
Los Angeles Tests the Power of ‘Play Streets’ - artsandsci
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/arts/design/play-streets-los-angeles-boyle-heights.html
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eigen-vector
It seems to me that the way cities are laid out makes all the difference. If
you have residential streets which do not see much traffic throughout the day,
you don't need designated play streets. Any good old street with a threshold
number of kids living on would automatically transform into one. Necessity
drives invention and all that. I've lived and visited several parts of the US,
Europe, and India. The major difference seems to be the wide spectrum of city
layouts. India—where I grew up—for instance, has a lot of residential streets
with houses and apartments. There are also what are traffic streets which act
as veins coming out of wider state and national freeways. These intermediate
streets take in most traffic which frees up the residential streets and lets
the kids play all day/all evening. Big cities in Europe and the US seems to
lack this spectrum of traffic streets which results in residential streets
themselves seeing a lot of cars and buses plying across.

It also perhaps depends on the sports and games culture of the geographical
location. For instance, in India cricket is huge. It requires very little
space to play a custom game of cricket with rules amended/modified to suit the
turf you're playing it on. Same with soccer in a lot of European and South
American cities. I don't know how friendly baseball or American football is to
the streets.

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dionidium
> _I don 't know how friendly baseball or American football is to the
> streets._

I grew up playing both in the street in the small American town I'm from. It
was quite common in the 80s.

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Clanan
_Playborhood_ , by Mike Lanza, describes a related endeavor to transform one's
yard into an inviting area for neighborhood kids. My wife and I have been
discussing this quite a lot lately. How do we bring back neighborhood play so
kids can get outside, meet each other, and just be kids?

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Someone1234
That sounds fantastic, unfortunately I'd worry about the financial liability.

Even using age appropriate play equipment and a soft-fall surface, you'd
likely still wind up getting sued if a kid broke an arm or worse.

Some quick Googling suggests you'd need to have the playground owned by an LLC
and get it "commercial business insurance" specifically commercial playground
insurance.

The problem with that is that you likely aren't zoned for commercial, so
running a "commercial" (even free) playground from a residential property is
unlawful.

And you can put up an "at your own risk" sign but given attractive nuisance
doctrine it likely wouldn't protect you from full liability.

Then on top of that, if the playground was too popular, or some of the kids
caused issues near by neighbours likely would complain.

I know I sound like a complete grinch. I think it is a fantastic idea. Just
the more I consider it, the more issues and expenses crop up.

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Negitivefrags
This comment is a grim reflection on the downfall of western civilization. I
don't think society can recover from this level of evil bureaucracy that seems
to have taken root.

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secfirstmd
Yeh. Here in Dublin, even in my inner city area which occasionally has some
traffic. Parents just put out traffic cones reminding people to slow down.
Small goalposts, chalk drawings on the road, skipping ropes come out as soon
as the sun does.

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11thEarlOfMar
In the 60s/70s, we used to have a 'Block Party'. We'd pass the hat to pay for
a permit and block off both ends of the street for a few hours on a Saturday.
Set up picnic tables, play games, pot luck, talk politics and religion and
basically call time out on our otherwise busy or boring lives.

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closeparen
The suburb I grew up in still has several of these every summer.

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21
When I was a little kid in Eastern Europe we played in the street, footbal,
catch, other games.

Cars were pretty rare, one every 5 minutes, we would collectively pay
attention and just yell "car" when one was coming and get on the sidewalks.
There was no adult supervision, just us 5-10 year olds.

Of course, if that kind of thing would happen today some parents would
probably go to prison.

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saagarjha
> Of course, if that kind of thing would happen today some parents would
> probably go to prison.

This is still common in many US suburbs…

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et-al
Until Waze routes commuters off busy thoroughfares to these quiet sidestreets.

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wahern
This is why I don't use side streets as shortcuts. Even before I had kids I
understood it was a bad idea. I also try to only use services like Google Maps
_before_ departing, memorizing key turns. It helps that I'm old enough to have
learned how to drive in unfamiliar areas without a computer giving me the
turn-by-turn.

Perhaps one day Waze and others will be held liable for any accidents or even
public nuisances that occur.[1]

[1] Better that than government regulators acting as gatekeepers for
technological innovation, who typically rely on imaginary, fear-based
scenarios rather than actual, manifest harms.

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twblalock
> Perhaps one day Waze and others will be held liable for any accidents or
> even public nuisances that occur.

Waze is sending drivers onto public roads. Public roads belong to everyone,
not just the people whose kids play street hockey on the roads.

Don't like it? Then privatize the roads and make the people who live on the
roads bear 100% of the maintenance and law enforcement costs. But don't
complain about members of the public using a public road.

