Rapid cultural change in a nutshell.

[mrissa]

When Donnie Darko* was set, in 1988, four teenagers jumping on their bikes to go across town in the evening was a reasonable thing.

When Donnie Darko was made, in 2001, it was an historical reference.

Wow.

*Which I watched for the first time tonight.

Comments

[elisem.livejournal.com]

It's really a historical reference? People don't do that any more?

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's only kids in very small towns that still do this now, and even that may be going away.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I'm from a small town, so that's probably why it seems so weird to have this going away.

(Small = fewer than 1400 people. Very small = fewer than 500 people. Those were my metrics, anyway.)

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I live in Davis, so...not at all historical reference here. I get to duck people trying to mow me over on bikes daily :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Look around when you're out and about of an evening. Most of the people you see on bikes are alone. The ones who aren't alone are mostly families (mixed ages).

Even in broad daylight, several teenagers riding their bikes together is really unusual; if you throw out the cases where they're riding a trail as a form of exercise/entertainment and consider the ones where they are riding somewhere together as transportation, it's nearly nonexistent.

I'm on the near end of this cultural change, too: I think 1988 was about the end of it, because when I started high school in the fall of 1992, of course none of my agemate friends were old enough to drive, but we never got on our bikes and rode anywhere together. No one we knew would have considered it.

I think it was partly that as younger kids we were more restricted in the use of bikes. We couldn't just hop on our bikes and go where we wanted. It wasn't considered safe any more. When I was in junior high, I could ride over to a friend's house in the same neighborhood, but if I had announced that I was going to ride a couple of neighborhoods away, either I would have been told that that wasn't a good idea, or I had the impression that I would. So as teenagers, people didn't have a habit of riding bikes together to get somewhere from their earlier years. (I also suspect that if I had announced at 14 or 15, "I'm going to take my bike down to the Park 4 with Mandy; we'll be back after the movie [after dark]," I'd have still gotten an oh-no-you're-not from the parentals. And the Park 4 was a mile, mile and a half from their house with only midsize roads between. And if I hadn't gotten the parental negative, Mandy certainly would have.)

The other part, I think, is that when a lot of people reached high school, they became embarrassed about not being able to drive (or, horrors! being old enough to drive, being licensed to drive, and not having a car). I didn't get it at the time. The first day of school, the seniors would bring signs to the pep rally that said things like, "Hey freshmen! My mom can drive us there if your mom can pick us up!" Which infuriated some of my classmates and left me completely confused: I would not have been proud of being a high school freshman at 16 or 17, so why, exactly, was this an insult? But it was. Having a car had become not just a status symbol but an expected one (the richer kids had nicer ones sooner, but most people had them; I didn't, but most of my friends did). And mine was not a rich high school.

I think the latter factor was partly caused by the former: people began thinking of their kids walking or biking somewhere as unsafe, so they did more to make sure there was a car available sometimes even if the kid didn't have a car all the time. If you're not going to let your kid walk two miles home from tennis practice, it's far easier to make sure she has a car when she's old enough than to keep driving her back and forth.

[rosefox]

It occurs to me that I do see bunches of teens on bikes up here, but I only see them in the park (the big park up near us, not Central Park, where biking is a competitive madhouse), and a bit on the street around the park. I'm quite certain they never go to other neighborhoods on their bikes. They do the friend-sitting-on-handlebars thing, though. It's very cute and retro.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I was still biking with my friends in 1997, FWIW. We were a little bit weird that way, but not a lot. Still, I had a lot more geographic freedom as a younger kid than you did, apparently.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have a seventeen year old. I don't have a car. He doesn't have a car. His girlfriend doesn't have a car. His girlfriend's parents don't have cars. None of us have bikes either though, we have a metro and a great bus system.

[numinicious.livejournal.com]

So, the fact that I'm 20 and do not have a driver's license, much less a car (and frankly do not want or need either one) means that right now, I should be so ridiculously embarrassed that I should dig myself into a tiny little hole and curl up, never to show my face to the world? Huh, strange. I always figure if I have two perfectly good legs attached to my body, I might as well use them.

people began thinking of their kids walking or biking somewhere as unsafe, so they did more to make sure there was a car available sometimes even if the kid didn't have a car all the time.
I like this argument, because it's more dangerous to for a kid to drive a car than it is for a kid to bike home at 2AM.

[arkuat]

I'm puzzled too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See my reply to Elise. And I didn't see bunches of teenagers on bikes together anywhere in the Bay Area when I lived there, either; this is not just a Midwestern thing. (Although with the Bay Area, some of what Rose says about the subway is probably applicable as well.)

[rosefox]

Wow, people still did that in 1988? To me it's always been a historical reference. I certainly didn't have a bike when I was a teenager; biking in New York is much too dangerous. I had Rollerblades, but most of my friends didn't (except the geeks, because Hackers is seriously a documentary of my late teens and we all really did Rollerblade everywhere with our laptops in our backpacks).

