When it's about cars, the "think of the children" machine suddenly breaks.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Come on. Electing pedophile presidents ring a bell?
Or guns in the ’Murica.
These fucking people always uses "think of the children", religion, and the Constitution for their own perspective but suddenly dismiss it when it comes to feeding children, children safety and freedom of speech of speech they don't like.
They are hypocrites and they don't care that they are.
Disarming the rich and powerful won't ever happen. Disarming queer then black then poor folk will.
No, it just switches to “ten points each” mode.
And ironically it's one of the few cases where it's a legitimate argument since the kids are actually being killed instead of merely exercising their autonomy in a way someone doesn't like.
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Parent Drivers: Sacrificed their free time, because now they have to fucking drive their kids everywhere. Once kids above a certain age could roam wild (pros and cons there, but on the whole a good thing IMO) and just come back for dinner.
My kid’s school pays parents $50 a month to drive them to school because there’s not enough bus drivers
$50 / 4.33 weeks / 5 days = $2.31 per day.
The official mileage rate for Ontario (my province) is $0.655/km.
This only makes sense if the drive is < 3.5km per day total.
Assuming this is trip chained (no extra mileage because of the detou, like a drop and back) that's 1.75km per drop/pickup.
Minimum distance for bussing of gr 3+ in my area is 2.4km.
This scheme does not pay parents to drive children to school, it only reduces the burden.
Yes, it’s very stupid. I agree.
To be fair, kids are not allowed to do most of those things because people are scared of pedos, not cars. 40 years ago we already had cars but I was allowed to disappear for whole days without anyone complaining. Now kids can't go to the playground alone even if they don't have to cross any roads.
That too is caused by car-centric design, though. It's not as though there were no pedos before there were cars, of course, but when a city isn't primarily designed around cars, there tend to be a lot more people outside, making it much harder to drag a child into an unmarked van.
This has nothing to do with design or actual crimes. People are scared because the media is scarring them. The numbers of abductions are actually dropping but people are more and more scared because child predators were made into the bogeyman of the XXI century. It's a well known fact that crime perception in US does not align with actual crime statistics. Cars have nothing to do with it.
Sure, but the media can only scare people if they can imagine it being true. It's a lot easier to imagine someone who would do their children harm actually going through with it and succeeding when the kids are wondering around suburban cul-de-sac hell where the only other people are zooming past in a car.
Jane Jacobs wrote about this in like the 1960s. More regular people on the street makes people feel safer. It probably actually makes people safer, too.
So, yes, car-first culture makes crime and fear worse. A local neighborhood with people walking about doing their business is safer than one where people just drive, park, and leave.
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I was going to mention that none of the streets have changed where my parents live from when I grew up but it does seem much sketchier. There's more roaming homeless people from nearby freeway encampments, and cars appear to drive more dangerously or the drivers are distracted with their phones
It's all very anecdotal but where I lived you could get from my apartment building to the playground without crossing any streets. All kids were just running around unsupervised starting at 6-7yo (for me it was closer to 5yo). The entire playground was just communist style metal constructions. I cut myself on rusty nails, was hit by a metal swing and twisted my ankle while jumping off the top of a slide. Today the entire playground was replaced by wooden, safe toys and I can't imagine kids playing there unsupervised. Times have changed. It's simple as that.
What I had:
What kids have today:
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Not in my country. All the things on the left are still true, but predators isn’t really something parents are (or need to be) worried about. Also, there are a lot more cars now than 40 years ago.
In my country it's true the fear of both cars and pedos and arguably, cars made it worse because now there is less people around that can prevent any pedo from acting- there aren't many pedos but the fear is there.
Our cities were not designed around cars like in the USA.
I don’t know where you live, but I can assure you that parents are generally more concerned about traffic than pedophiles.
to back this up, the Netherlands keep scoring highest in UNICEF's child well being reports: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/child-well-being-unpredictable-world
Um... In US car drivers have sacrificed lives of their own children....
Not sure it counts as a sacrifice if that's your preference.
Big Oil cares not where the blood comes from, only that it flows
On the right column: "high speed limits near schools", that's their brave sacrifice
"sometimes slow down near schools"
* if they feel like it.
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"Not driving ar maximum speed"
To the right column, I would add, "Occasionally getting stuck behind a school bus, and not being allowed to pass as the stop every block". It's not much, but I think having 1 thing in the right column is a little bit funnier.
This implies drivers stop for buses
https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/school-bus-safety
Fair point. I don't even need to click the link, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law both drive busses. I thought drivers blowing past would MAYBE happen every few years but apparently it happens to them at least every week.
They need to start fixing deck guns to the bus. The kids can run it! Teach 'em while their young!
I can't let my child ride their bike on our street because of the assholes that speed down our road. I saw a biker almost get hit the other day by some idiot driver.
"I sacrificed my manliness to get a minivan to drive my kids around in. Whatchu talkin' 'bout?"
Would be awesome if instead of govs pushing age verification and similar bullshit they would shift the focus to cars
That won't be profitable, or increase the amount of surveillance.
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Given the sheer size many trucks and SUVs have ballooned up into now, pedestrians should be armed with bricks crossing the street now.
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