Old 06-12-19, 11:18 AM
  #60  
livedarklions
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Originally Posted by Last ride 76
I am hardly the helicopter parent type... She is able to walk to the library, ice cream shop or any of the stores in our area...


You don't buy it... If you think that cell phone usage has had no impact on local driving, you're not paying attention. I was taken down (only) twice by cars over many thousands of miles during the 1970s. Now, older, slower and wiser, I have had extremely close calls in a crazy per mile ratio, since starting to ride again in 2015.


Need to learn it eventually? Americans need to learn to ride bikes in urban sprawl? Bikes are mostly recreational in the US. Unless we do something constructive to make kid/commuter local type riding safer, more kids will have to be chauffeured around, even more than they are currently. Perhaps it is to big an undertaking for the perceived benefit. That ship may have already sailed...
By "it" I meant dealing with navigating through heavy distracted drivers generally, whether on bike, on foot and eventually driving. My kids are in their 20s now, your kid isn't going to be a kid forever.

Sorry, I'm old enough to have done a vast amount of riding in the pre-cell phone era, and drivers have always been prone to distraction, outright hostility, and general carelessness. Most drivers are actually pretty good and considerate, it's always been a matter of a small minority acting like jackasses.

If you're relying on anecdote, so can I. I do tons of riding on rural and urban streets of all kinds, as well as MUP riding, and long rural rail trails. Drivers are about the same as when I was a kid back in the stone age. There were always drivers futzing around with lipstick, fumbling for cassette tapes, fiddling with the radio dials, spilling coffee on themselves, or whatever distraction was being used at the time. Trust me, I'm paying attention, I always have been.

If you haven't noticed that parents freak out a lot quicker because they don't know exactly where Suzy is for an hour or two, you are the one not paying attention.
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