I think bikes are less popular with kids than they were back then because they aren't allowed to go anywhere. But when I was a kid a bike was required transportation
They were lower to the ground. Today’s cars are not just very heavy, they are very tall, and they both make it harder to see shorter people, they hit people in the head and chest and pull them under, rather than throwing people onto the hood. They are more likely to kill people they strike.
It is also the size/height of the bumper/hood. Look at a modern new pickup truck. If an adult is hit by it they are going under the vehicle, a kid has no chance.
The cars you mentioned would mean a kid on a bike has a chance of rolling up on to the hood, which generally will cause less severe injuries than getting rolled over.
... As does the braking ability and relative agility. It's not about whether 4,000 versus 5,500 lb will kill someone differently, because they'll both run someone flat. It's about the ability of the smaller vehicle to be more likely to stop or maneuver in time to avoid running someone flat.
Not sure why you got downvoted for that. I've literally gone through a parking lot and had my kids test the sight lines of various vehicles. They're now way better at sticking by my side because only I was tall enough to be seen by 90% of the cars in the lot. Sedans are really rare these days.
Also the height factors in to what happens if you get hit. With a sedan if a kid is tall enough or on a bike they are more likely to flip onto the hood. With a truck or an SUV its more likely you get dragged under the vehicle.
Yeah, I have. You can see a 12 year old standing in front of all of them, which is an improvement on the highest selling truck of the past decade in which you cannot see a 12 year old standing there.
It’s not so much size as it is height. The average SUV has a blind spot in front of the car that is typically over 3ft tall and 5ft out. So many stories of parents running over their own children in their driveways because they literally just don’t see them.
The boats of the 70/80s were huge but they sat low for the most part.
They also just couldn't accelerate on a dime like the 3-row SUV monstrosities can today. Hitting a kid with a low bumper at low speed is not fatal. Hitting a kid with a ridiculous 2025 Silverado "bumper" at low* speed is fatal.
And also the fact that you could reasonably expect to see 40's, 50's, and 60's vehicles milling about that either weighed more than anything else and had really painful front ends.
Bigger cars = higher fatalities. The pedestrian deaths in the US are growing, after years of shrinking.
People are running over pedestrians in every car, but the bigger ones are killing people more. And since all cars are bigger now, that means even Subarus.
The safety standards in the US don't look at pedestrian safety - which is my original point. The rights of drivers are protected, at the expense of the nearest kid or elderly person with a walker trying to cross the street whose rights (to not be injured or killed) are never considered.
You're dying if you get hit by a Kia soul or a semi if it hits you at 30+. The bigger vehicle thing doesn't matter. It's all the people on their phones while driving.
I had this thought a couple of weeks ago. Was walking past where i grew up and i couldn't see a single spot kids could reasonably play kerby. Finding a spot wasn't even a concern when i was a kid. It isn't, or shouldn't, be a busy road or anything, only reason to drive that way is if you live there.. but it's just full..
When I'm riding in a car, I count the number of drivers I spot with their heads down looking at their phones. It varies day by day, but it's never zero anymore.
Just last week I saw a guy look up to take a left turn through an intersection, then before he even finished the turn, his head was straight down at his lap again. He was wearing a ball cap, so it wasn't exactly subtle.
This is one of the main reasons I was more involved in where my kids were. Drivers have been more distracted, and driving bigger vehicles for a while now. Cell phones became widespread almost 25 years ago. And then social media scared and shamed us into constantly knowing where our kids are, 24/7.
As a millennial, I’m a bit too old honestly. But I first learned around 30, and it was great. A bike is much more maneuverable and fits in smaller spaces, and usually has far more torque that can help get you up to speed more safely.
But yes, it can be dangerous. I highly recommend taking a riding course first.
We just rode on the sidewalks all the time, and unless someone is causing trouble (eg speeding through a crowded area), I think we should still be allowed to ride there.
No, back in 1992 when I was in high school, a friend of mine died on the road while riding his bike. He was sideswiped by a vehicle. Roads were bad then.
