03/14/2026
A world built for cars has made life much harder for grown-ups, Stephanie H. Murray wrote in 2024. https://theatln.tc/XVjVdlji
In 2009, two mothers in Bristol, England, experimented with closing part of a neighborhood road to traffic for two hours after school. “The experiment also produced some unexpected results,” Murray writes. “As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors … That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another.” As the experiment has expanded, “neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them.”
Roads were once areas of community and play. “Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change,” Murray writes, as “deliberate efforts within the auto industry shifted the blame for traffic deaths to children and their parents.” Streets became a place for children to cross only when cars were absent, and speed limits subsequently rose.
Play streets can now be found sporadically in urban centers. Play streets help bind communities, because adults must work together to enact the logistics of shutting the roads down. But it could also have something to do with the way children’s play alters the feel of the street, giving adults permission to engage in the sort of socializing “we’ve otherwise policed out,” one expert told Murray; kids function, he pointed out, as a sort of “connective tissue for adults.”
“Children’s tendency to violate social boundaries—to stare a little too long, ask someone an overly forward question, or wander into someone else’s yard—can nudge adults to reach across those boundaries too,” Murray continues at the link in our bio. “It probably isn’t a coincidence that playgrounds are one of the few places in America where striking up a conversation with a stranger is considered socially acceptable … By siloing play there, we may have inadvertently undercut children’s capacity to bind us to one another.”
🎨 :Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Giuseppe Ramos / Getty
In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups.