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wahern
I'm not complaining about members of the public using a public road. I'm
complaining about a company _directing_ its users to take routes which were
never designed as throughways; routes which few if any of those users would
have taken _but_ _for_ Waze directing them.

Imagine you own a large parcel of land with a public easement for crossing to
a beach. Every day a few dozen people walk across. Now imagine I put together
a party and direct 3,000 friends to walk across your parcel all at once. As
large crowds of people do, they stray and destroy things. Your mailbox. A
small bridge crossing a creek that you own and maintain (thankfully nobody is
hurt).

 _But_ _for_ my party and the people I invited, none of this damage would have
happened.

Not only did I create a credible nuisance (actionably by itself), it's not too
much of a stretch to say I could be held vicariously liable for the damages.
All this even though it was a public right-of-way.

In the absence of relief (self-policing, civil liability), I can tell you what
is likely happen with the Waze issue. States will pass laws that require Waze
and others to exclude routes upon notice by state authorities. A database will
emerge of impermissible throughways. Neighborhoods and towns will scramble to
add their streets to the database. Violations will come with huge fines
whether or not actual harm occurs, even if the violation was exceptional (i.e.
reroutes through blacklisted streets during a traffic accident). Ultimately
the only routes you'll be given are truck routes.

This has already begun, it's just voluntary, and Waze doesn't cooperate.
That's not going to last long. Waze will ruin the space for everybody else by
inviting heavy-handed regulation.

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et-al
Yeah the "public roads for everyone" point is always the immediate response to
the Waze debate, and it's accurate. But really the opposing viewpoints are:

\- my "right" to drive to somewhere as quickly as possible

\- living on a street without cars zipping by

City planners didn't plan out streets for Waze. We generally have small,
slower streets feeding into larger, faster streets. The smaller streets
weren't designed to be thoroughfares. And sure there were people who knew
shortcuts, but with Waze, it's a magnitude more drivers.

So you can't fault homeowners for being upset by this change. And the folks
driving on these sidestreets aren't legally trespassing, but they're probably
speeding, and that's the crux of most complaints.

If the re-routed folks were driving carefully at 15-25mph on these
sidestreets, I don't think anyone would care. But they're usually going 35mph
or whatever is the usual speed limit on the main thoroughfare. Their mindset
they just dodged some traffic and now's they need to make up some time.

And as a result homeowners need to ask the city to install traffic calming
measures like speedbumps in their neighborhood to make it less attractive for
re-routing.

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elcapitan
I come from a small town in Germany, and in those towns it was very popular to
build those kinds of streets in the 80s and 90s (I think, probably still is).
It was definitely nice not to have heavy traffic around. But the images in the
article made me laugh. None of that stuff they show ever happened around where
I lived. We kids played in the back yards and in the gardens, but not on the
street.

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fnordian_slip
Of course this is all anecdotal, but in my small German town in the 90s we did
play soccer on the streets. Well, we also played in the backyards and gardens,
but soccer generally played in the streets where I come from. It was a town of
less than 3000 inhabitants of course, and we would clear the street about
every 10 minutes when a car would come through.

I recently went back to visit my parents, and had to drive very slowly because
a couple of children were playing on the streets in a neighboring village, so
I guess it hasn't died out yet.

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readams
There's a bit of a trend lately around destroying transportation
infrastructure to achieve vague goals. What is wrong with playing in parks?

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adlaigordon
They got paved over to build a highway. Or in lots of places, were never built
at all, or are too far away. So much infrastructure over the last half century
is built for cars, not people. The trend you've identified is people realizing
this situation and reclaiming some of the space for people instead of just
cars.

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ovao
I live in Los Angeles. There are three (what I would call "average-sized")
parks within 1.5 miles of the street mentioned in the article, as well as two
smaller parks. At least one of them just underwent major renovation over the
past six months.

I couldn't say whether public parks in Los Angeles are going away in general.
I'd say "likely". But I think this article somewhat incorrectly frames how
dire the situation is with respect to public parks in L.A..

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CalRobert
Would you let your 8 year old kid walk 1.5 miles to the park, on their own, in
LA?

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ovao
No, I wouldn’t. I’m merely suggesting that the author is mischaracterizing the
public park situation around Fickett St., and not suggesting that kids in
Boyle Heights walk 1.5 miles to their local park.

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FrozenVoid
Perhaps the problem isn't the lack of such streets, but lack of free spaces
such as parks, due to density of development and high land use?

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advisedwang
[http://archive.is/7W4Hj](http://archive.is/7W4Hj)

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dholness2
Golfers need their green, sorry kids. lol

