We let our very-capable son and his less-capable-but-bright and more-experienced older sister freely wander the neighborhood on bicycles when they were 5.5 and 7, respectively. Worked out fine so far.
Varies by neighborhood, though. Our current one's busy-body and kids-only-play-with-parental-escort enough that we had a couple neighbors stop by to warn us that they'd seen our kids several streets over, thinking they'd gotten away from us. Not quite busy-body enough that anyone called the cops (I suspect we were right on the edge of that happening, and maybe just got lucky). Our last neighborhood had wonderful mixed-age "gangs" of kids wandering around playing all the time, and it would have been entirely safe there. That was a much younger neighborhood (in terms of both the ages of the houses and the average age of residents) than this one (not sure whether that's related), and, I suspect, there were some class issues at play (the other had a very high-prole character to it, in Fussellian terms, while this one's 100%, gratingly, middle-class as hell)
As for chances of assault, your main worry by a country mile should be cars, not predators. All forms of attacks on kids by strangers are incredibly rare. Leaving your kid in the company of a specific adult or set of adults is far riskier than letting them walk to the park (yet people do that all the time). Shit, statistically siblings or cousins are far "scarier" and worthy of concern, in that regard, than the risk of regular walks to a park 2 blocks away.
> your main worry by a country mile should be cars, not predators
100%, and cars are a reasonable worry that we should do something about. There are well known traffic calming measures that we know slow down traffic substantially (speed being one of the greatest causes of pedestrian fatalities) and even in my very walkable city we're largely not using them.
speed doesn’t cause fatalities, or even cause collisions, it increases severity in the case of a collision. collisions cause (pedestrian) fatalities, and distracted driving is the leading cause of collisions.
Well no; speed does increase severity in the case of a collision as you say, but it also directly impacts your stopping distance, even at the same level of alertness/reaction time/etc. If a kid runs out in front of your car, you are both more likely to hit them at 30 mph than 15 mph (due to not being able to stop in time) and more likely to kill them having hit them.
you see, that's exactly the kind of marginal thinking that gets us into these kinds of shut-in situations for children in the name of "safety". that exact scenario, where only the speed difference rather than a myriad of other factors, is material to life and death, is a tiny, and probably an undifferentiable, portion of collisions. putting forth such imagined scenarios as if they present significant risk is poor rationale.
support traffic calming measures (like narrowing car lanes, adding streetside trees, converting parking to bike lanes, etc.), not for specious reasons like this, but because they reduce distracted driving, and thereby reduce collisions and injury/death. it's at best misdirection to talk about reducing speed, and at worst, leads to poor policy that not only doesn't address the problem (reducing injury/death) but creates unintended consequences (like traffic and more distracted driving).
And focusing just on distracted driving similarly leads to campaigns that are little more than "you, driver, pay attention" PSAs while ignoring the structural reasons that drivers incorrectly feel safe enough to do so.
Of course they both contribute to the problem. So why not both? Traffic calming is the answer, either way.
no, that sounds like a reasonable compromise, but it's just appeasing poor thinking, which is exactly how we get so many bad policies and regulations. addressing distracted driving with traffic calming is a reasonable solution for a correctly identified problem. psa's for distracted driving is a bad solution for the right problem. traffic calming for speed is a bad solution for the wrong problem. it's how we get stupid speed bumps and unproductive stop signs as an energy and time tax on everyone rather than targeting the reckless directly, which is the (other) right problem to address. while excess speed is indicative (but not conclusive) of reckless driving, a focus on reducing speed is a safety theater red herring. just like "think of the children" and ceqa (environmental) challenges to housing, it's used as a brainless cudgel to get a pet outcome approved, not to improve societies.
Ha, yes, actually it was almost exactly like that. With a concerned look, "I think I saw your boy over on [street] and thought I'd better let you know". Was he playing in the road? Getting in the way of traffic? Stomping on flowers? Otherwise behaving like a jack-ass? Nope, just there. OK, uh, thanks for telling us.
Well intentioned and mostly just amusing. At least no-one called the authorities when they realized we weren't planning to confine our kids to the yard or accompany them on every idle play-outing all damn Summer.
Varies by neighborhood, though. Our current one's busy-body and kids-only-play-with-parental-escort enough that we had a couple neighbors stop by to warn us that they'd seen our kids several streets over, thinking they'd gotten away from us. Not quite busy-body enough that anyone called the cops (I suspect we were right on the edge of that happening, and maybe just got lucky). Our last neighborhood had wonderful mixed-age "gangs" of kids wandering around playing all the time, and it would have been entirely safe there. That was a much younger neighborhood (in terms of both the ages of the houses and the average age of residents) than this one (not sure whether that's related), and, I suspect, there were some class issues at play (the other had a very high-prole character to it, in Fussellian terms, while this one's 100%, gratingly, middle-class as hell)
As for chances of assault, your main worry by a country mile should be cars, not predators. All forms of attacks on kids by strangers are incredibly rare. Leaving your kid in the company of a specific adult or set of adults is far riskier than letting them walk to the park (yet people do that all the time). Shit, statistically siblings or cousins are far "scarier" and worthy of concern, in that regard, than the risk of regular walks to a park 2 blocks away.