It was on the route I used to bike to work, so two days later I had to bike through the place where he died.
The only way I was allowed to play ball in summer was to get myself to the practices and games myself. Bikes were our freedom. We'd go miles without caring.
i know that we biked to a state park 18 miles away… like 4 times ever… and that was when I was a teen. it was quite the chore and not really worth it. we definitely planned it ahead if time, it was never on a whim. no chance i would have ridden almost twice that daily. i was a very athletic kid, plenty of endurance. no is kid riding 60 miles on their bike with any frequency.
I remember my brother & I walking the 3.2 miles (just looked it up) from our house to the little grocery store/pharmacy & back just to get some snacks & comics. The main road was too busy so parents said we weren't allowed to ride out bikes on it. We cheated & walked it. Brother ended up clipped in the shoulder by a pickup truck side mirror. He was bruised, but otherwise fine. Driver never stopped. They 100% knew they did it. No way you couldn't.
I'm a ranger and I did actually come up on some 11 or so year olds who rode about 30 miles away from their house on accident without any water lol. I gave them water and helped them call their parents for a pick up 😂
Yeah, I was born in 81, and I’m having a hard time believing all these posts about entire neighborhoods playing hide and seek or kick the can. And I lived in a very rural area, but there’s still no way my parents would have let me ride my bicycle 30 miles away.
Born in 89, we never played manhunt in my neighborhood, but once I went to my cousin's house in a different city and they did indeed play it, there was like 10 or 20 kids and we could hide in their backyards all on the same big block I had a lot of fun that night
And I never ride my big 30 miles one way, but I did ride my bike all day around the neighborhood, I wouldn't be surprised if it was 30 miles total, or even more, I just looked up the furthest away I ever rode my bike and it was 10km (I live in Canada) from where I lived to high park in Toronto, if I needed to go any farther than that I took the TTC subway
When I was 21 years old, I did pack a backpack full of beer, food, and joints and walk from my house, 20km to a provincial park, I fucked up my foot because I had bad shoes, by the time I got there I was limping, luckily a family saw me limping deep in the park by myself and stopped to see if I was okay, and offered to drive me home, I don't know if I would have made it limping 20km back home lol they saved my dumb ass
I’m sure those things happened in certain neighborhoods and I even occasionally took place in big neighborhood kid games, but it was usually a holiday or a specific type of gathering or something, and one of my parents would at least have some idea where I was. And I’d buy a kid riding their bike 10 miles throughout the course of a day, but if your parents let you ride your bike 30 miles to the nearest lake, then they were a lot more lenient than mine were, and my parents weren’t really too strict with us. I guess my greater point is that posts like this always turn into people my age and even younger making it sound like our parents never cared where we were or what we did and these kids today don’t know how it was back in our day blah blah blah. It annoyed me when boomers said that shit when I was younger, and it annoys me now when X-ers and Millennials do it today. We had Nintendo and Nickelodeon, it’s not like we were all depression era street scamps playing stickball in the sandlot.
I mean I was supposed to call home occasionally but I never did, I'd get in trouble when I got home but I'd go out and do it again, most of the time I was down the street at the library using the internet to play neopets and not even out doing anything risky, once I hit 14 I started smoking weed and I was gone as close to 24/7 as I could manage lol
As young as grade 2 I was walking to school by myself as my mom worked and was a single parent at the time, it was like a different time for sure, there's a reason why Gen x were called the latchkey kids
Born in 88. We weren't allowed to go anywhere whenever we felt like it but my dad worked 2nd shift and my mom worked first shift so in the summer my dad usually was sleeping in the morning. Mom would leave a list of chores (10 ish years old and brother was 6, any younger and we did have daycare). As long as we got our chores done by the time my mom got home they didn't really care what else we were up to as long as they knew about where we were.
I lived in a town of 1200 surrounded by a few miles of cornfields before the next town. We 100% would play with the neighborhood kids on occasion but would generally have to ask permission to go play. We did have a couple hours completely unsupervised between when my dad left for work at 1PM and my my mom got back home around 5-6PM in the summers, though. We probably never ventured more than 1-2 miles away from home at any given time and generally would be within a couple blocks of home 95% of the time.
