I was born in 1993 and I did that with my neighborhood friends too.
Comment on Yeah, but...
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 7 months ago
[off topic?]
Just read an interview with the young actors from ‘Stranger Things.’ They said that one of the craziest 1980s thing they did was get on bikes and just ride around town, unsupervised. One said he looks around now, and never sees kids just riding bikes.
doctordevice@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I posted because I have seen it go from expecting a bike rider to be a kid to expecting them to be an older adult. But I guess it’s different depending on where you live.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
It definitely is. Kids bike down my street every day, though much more on weekends, I think because most schools near me don’t allow walking or biking to/fro anymore. Some kids getting run down on rural roads because they’ve been paved and turned into highways made it too unsafe for many kids to walk or bike down highways, and it was too big a headache to have selective rules.
I’m in a suburban area between rural and city where kids don’t have to worry about high speed traffic or much violent crime, so kids are still free-range here. They videogame, too, of course.
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Back in 1993 I used to ride my bicycle on the highway that had a 55 mph speed limit.
It was so far out in the country though, that there were only about 4 cars per hour.
I was 10 years old.
callouscomic@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I see kids doing that in my neighborhood all the time. There’s some that go with poles down to fish in a nearby creek. It all depends on where you live.
ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
Hell I was born in the mid to late 00s and i grew up in the 2010s, but I still did this, we did have dialup internet (i lived and still live in the middle of nowhere, but now we get satellite internet) and I distinctly remember the time we went with my sis and some friends and a fucking massive storm appeared, I thought we were gonna die lol, I think I was like 10 or 11 at that time
Yes I am an European, specifically one of the eastern kind
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
True, I rode all over the place when I was a kid. We let my daughter ride everywhere she wanted within our (very large) subdivision, but it’s semi-rural and the entrances are both country roads that cars hurtle down, so we didn’t feel safe letting her down those. When I was a kid, I lived in town, so it was different. Maybe kids in town aren’t like that anymore though.
Zoomboingding@lemmy.world 7 months ago
When I was a kid in the 90s, we biked all over. Loved going 5 miles down the highway to the surplus store. It wasn’t a busy highway though and had a big shoulder.
ohlaph@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We wven did that without maps. Of we got lost, we just rode around until we recognized something familiar.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I’ve noticed with my kids I have to know where they are basically at all times. Leave school, go to friends house, I get notified. On weekends if they go from one house to the other, I need to know.
When I was a kid, I would get up and on my bike around 7-8am, would not be back until dark at least, and just go… anywhere? Ride 10 miles across the whole town, through construction, to the creek or up the big ass hill a little outside of town? Sure. And the wild thing about this is that it was completely normal.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That sounds awesome, bicycles give you superpowers in landscapes that aren’t violently hostile to anything that isn’t cars. I grew up on the side of a highway basically, I could only bike up and down my driveway basically.
Now I take so much pleasure in just shooting over to the grocery store on my bike. Every single time I do it I am thankful because of how much that capacity was utterly denied by where I lived.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 7 months ago
oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.