this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Combinations. Amazon, smart phones, how kids hang out, poverty, giant stores like target and wal mart..It's a bunch of reasons that all hit against malls.
Malls haven't been the only hit over the decades. "Cruisin" is no longer a thing. Teens used to spend hours on nice nights driving up and down a certain stretch of road in nearly every city somewhere.
More kids used to ride bikes around for funnies.
Drive in movie theaters used to be huge.
Things always change and it's almost never just a single reason.
Part of that is also how in our car-centric society, our public transportation sucks. And biking is unsafe in many places— even spots that have bike lanes. Everything is too far way, so you can only get there by car. Everywhere you that is close is either unsafe or actually impossible to bike to, unless you’re lucky. And if you wanna take the metro or bus, it’s slow af, unreliable, and in many places has very few stops and runs infrequently.
And then the lack of people using public transportation only leads to more cars on the road which makes the problem even worse! More lanes, more land used for parking lot deserts, etc.
Nowhere to go, no way to get there, nothing to do.
This is one of my things I go off about. People sometimes tell me they want to move out of the city "for their kids" and I'm like are you crazy? The suburbs were hell as a kid. Can't go anywhere because you don't have a car and walking is dangerous and slow. I was always so jealous of my friends that lived in the city. They could just go do stuff
Not only is this no longer a thing it's actually explicitly illegal in some places. Passing the same location 4 times within a short period or "driving without a destination" can get you a ticket if the cops are paying attention.
That's kinda fucked up. Almost sounds like laws targeting homeless people living out of their cars. And for anyone else, why shouldn't I be able to just tour around and look at sights without necessarily stopping anywhere? That's basically what I do every weekend for fun.
Yep. That's the thing that never changes. "The man" is a total asshole killjoy.
That's not the case in much of the rural US. In small towns (~30-75k) everywhere there are kids driving up and down the road every Friday and Saturday night.
You'll just have to trust me, or ask an old timer from one of those cities you speak of (I'm from one of several in the area). They're about 1/4 the amount of traffic that they used to be.
It's because they can't remember where their meth dealer lives this week.