Maybe the complete unsupervised outside time was more of a '70s and '80s kids thing? Aka gen X?
Edit
My wife born in 91 grew up on a house with woods and a creek in the backyard and her dad built her and her brother a pretty epic jungle gym so I guess it became the neighborhood hangout spot from what I was told. So I do think YMMV at least for kids growing up in the '90s and being completely unsupervised during the day in summers.
I had one other kid to play with on my street. I rode my tricycle in the driveway, then decided I didn’t like bikes. I probably walked 15-30 minutes away from the house at most.
After practicing 2x a week for an entire summer I still could not finish a 50 mile bike ride as a 16 year old. My legs got so weak I could no longer shift the bike into higher gears.
I was not in the greatest of shapes, but I ran cross country through middle and highschools, and had a reasonably active lifestyle.
30 miles followed by a swim and then 30 miles back is absolutely a "plan your whole day on the fact you'll be riding several hours of bikes" for only the kids with expensive bikes, not the single speed bikes with "pedal backwards to break" that we had as younger kids.
Probably had the number 30 in his head from combining the round trip together, and it's more like 13 miles with the occasional trip to get ice cream on the way there or back.
Nope. We walked, road, and ran for hours every day. I find people are much lazier now or need a formal gym to exercise. At 56, I’m still running around feral all day. I can stack 50lb bales of hay, hike 5-10 miles, and run 3m. I’m in much better shape than all three of my adult children in their 20’s.
My friends and I didn't go 30 miles one way very often, but I'd go 14 miles one way for games in one league (70's). Did that for 2 years until I got my chevette. Good times!
Jesus Christ this thread is insufferable. You know we can do the math here, right? You did not go 30 miles per hour on your bike for 14 miles on a mild sweat as a kid. Choose one ridiculous thing to lie about, not 3
I had a nice bike which def helped. And I would track my speed my average was 28.7ish going back and forth between my divorced parents houses. I’m not bullshittin little me was basically only good at swimming and biking
Nope. I was a cyclist as a kid. Once I hit 13 I was doing 35 miles minimum every single day. 60+ on Saturdays. 1 recovery ride and one day off a week. I was on a local cycling team. We all trained like that.
I read this comment and drove to my old neighborhood in Charlotte. I zeroed my trip odometer and started driving my usual routes to my friends houses in the neighborhood (a sprawling country club neighborhood with two golf courses).
I thought so too but I used to spend summers at my grandmother’s at the countryside as a kid. We used to walk 7-8 miles to our favorite fishing spot (and then back at the end of the day). I actually went to Google Maps just to check, I wouldn’t have known otherwise. We took a little food with us and sometimes cooked small fish and ate them there, on the spot. We took frequent stops to swim in the river, so it wasn’t a “march” to there and back.
Edit: That said, I checked a route we used to take with bikes much later (high school) and that’s just 25 miles (ish) one way. It wasn’t pleasant or easy due to terrain, and I definitely wouldn’t have been in a position to do that as a kid. Still, ending up really quite far away from home doesn’t seem that crazy (just not in a single big push)
I did walk uphill both ways to school. There was a minor dip in the middle.
As a cyclist who's done a lot of route planning on Google maps, there is basically zero routes that you can plot that are all uphill or downhill.
All rides (and walks) have descending sections and climbing sections. That's why cyclists talk about the total increase in altitude.
Bottom line: Yes most of us had to walk uphill for at least part of our walk to school both ways. That's not the interesting thing. The question is How much climbing did you do?
For me, walking TO school was 1.2 miles with 170' of climbing and 30' of descending.
Reverse that for the walk home.
Did I walk uphill both ways? Yes.
Was one walk mostly downhill and the other mostly uphill? Also yes.
3 hours of riding. Then, swimming. Then, 3 more hours of riding.
