Originally Posted by
jon c.
In any case, I think the discussion is somewhat academic today. At least from what I see, there are relatively few kids today who want to ride bikes. And relatively few parents who want their kids to ride to school. I don't think prohibition by the powers that be is a major factor. We would have ridden bikes to school if we could because we rode everywhere. Maybe in part because our parents weren't about to drive us everywhere and we wanted to be anywhere but in the house. Kids today seem happy to be more housebound while interacting with the rest of the world electronically. I don't know if that's going to change any time soon.
I had a discussion with a teacher about this recently, and one thing that was brought up is that - in the case of immigrant families from certain parts of the world - many kids simply never learned to ride a bike. Actually, I wonder if this is starting to becoming more prevalent here in North America - kids not learning to ride bikes in the first place.
I totally understand the mindset of fear that many parents have (I myself was rather reticent about riding on certain when I recently started cycling again, and I should know better!) but I think if parents could be persuaded to ride the route themselves they would quickly find that it is not nearly so scary/dangerous as it seems from the seat of their car and then they might be less reluctant to let their kids ride.