In 20222, the federal government spent approximately $52 billion on roads. This infrastructure is obviously a necessary expenditure. Roads and highways are the connective tissue of our economy, one could argue. But it’s worth asking: Who are roads for?

Nowadays, the obvious answer might be that roads are for cars and drivers. But once, the answer might have been that roads are for kids and their games.

Stephanie Murray is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. She joined Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal to talk about how life changed when kids stopped playing in the streets. An edited transcript of their conversation follows.

Kai Ryssdal: Tell me about these two moms in England that you start this piece with.

Stephanie Murray: Yeah, so Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson. They were friends, and, I guess this was back in 2009, their kids were kind of getting to the age where, based on their own experiences as children, they would have expected them to kind of be out of the house more, playing with their friends, just sort of running around. But they weren’t. They were inside a lot. So they decided to kind of run an experiment on their street where they applied to shut their road to traffic for an afternoon. And they specifically did not plan any activities or anything like that. They just wanted to see, you know, with time, space and permission, what happens. And what happened is a bunch of kids poured into the street and had no problem, you know, playing, finding things to do, right? And it went really well.

Ryssdal: Of course it went really well because kids playing is kids playing, and that’s good. I want to go to the subhead of this piece, though, and with the understanding that writers don’t usually write their own headlines and subheads. It says, “A world built for cars has made life so much harder for grownups.” Talk about that a little bit.

Murray: Yeah, absolutely. I think that one of the things that came really clear through the experiment was it sort of made the modern approach to play, where parents kind of shuttle their kids to activities, structured activities, playgrounds, play dates, that sort of thing, seem sort of silly, I guess, because the kids clearly didn’t really need special equipment to play. What they needed was to be less reliant on their parents to get outside.

Ryssdal: The challenge here, of course — yes to everything you said — the challenge, of course, is that, you know, I live in suburban [Los Angeles]. It’s a small, little town. I grew up in an even smaller town, and we played on the street all the time. But I’ll tell you what. If my kids went out on the street that we live in today, this is a terrible thing to say, they would not last three minutes because people come blowing down there in their cars.

Murray: Yes, I mean, same here.

Ryssdal: So what do we do with that, right? Because this is really a story, and I’m going to out you here as a former public-policy researcher, as it says in your bio on this piece. This is a story about built environment and infrastructure, right? Because we are now built for cars.

Murray: Yeah, I think that that’s, you know, Amy and Alice, they went on and they founded this organization where they help a bunch of other streets, neighborhoods throughout the UK, set up their own play streets. But I think one other sort of long-term result that they found is whether or not having these sort of play street sessions is enough to actually change the culture of the street. So on some streets that are quieter, maybe they’re not a through street, on those streets, having these regular play street sessions is enough to sort of change the culture of the street. Eventually, everybody gets it. They’re like, “Oh yeah, you just expect to see kids play.” But on the street where this experiment originated, which is a very busy through street, it’s not possible to do that.

Ryssdal: The other thing that’s built, and this is something that’s happened over, you know, decades in this country, is the parental attitude toward knowing where their kids are at all times and being uber-cautious. And, you know, I did things when I was a kid that, you know, if my kids did them today, I’d be like, “You are out of your mind. You’re not doing that.”

Murray: Well, yeah. And, I mean, in response to this piece, a lot of people said, “Oh, yeah, you know, there were cars when I was a kid, you know, in the ’70s and the ’80s or whatever, and kids still did this.” Right?” And first of all, I mean, even by the ’70s and ’80s, children’s street play had been drastically curtailed by cars compared to, you know, 50 years prior. But then, on top of that, as traffic has become dominant and there are just more and more cars on the street, it has this sort of vicious-cycle effect where it gets a little bit more dangerous, and then parents don’t let their kids out as much, and then people don’t expect to see the kids out there. And it just sort of gets worse and worse, such that, yeah, it’s pretty dangerous in most busy areas to let your kids, you know, out into the street.

Ryssdal: And just to put a punctuation mark on this, as you said, it took decades for this to become a thing where kids playing in the street has been lost to cars in the streets. It will take decades to change this back.

Murray: Absolutely, absolutely.

Stories You Might Like

One way Oakland is fighting racial inequality? By fixing potholes

How do we make roads and bridges more resilient?

Biking in cities can be complicated, and map apps can only help so much

Let’s build infrastructure, but we better make it smart

Shrinking batteries unleash DIY vehicles onto streets of New York

The infrastructure bill is on the president’s desk. What’s in it for rural America?