Car Culture Is Costing Our Kids

The following is in response to the editor’s note in the January issue of Growing Up Santa Cruz regarding the bike and pedestrian rail/trail, a project that has stretched across decades and is estimated to cost tens of millions of dollars, yet shows little substantial development thus far. While funding and timelines often dominate the conversation, there’s a deeper issue at stake: streets, sidewalks, and bike paths are not just transportation projects; they are spaces that shape childhood. When pedestrian and bike infrastructure is safe and accessible, children gain independence, confidence, and the freedom to explore their communities, benefits that no budget alone can afford.

Every summer I travel to the Netherlands, where my husband was born, and marvel as groups of Dutch elementary schoolers stream into local shops, stopping for ice creams on their way to the petting zoo or the local swimming pool or the sporting fields. There are no parents hovering, no cars idling, just kids pedaling, chatting, and negotiating the world together. My husband barely notices scenes like this because he grew up there, in Amersfoort, a picturesque medieval Dutch city that decided years before he was born that children mattered more than cars. The historic city center doesn’t allow through-traffic. Protected bike lanes, some as wide as many American residential streets, crisscross and encircle the city. Trains, buses, and bike networks hum along in a transportation system so well maintained that miles of rail and bike lanes are routinely upgraded or replaced entirely in a matter of weeks, not years (or decades).

To him, childhood independence is normal. At five years old, he rode his bike to school alone every day, accompanied only by his seven-year-old sister. No adults helicoptering, no car lines, no check-ins. Not because his parents were unusually brave, but because the streets were built to make that kind of childhood possible. It remains the same today in 2026.

That freedom didn’t happen by accident, and it wasn’t a gift from benevolent politicians. The infrastructure that made Amersfoort (and hundreds of other Dutch cities) safe for children was hard-fought, born out of grief and rage in the 1970s, when cars were killing hundreds of Dutch children each year. From 1972 until about 1978, Dutch citizens relentlessly took to the streets under the banner Stop de Kindermoord (“Stop the Child Murder”) organizing national strikes, mass protests, civil disobedience, and yes, even property damage. They forced the country to confront a brutal truth: a transportation system optimized for speed and centered around car-facilitated individualism was stealing children’s lives and independence. The protections that followed made the Netherlands a global example of infrastructure and pedestrian safety, and they were demanded, not politely requested.

In the United States, childhood independence is disappearing. Many teenagers and young adults don’t know how to run errands, make appointments, or even get to school alone, not because parents are necessarily overprotective, but because streets aren’t safe. When neighborhoods are built for fast-moving cars instead of people, constant supervision isn’t optional, it’s necessary. Conversely, when streets are designed for walking and biking, children gain more than safety. They gain autonomy.

They learn to make small decisions, solve everyday problems, interact with people in their community, and trust their own judgment. Those skills are built gradually, through repetition, in ordinary moments. In the Netherlands today, these hard-won gains have been worn down by recent decades of neoliberal leadership under politicians like Mark Rutte, a reminder that progress can erode when industry, convenience, and privatization are allowed to eclipse collective well-being.

If we care about our children’s emotional resilience, social competence, and ability to navigate the world, the debate over bike lanes and sidewalks isn’t a niche transportation issue. It’s a parenting and social issue, and an invitation to ask whether the streets we’ve built are allowing our kids to feel capable, or keeping them dependent far longer than they should be.

Addressing these challenges requires more than wishful thinking or incremental fixes. In the U.S., infrastructure development is often forced through serpentine political channels with bifurcated priorities, and whether projects are executed efficiently for the public good or whether they serve as little more than a money-laundering apparatus for vested interests remains an open question. What is clear, however, is that we cannot begin to tackle the problem while ignoring or denying that our dependence on, and prioritization of, cars (and oil) is a root cause of our infrastructure stagnation, and that it’s crippling our children in myriad ways.

Until we confront the fact that our communities are built for cars and individual convenience over our collective wellbeing and safety, children will continue to lose the freedom, confidence, and independence that are their birthright. A single walking path will not correct this fundamental conflict. Recognizing the broader social problem of our car dependency is a first step; designing streets that let our kids navigate the world safely and autonomously, and figuring out how to actually get them built, is the next.