Car!

There is a one word Canadian joke.

"Car!"

This should bring to mind a ball hockey game being interrupted by the fact that a car wants to drive down the street on which the ball hockey game is being played.

I have just realized that I have only once in my life seen this situation in action, in real life.  I must have been at least fifty years old before I saw it.  We were living in a townhouse complex, and new neighbours moved in with a pair of hockey-mad twins, who set up said ball hockey games with some of their school friends and some other children from the complex.  Not on the street, of course, but on the driveway of the complex.

It's that "of course" that has hit me.

I have a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly magazine, and I have just read an article, which has just been published, online.  I don't even know if it'll make it into the print version of the magazine.  I hope it does.  It'll be behind a paywall, but I hope you all look for it, and point it out to friends.  It's important.  The title of the article is "What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Streets."  To assist you, here is the URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/07/play-streets-children-adults/679258/

I've just realized, reading the article, that I have never seen children playing in the streets.  Oh, yes, I've seen it in movies and TV shows, but the times that I have seen it in real life are vanishingly rare.

Of course, you will say, this is natural.  I grew up in "the Big City."  My home, growing up, was on a street with six lanes of high speed traffic.  *Nobody* would play on that street.

But off that street were back streets.  And we didn't play on *those.*  We all *knew* that streets were for cars.  Not for us.

And later on I lived in a small town.  Not just *a* small town: *the* small town.  Kitimat, the famous planned community.  The streets were designed to have few major arteries, with the bulk of the streets as winding back roads, *made* for ensuring that cars didn't barrel down them at high speeds.  If *any* place had streets safe for kids to play on them, it was there.

The kids didn't play on the streets in Kitimat, either.  I know.  I was the only pedestrian there, too.  I walked two miles to school, each day (yes, mostly in the snow, no, it wasn't uphill both ways).  OK, I was *teaching,* not going to school, but I still got to see, up close, what anyone was doing on the streets.

Driving.

Not playing.

And, later on, I taught on six continents.  I have taught all over the world.  And I've never seen any place where the kids play on the streets any more.

And now I live in a small town, again.  With beautiful wide streets.  And I'm the only pedestrian in town here, too.  So I know that the kids don't play on the streets here, either.

Yes, cars are useful things.  But, as somebody said about fire, it's a great servant, but a terrible master.  We have rearranged our lives, and our childrens' lives, to make the roads safe for cars.  Not the other way around.

Think about that.