I already posted, but this post bothered me so much that I wanted to say my peace. You can tell that OP and everyone resonating with them is from
Canada or the USa country with car dependency. How? Because our urban environments are uniquely awful, since they're built for cars, not people. The suburbs are far from anywhere you'd like to go, and even if you had the gumption to walk or bike a mile or more each way, the infrastructure to do so is flat out dangerous or hostile in a lot of cases. The suburbs keep a low population density, and there's no real cause to meet anybody else ever since they have no third spaces, so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience. Big box stores, chain pharmacies, and chain restaurants being the dominant businesses in your area is also a car-centroc urbanism thing, since if you have to get in your car to go shopping, you're just going to go where you'll only have to make one stop or where you won't have to leave the car. It's even in the meme: parents too busy to teach [them] how to drive, which matters because the city is fucking inaccessible otherwise.I live in a city of 90,000 in California and, while California is generally head and shoulders above the rest of the US in bike infrastructure, it's still goddamn hostile to try and get across town on a bike or on foot, and that's assuming the weather isn't miserable. I've had five exchange students from different countries (Japan, HK, Russia, Netherlands, etc) and they all found the suburbs / US urban design to be isolating. All of them were used to just being able to bike/tram/bus/train across the city and even between cities completely on their own and it was no big deal at all. It's easily the hardest thing for them to cope with.
It's not this way in the rest of the world, and it hasn't even been this way forever. It got this way due to decades of deliberate policy choices, and it can be changed. Your local city and county government has a shocking amount of power over this kind of stuff, and those are levels of government that, unless you live in a big metropolis, are actually accessible to laypeople. Start organizing, get your friends together, make some noise, let them know what you want; local politics can actually be pretty responsive to this stuff.
Edit: in case you want more information, there's several really good channels about this stuff, but I'd recommend NotJustBikes and AlanFisher on YouTube for a start.
Edit 2: OP is not, in fact, from the US or Canada. Took a gamble and lost.
Australia is, to my understanding, not as bad as America, but roughly on par with Canada. I believe NZ might also be very car-dependent. It's definitely not just those two countries
Anyway, shoutouts to !fuckcars@lemmy.world and !notjustbikes@feddit.nl.
For fucks sake, this is my teens and it was because my parents sucked ass and were insane. We are not in fact all living in America.
Could be worse you could have a abusive fuck religious parents who have the time to make sure you a prisoner.
so unless you hit the neighbor jackpot, the suburbs are a super lonely experience
Everything else you say is right on, but this is the one that annoys me. I've had shitty neighbors. I've had neighbors that were constantly committing domestic assault and having the police called on them. Overall though, I knew and spent time with my neighbors because we all made the effort to be a community. I've recently moved to take care of a dying family member, but even in the few months I've been here there have been improvements in the relationship with the neighbors because we made agreements to have a block party once a month, have the husband/wife lunch every few weeks, and generally socialize. It sucks to start if no one on your block is talking, but most people are pretty happy to start building a relationship with their neighbors. You just have to put in the effort.
Car culture turns children into prisoners in their own homes.
I am so happy I didn't grow up in the US... Lots of biking and walking, a bus to go to town, school friends that tag along in the evening
Meanwhile every wannabe city planner on this site tells me how great winding burb roads are
It does not matter how windy or straight burb roads are.
What matters is that they aren't culs-de-sac for pedestrians/cyclists, allow mixed use zoning(!!), and are dense enough to support a diversified economy.
See: streetcar suburbs.
I mean even if you are old enough to drive, how are you supposed to get home after getting shitface drunk?
Hate to upvote someone from Lemmy.ml but for once you're totally right.
Have you tried drugs?
I wonder if there is a relation between drug use and proximity to recreation.
Yes. Theresa a massive cocaine problem in my country largely because of how no one has a clue to form friends anymore. The Irish are friendly but terrible friends. Tons of acquitances but little to no actual bonds beyond a superficial level.
That is extremely American looking
I live in the middle of nowhere in Europe and all is true except the outside picture and the fact that there isn't anything to walk to (except if you want to take a 20km hike trough a forest to get to the city, and then do another 20km back)
I'm In middle of nowhere north east amarica and replace walking through a forest your climbing hills steap enough to be considered cliffs, and you have my childhood. It amazes me that I biked all that just to visit a ice cream stand.
Same, just change to Croatia and closest "city" being 8km away.
This one hurts. It wasn't my experience, but it's too common and I hate it.
It was mine. From 2013 to 2018. It still affects me to this day.
OP literally me. 🥹
How does it affect you?
I live in central europe, I could travel across the entire continent in a day for not that much money and could go anywhere in the eastern part of my country for 60€/year, I could go to any western part of my country in 5h for less than 20€
this dark magic I could use is called a "train system" also reffered to as "good public infrastructure" by many
goddamn. i live in western europe and i have to spend upwards of 100 euro just to go for a 3 hour train trip. i have to spend 500 for a yearly transit pass to get around my (relatively small) city.
Keep in mind that trains are not popular in the US because much lower population density means that it is harder to plan efficient routes.
yes and no, we also HEAVILY subsidize roads via federal grants and until recently passenger train infrastructure didn't have any kind of federal backing.