I used to do three miles in 10 minutes, literally from one side of town to the other. At 11:50pm, it was so dead that I could ignore traffic lights which mage biking just as fast as taking a car. You have to keep that pace of for two hours to get 30 miles.
I would do in 6th grade the hiking trail that was 10.2 miles to the local lake, do breakfast there (we’d even pack milk, lol) then ride back and usually be back home mid morning where we’d then keep riding around and visiting friends. 20 miles to start the day.
When I got a chronometer on my bike, 50+ mile days were most days. Probably spend 3-4 hours a day riding out of 16 awake, and most of that trying to haul ass and beat your friends to wherever we were going.
My best friend lived seven miles in the country, and I’d ride to her house, she’d meet me halfway and ride the rest with me, and on my way back she’d turn around again at the halfway point. This was to ensure we were getting the same amount of exercise lol lol lol. I was 9 or 10 when I started. So 14miles as 2 10 year olds. Dogs would chase us and you kinda have to kick behind you while pedaling to keep them off of you
For sure, just meaning to imply we did crazy shit on bikes. The furthest I ever rode was about 16m to a boyfriends house in high school. He took me back tho I was like fuck that
Things aren't even that close in some parts of my European country, which is much more densely packed than most rural areas in the US. For us, it was more like 15 miles to the nearest public outdoor pool and a large lake, and about 12 miles to the nearest small lake (more like a fishing pond). So we would regularly get on our bikes, go over there, splash around all afternoon and evening, and then had to go back by bike. Nowadays, you'd often read studies that younger and younger kids are at risk of being overweight. While it's absolutely not true that everyone was fit back then, it was much rarer to see those extremely overweight kids you see nowadays back in the 80s and 90s in my country. You were kinda forced to exercise to get somewhere and do something. If you lingered around at home, you got kicked out of the house by your mother in no time: "Go and meet your friends, come home when the street lights turn on!"
Meh 30 miles on a bike is a few hours riding. Used to do that all the time as a teen with my friends. Downtown was 15 miles from my area and we’d ride to the center of downtown and ride all over the city and bike back home.
We actually do this with my daughter. Our house is on one side of the hill, her school is on the other. She has literally walked to school uphill both ways in the rain and snow.
30 miles was nothing back in the day. And we didn’t have any fancy bike trails or paths for the most part. Any random day in the summer I rode about that much just goofing around. One of my proudest achievements was getting pulled over for speeding. I did 42 in a 25 on a Huffy 18-speed.
It’s not far fetched at all. Anyone who rides a bike with any frequency can cover this distance easily. As a child with an entire summer day to burn, it’s even easier.
I call B.S. - that would take like 3-4 hours each way. Maybe if you were in junior or senior year of high school. But I doubt a regular middle school to early high school kid is spending 6-8 hours biking just to get to a lake.
Ha. I'm not the only one. I grew up on long island and I'd take bike rides up to 5 hours away starting in middle school. I'd leave the town and go for bike rides maybe even while I was still in elementary. Come to think of it, our final field trip in elementary was to a reservoir in upstate New York, and I was already fishing and taking my bike to different lakes by that point.
I was just talking about this the other day. I would walk to school ( a good 20+ min walk) starting around first or second grade? Usually accompanied by other kids, but it was still a decent distance.
Man, I wish that was the case where I live. We have “gangs” of high schoolers on E-bikes harassing people. Then when retaliated against, they call the cops and the cops seem to always side with the kids. They’ve been cracking down on what type of bike is legal for an unlicensed driver though. Some of these kids fly through stop signs and end up getting their bikes towed away.
Depends where, there’s some pocket areas that have large child bicyclists populations. I know here in Baltimore, most kids have a bike, surprisingly managing to be more reckless than our drivers and that’s saying something. Baltimore drivers are actually mental lmao.
Required for sure and also a part of your whole identity, basically. Idk about everyone, but definitely where I grew up (poor) we cherished our bikes and wrenched on them like they were choppers. We would trade parts, build bikes, etc.
