Not Just Bikes articulates this point better than I ever could.

Cars aren't the only sources of loud noise in our lives, but they are ubiquitous and persistent. This tool (be sure to change the mode on the top right) can help you visualize where transportation noise is the highest.