By far the biggest danger for children wandering around (in rural area, suburb, or city) is big cars moving quickly. But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour. (Or more realistically, plenty do worry, and keep the kids indoors or drive them everywhere instead of letting them wander around independently.)
> Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower
This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.
But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.
> But none of the suburbanites worried about cities seem to mind that there are SUVs whizzing around their residential neighborhoods at 40+ miles per hour.
The pavements are often much wider in suburbs, and/or separated from the road by trees. That's the difference. You're not in a high rise apartment building that opens directly on to pavement, which is 4ft from a road.
Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
But that most places in the USA are pretty unsafe for pedestrians nowadays, especially children. We would do well to introduce traffic calming, improve pedestrian/bike infrastructure, and cut speed limits in all areas where people commonly walk down to a max of about 20 miles/hour.
It would also make streets much safer to reduce the proportion of SUVs and large pickup trucks. Disincentivizing these vehicles should be an explicit government policy goal.
Those are all great ideas, but to the average voter you might as well be saying we should outlaw apple pie. Political will behind reforms like this is very hard to find and always in danger of being voted out by angry drivers.
> Empirically the most dangerous cities for pedestrians are sprawling ones with large high-speed-limit pedestrian-hostile roads, not denser ones with walkable streets.
> Statistically speaking the schools in the city are going to score lower
This has more to do with the more diverse mix of children in the class than it does to do with school or teacher quality per se.
But I'm happy to grant you that some upper middle class parents are also inordinately worried that their children might spend too much time near poorer children who get worse test scores because their families have fewer resources and they were not as academically prepared.