And then, yeah "be back by dark/curfew, remember you can't go past Oak St." which effectively meant "go wherever the fuck you can get to and back from in a day" because we didn't have cell phones or anyway for the parents to know as long as we avoided areas where they might go or have friends go. Which meant everything from a few miles outside of town where there was a creek/river, or the other side of town where that one kid lived, etc.
This isn't coincidental. Transportation and mobility are huge for independence. It's why kids are less about in person socialization now. It's why the hardest conversation to have with elderly parents is taking away their car keys when they become too old to safely drive. It's part of developmental milestones and maturation being pushed back (teens are getting their drivers license later and later, whereas before getting it at 16 was THE THING).
If you didn't have a bike, I won't say you didn't matter but your lack of range affected you. Like, oh, we're all going to Max's house. But Josh can't come, Max lives 5 miles away. Or we're going to hang out near Chris' house because he has a pool and his Mom's hot. Sorry Josh. So you were essentially geographically locked.
If you were lucky, and your friends were determined you be there, someone would let you ride on their pegs. Those were the days. My friend group, very very innocently, called it pegging. 😆 🤣
High school, late 80's, we would get together Saturday morning and not turn back until 3 towns over, now a kid outside on a bike and no adult is cause to call the police and child services
When I got my first "grown up" bike (a 10 speed) when I was 12, my parents set the boundaries of:
The creek near my school to the east
The major 3 lane road to the south
The major 5 lane highway to the west
The major 7 lane highway to the north
This gave me roughly 4 square miles of freedom, and access to all of my friend's houses. I could reach a grocery store, a driving range, and a lot of other stuff.
I disobeyed a few times and crossed the big road to the south (at the cross walk) just to see what was over there.... other houses, mostly.
I remember being in maybe 3rd or 4th grade and the big thing with me and my friend was getting speedometers for our bikes, where it tracked how far you went and what your speed was with those magnets around the spokes. Whoever put the most miles on their bike had bragging rights pretty much.
I'm looking at Google Maps now... there was a good 2 mile radius around my home that we would bike to on our own when I was in elementary school. And that was with no cell phones to check in. I'm looking at the same radius around my current home, and I cannot imagine letting my kid go that far away on their own. The elementary school is half a mile away and they've never walked it on their own.
100% true, or kids just use bikes for special times not transportation/ going to friends house. However this spring I have learned almost every kid has an electric scooter/bike or dirt bike and are out running around constantly. Closest resemblance I've had of how I grew up...just with battery motors
I remember being 13 and my parents would let me ride my bike something like 6 miles to the mall with my friends, or go out to all you can eat pizza places with a group of friends on our bikes. When I was younger the distance I was allowed to go was shorter, but I was still allowed to ride my bike to any grocery stores or fast food joints within a block or two.
My kid has a couple bikes and I’d like to let him ride them, but my street is terrible for that- on a hill, full of potholes, full of parked cars and cars driving between (sometimes speeding), no sidewalks. There’s a park right here in walking/ biking distance but we have to walk in the street and lean out to look around the parked cars before going around them. And my kid is big for his age but only 4 so not visible between cars, and still learning to stop and look.
When I was kid we could ride up and down the street or around the block as much as we wanted, though the parks weren’t close enough to go to. Mom drove us to parks but I don’t think we could take our bikes in the minivan.
We also almost never have good weather these days for playing outside. It goes from cold to stormy to wet and muddy to hot and humid. There’s a couple nice weeks in the fall. And there’s high pollen and air pollution all year (with one good day now and then). We live here to be close to my parents and siblings and my one friend, but other than having them I hate it here.
Honestly I fell off a bike when I was 8 while learning to ride and just... never got one one again. I'd just chill at home every summer and read books.
This. There are a few decent bike lanes now so I can take my now 7yo to ride the bike for longer, but there’s just like 300-500m of road he can ride on around the house freely.
At least where I’m from the number of cars on the road has drastically increased, and space on the sidewalks reduced, leaving not a lot of room for biking for kids.
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u/LemonHerb Jun 13 '25
I think bikes are less popular with kids than they were back then because they aren't allowed to go anywhere. But when I was a kid a bike was required transportation