So, you do have a choice, and you’re choosing safety over freedom.
That may be the right choice, according to your values, or it may not. But you obviously do have the choice.
This sort of “we don’t have a choice” rhetoric is the source of a lot of the dynamics that the OP describes.
Yes I technically have a choice, I could tell my kids to suck it up and walk across multiple even busier roads, many of which don’t even have sidewalks for a good portion of them. But technically having a choice there doesn’t change anything about the complaint, after all I wouldn’t need to make this choice if I could live somewhere more walkable!
I’m making a far riskier choice than the parents in Tokyo do when they let their kids walk to school, in part because the parents in Tokyo don’t have their children walking down a sidewalkless street with cars going 40-50 right by them.
There’s roughly a 1⁄132 chance of a person being injured in a car accident each year in the US using some quick math off of injury rates and population, and walking is apparently 36x more dangerous than driving so it’s pretty heavily skewed towards them and I’m going to assume that’s skewed even more heavily towards “Kids who routinely walk alongside a road without a sidewalk near cars going 40-50 mph”. I wouldn’t know the exact amounts, but that seems pretty substantial to me.
Of course, I already make the choice of freedom vs safety by driving them to begin with (although similar, it’s skewed towards people who are drunk driving/using phone/speeding heavily/etc). So I know it’s a choice. But it doesn’t have to be one this awful!
Yes I technically have a choice, I could tell my kids to suck it up and walk across multiple even busier roads, many of which don’t even have sidewalks for a good portion of them. But technically having a choice there doesn’t change anything about the complaint, after all I wouldn’t need to make this choice if I could live somewhere more walkable!
I’m making a far riskier choice than the parents in Tokyo do when they let their kids walk to school, in part because the parents in Tokyo don’t have their children walking down a sidewalkless street with cars going 40-50 right by them.
There’s roughly a 1⁄132 chance of a person being injured in a car accident each year in the US using some quick math off of injury rates and population, and walking is apparently 36x more dangerous than driving so it’s pretty heavily skewed towards them and I’m going to assume that’s skewed even more heavily towards “Kids who routinely walk alongside a road without a sidewalk near cars going 40-50 mph”. I wouldn’t know the exact amounts, but that seems pretty substantial to me.
Of course, I already make the choice of freedom vs safety by driving them to begin with (although similar, it’s skewed towards people who are drunk driving/using phone/speeding heavily/etc). So I know it’s a choice. But it doesn’t have to be one this awful!