I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Or driving in general. As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can’t comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn’t know how to use a passport as an ID.
The only other people I’ve met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem… the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like “simply drive to your driving test appointment”…
As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)
I’m now 41, never made a license - there wasn’t really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.
Guessing you live in or close-ish some kind of urban center? I got my license at 18 cause the closest bus stop from my parents’ place was a 30 minute walk from the closest bus stop, getting literally anywhere useful was at the very minimum another 30 minutes on top of this, and getting downtown was another 45-50 minutes of bus+metro over those last two stretches, assuming no traffic. I currently live 60km outside of town, it’s the exact same story. 20 minute walk to the bus, 30 minute bus ride to the train station, and 45 minutes of train to get downtown. North America was built for cars, for better or (especially) for worse, our public transit infrastructure is terrible, things are so far from each other, nothing was built for it…
When I moved out of my parents’ place and got an apartment in the city with my wife though, we managed without a car. Bus/metro/walking got us everywhere we needed for every day life, and we used car sharing services when we needed to go out of town. I wouldn’t mind going back to this, but living in town would be literally twice as expensive, and we’re deeply priced out of that area if we ever want to buy, despite me making a solid 6 figures lol
North America was built by the train, it was later destroyed for the car.
Currently in Finland - single family home in a town with 46k people. Originally from a 2k village in Germany.
We have two daycares, a school and a grocery store 1km from home - here that kind of stuff is integrated in the neighbourhoods where people live. Many elementary schools, some just grades 1 and 2 - by grade 3 they can already easily travel the longer distance to another school by themselves.
You’d be surprised how for you can stretch ANY transit infrastructure. I despise the resignation that North America was “built for cars” you’ll find people-centric places all over the country, both in cities and rural areas too. The biggest issue is that a lot of rural areas lack transit service, but fixing that would be relatively inexpensive. Unfortunate anywhere without transit is inaccessible to disabled people such as myself who are incapable of operating their own vehicle, so this is something we need to work on.
Most places were built for people, not cars. But many weee, and even more were demolished for them. But saying that North American cities were designed for cars ignores much of the history of North American urban development.
Either way, if a place isn’t transit accessible, it might as well not exist. Though I must stress that it is NOT difficult to make something transit accessible.
I moved to the USA and then Canada as an adult. I had never needed to learn to drive in my home country because there were decent buses and trains. But you really can’t function easily in North America without driving a car, so I had to learn and start polluting like everyone else. It’s not a good setup.
