Readers push back against this one:
Cul-de-sacs are not safer:
"They turn what should be a 100-yard walk into a two-mile drive, and they put more people in cars for more reasons than they should," [University of Virginia's William] Lucy said. And because they get lulled into a sense of security, he said, parents don’t teach their kids about street safety and the "difference between street and sidewalk and driveway and yard." But the greatest danger to a young child, he said, is being backed over by a motor vehicle– usually driven by their own parents in their own driveway. Indeed, "backovers" account for 34 percent of "non-traffic" vehicular fatalities among children under 15 years old. ("Frontovers" account for another 30 percent, meaning that 64 percent of "non-traffic" vehicular fatalities still involve children being run over, according to KidsAndCars.org.)"
Another writes:
Regarding your reader's point that suburban cul-de-sacs become de facto playgrounds: so do city streets and parks for urban kids.
I was raised in the grid of Chicago’s far north side, and all the front yards (usually without fences or shrubs) created de facto football fields and baseball diamonds. The alleys and gangways were mazes for hide-and-seek and discovering what happens when a squirrel gets run over. A few blocks away were parks and playgrounds and beaches we could walk to. Yeah, you had to watch for traffic, but so do kids in cul-de-sacs.
But more importantly: what happens when kids are adolescents? While the relative safety of suburban cul-de-sacs might be a good thing for younger children to run around in, living in an urban grid, as James Howard Kunstler brilliantly argues in The Geography of Nowhere, helps those children grow into adults who are part of a community. When children have independent relationships with adults – storekeepers, bakers, butchers, crossing guards at the busy streets, the mailman, the blind vet who runs the newsstand on the corner, neighbors who aren’t parents of their friends, the cop on the beat, and so on (all examples from my own childhood) – the kids mature into people who feel a part of a community. And in an urban grid, adolescents can go places and do things without being dependent on driving adults or getting their own drivers’ licenses. The museums, the ballparks, the cinemas, the libraries, the many wonders of a city are accessible to young people making the transition to adulthood in cities in ways they simply are not in the ‘burbs.
And are these suburban cul-de-sacs really so safe? A recent incident in a Chicago suburb, where a homeless man who was living unbeknownst to most nearby residents in a field attacked an elderly woman, suggests otherwise. Money quote:
By many accounts, the cluster of houses and apartments in a leafy area behind The Home Depot in Orland Park is a safe and family-friendly place. It’s a quiet community where people feel free to walk their dogs and let their children play outside without fear. Thus it came as a shock to many residents that a homeless man pushed down and allegedly sexually assaulted an 83-year-old woman Friday morning in a nearby field.
Suburban safety is a myth suburbanites like to tell themselves.
The reader's brother concurs:
Growing up in the city was the best thing for us, as kids. I hate the idea that urbanism is anti-child. It's a meme with no truth in it, and one that is responsible, in part, for so many parents abandoning the city once they have kids. They don't want to be Bad Parents, so they Must Leave The City For The Kids.
Another:
The ability to play in the street in a surburban cul-de-sac environment only works if you live at the end of the cul-de-sac. I know people who live on the feeder streets, and you better believe cars are flying down these streets to get to the main road.
One more:
When I was growing up in Brooklyn, there was plenty of playtime on the streets – you just, you know, got out of the way of the cars when they came. Not all streets in the city are thoroughfares. Stickball, punchball, skellsies (or "skelly"), "pitching in", street football, "Johnny on the pony", "Ringolaria" – all these games and more were played out on Hart Street where I grew up in Bushwick (Bill Cosby has many stories of street games when he grew up in Philadelphia).
When my family moved to the Florida suburbs, no one played any street games. But that was thirty years ago. Maybe it's a sign of the times, where the few parents who let their kids have a little bit of unsupervised activity (like riding their bike to school for chrissake) get harassed by the police.
The Dish 