Tom Sherman wrote in
:

Bill H. wrote:

donquijote1954 wrote:


Obviously it got to do with SAFETY. Would you push an 11 year old

child

with a bike into the mean streets of America? Sounds to me like
throwing a sardine into a tank full of sharks.


Well, I don't know about anyone else, but when I was about nine or so
I started riding a bike to school just about every day, as long as it
wasn't snowy or raining. And yes, this was on the "mean streets" of
America. I wasn't kidnapped or hit by a car, either....

I rode my Peugeot P-8 to school every day during junior high school,
and this was in Wisconsin where it did get cold and snow quite a bit
in the winter. That bike rode and handled very well, especially
considering it was about the least expensive "LBS quality" bike
available at the time.


I never rode my bike to school (this was in the 60s), but I often rode
it out of our subdivision, along a US highway, across a bridge into town
and over to the library, where I would stay half the day until my mom
called the library to make sure I was there. I was prolly about 10. Now
I'm afraid to let my teen daughters ride around through the small town
we live in. Why am I paranoid?

I think it's partly that there truly is more traffic on the roads now
than there used to be, and proportionally there are more idiot drivers
out there. There are more kids behind the wheel than there used to be. I
don't think this country (the US) does enough to maintain the proper
level of competence in drivers. Once you get your license you pretty
much have it for life.

If driver training included something about sharing the road; if
maintaining a driver's license included a mandatory behind-the-wheel
re-test every 10 or 15 years; if traffic enforcement concentrated more
on encouraging proper motoring and less on traffic citations (and
revenue and statistics) - then I'd worry less about my kids biking.