This means elected officials with tight budgets will 'address' transportation with new roads even where its a bad solution because its cheaper and it looks like they're doing something. By the time people realize it didnt fix anything the elected official has moved on.
No, that's a myth. America had extensive train networks -- both within cities and between them -- and deliberately destroyed them because of a combination of misguided modernist city planning and corrupt lobbying from corporations from oil companies and car manufacturers.
There is nothing special about America that makes it inherently unsuitable for trains.
Ha. I grew up across the road from the beach so just surfed every daylight hour not in school. No friends, no cool things around, no games, no hobbies, but didn't care at all because surfing trumped anything you could offer a kid.
This was my adolescence except miles removed from Cowtown, the second largest municipality in Pigshit County, Ohio. People wanna talk about car culture and how the suburbs ruined everything, and I get it, but rural life as a teen was depression on top of the depression I’d already developed in elementary school.
If I hadn’t been able to drive my busted-ass ‘85 Toyota Van when I was 17 I don’t know if I would have made it to 18, I was hanging on by a frayed thread. Even then, my hometown was utterly worthless, I’d have to go at least half an hour on the highway to go somewhere with a veneer of life.
I would love for the semi-rural suburb where I currently live to modernize and become walkable and bikeable, but I’ll still take this any day over what I had 25 years ago.
I'm 27. This has basically been my life for the last 10 years.
this was my youth, we still fucking walked / biked everywhere, even in the deep south's 100+ degree temps. people who think europe is an non-automotive utopia: this is a recent trend - it took time to build out the infrastructures (PLURAL) that replace driving everywhere, and even then it's taking time to get the cars out of the cities.
https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-myth-netherlands-is-great.html
It's something we have to work at together, and the vroom-vroom crowd who want to murder cyclists with their coal-rollers are very much in the way.
Lack of reliable tech or computer made me explore my city on bicycle with friends. Good times.
Hah, or you can be me. I grew up in New York City with the ability to go pretty much anywhere unsupervised and I never did - I spent all my free time either reading books or playing videogames anyway. I had almost zero interest in the real world (I think it's pretty boring even now that I've been an adult for a while) but I still feel like there was something wasteful about not bothering to experience things that so many other kids would have really enjoyed.
The worst part was college. I attended a famous party school but went to zero parties, zero dates, etc. At least I managed to graduate in three years with a double major. (By the time I got to college, I did want more social interaction but I thought that I was incapable of it so I didn't try.)
what a sad life
It actually hasn't been bad overall. Those were my missed opportunities but there were also other opportunities that I didn't miss.
(I do live in New York City again and I do still think it's really boring here. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do that doesn't involve a crowd of strangers which ruins it for me. The main reason I'm here is to be close to my family but even visiting them requires a miserable two-and-a-half-hour round trip on the subway. I got to live in a small town for a while and I liked it a lot better - having a house with a big yard, being able to drive everywhere, and easy access to nature were great.)
This is so relatable that it hurts
Don't forget COVID
Me:
I obviously can't speak for everyone, but in the US my parents were elated when I reached the age where they could start teaching me to drive, which in my state is 15 and a half years.
They helped me buy my first beater car for $500, then told me to get a job to pay for gas and insurance. After 16 I was never home, I was working, at school, or out with friends.
Public transportation instead of a car could have taken me to some of the densely populated areas, like the cities or the beach. But with a car I could go to the desert, to the mountains, camping in the middle of nowhere with my friends. When your state/country is HUGE then public transit might be nice, but a car means freedom to get out of the urban areas.
I was basically self sufficient, and my folks were happy to have some time back for themselves.
Same here. Having a car as a teen unlocked all the cool shit for me. Freedom to roam and meet with cool people, going fishing, shooting guns at a sandpit, getting drunk, getting laid, etc. Nobody would believe all the cool shit we did back in the day without pictures haha.
Forgot most of it because how boring it was, and then I talk with people I knew from those years and it's always the same topics, the same histories, like they are stagnant on memories because their life peaked at highschool.
As someone who's had a teenagehood like this, what should I do? I have friends abroad and I travelled to visit them by myself a few times. It doesn't make the other 350 days of the year any less boring though
Study for college. Seriously, just allocate many hours a day for it. it's boring at first but gets better after a while. You don't have to go to an Ivy League, any mid-range state college will have cool people and walkable infrastructure. If you don't have a lot of money, do the first couple years at a community college and talk to counselors to make sure the credits transfer. Once you're in college, be proactive and seek more advice.
Ah yes parents teaching their kids to drive at 16 and scary traffic, this can only be the US...
Ouch.
Holy fucking mood.
Bold of you to assume that we have parents? :-P
There's a probability that a teen will get the energy and motivation to step outside and interact, but if they don't have a decent experience interacting or if they can't reliably find another teen to interact with, then it reduces their motivation and that probability drops. Phones and availability of "good enough" entertainment alternatives to interacting combined with reduced probability of having a good experience result in reaching a critical mass where interactions and good social experiences are so unlikely that many people don't even try. The only way to fix this problem is by increasing the motivation to get out, but unfortunately it depends on everyone doing it and not just you.