So what changed between 1988 and 2001? In bike-riding land, I mean. As far as I know, present-day New York teens take the subway across town in the evening, just like they did in 1988.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

In 1988 in West Philadelphia as a college senior I was riding my bike everywhere because it was safer than walking. What I've never been able to do safely during my life is walk alone at night in a US city, except in very limited areas (i.e. within a few blocks of my house or else in crowded city center areas during the hours shops and restaurants were open).

My guess is Penn students in that area still ride their bikes at night, but that 14-year-olds in the same neighborhood *don't*.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hackers is loff. Amazingly stupid in several ways. But loff.

But yes, people who didn't have subways had to do other things. See my response to Elise for the rest.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

You took the subway at night in 1988? Eeek. If it was after rush hour, I was in a cab. I was robbed on the No. 2 train (the Muggers Express) in 1979, and that was enough for me. I didn't start taking the subway at all hours until the end of Rudy's first term (and now, of course, it's completely safe -- I never worry about my wife coming home to Brooklyn late, as the trains are always packed).

[kendwoods.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I was a kid in the late 70's and early 80's in San Diego, a whole pack of us rode our bikes everywhere, like miles and miles away from the house (with no helmet!).

Kids miss out on a lot these days, I think.

And I heart Donnie Darko, especially references to it, which allows me to break out the icon, lol.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

If I were just a little more motivated, I'd answer you with Jumping Reagan. But don't quite care enough to make the icon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You know, Ken, sometimes I question your commitment to Sparkle Motion!

Not often, though.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

No idea what it was like *in big cities* back when I was a kid. When I moved to Minneapolis for a while in the middle of college (1975), almost nobody (except Jerry Stearns) seemed to use a bike for transportation, whereas in Northfield it was nearly universal (including many adults, like my parents). Of course the zone across which transport was of interest was much larger up in the Twin Cities than down in Northfield. Anyway -- given the strong difference based on city size back then, I wonder how much of the differences are temporal and how much locality-based. Biking is much less fraught on less-busy streets.

teens on bikes

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

i didn't do it, either, growing up in colorado. i was never much of a bicyclist. before i had my license, we all got places via older friends who had their licenses. lots packed into one car.

[crimini.livejournal.com]

Growing up in suburbia NJ, I remember riding bikes as kids, probably up until middle school/junior high. I rode there on my 10 speed because it was faster and much cooler than walking. I remember the bike racks being packed and eventually gave up riding because there wasn't enough space for my bike.

High school was pretty much the same way--and being from a car culture where almost everyone I knew had a car for their 16th or 17th birthday (some old, some new, some just handed down keys for when the 'rents didn't need it), few people walked or biked to school.

But this was after the whole Adam Walsh kidnapping and murder, and during the rise of "America's Most Wanted." There was the feeling of a pedophile around every corner. No way were kids/teens allowed to roam the streets unsupervised. The mall was where we all ended up. Yes. The Mall. Why that was safer than being outside, I'll never know.

Where I live now, there are lots of bikers. I live in suburbia and our town has bike lanes and places for bikers to lock their bikes up. The buses will load up the bikes so a rider can bike partway and bus the rest (or for our area, bus across the lakes and ride in the city). It's very bike friendly (but hilly terrrain).

I don't see groups of teens anywhere. But then, I tend to avoid the mall and cheap eateries, so I have no idea how our area teens congregate. We are not a pedestrian area although the city tries to make it so. But it just isn't.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'll have to watch more carefully, but I believe this is not true where I live. (Yet another reason to appreciate life in Kent, if I'm right.)

[mightyjesse.livejournal.com]

See... I thought that the fact that I didn't see any gangs of kids on bikes in 1988 was because I had just moved from Ohio (mostly flat) to Pennsylvania (OMG, HILL!!!) and not because suddenly there were psychos everywhere.

All the people I knew in Pittsburgh that rode bikes were bike messengers with mountain bikes and they were ALL INSANE. I couldn't afford a mountain bike AND a car (I got the car for $350... the mountain bike would have cost me $500...) so I opted for transportation that could get me to Detroit in the snow, if that's where whimsy lead me...

Now I live in Madison, and I see people pedaling diligently everywhere... But not gangs of teenagers. We have tons of college students, and many of them ride bikes due to fuel prices or just to save the environment... But none of those people seem to go anywhere in *groups*....

How odd.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

In the small town my parents live in one does see packs of kids on bikes nowadays, which I am sure they are using as transportation, although it confuses me a little as there really isn't anywhere to go that isn't either in walking distance or manifestly dangerous on a bike (tiny sleepy town surrounded by massive freeways and a lot of cattle farms).

But when I grew up in a major Ohio city in the nineties, I had a bike and I used it for transportation of me, but it would literally never have occurred to me that it could be a form of group transport. It never crossed my mind until you mentioned it. Despite the fact that now that I think of it my friends had bikes. My father and I used to bike places together, so I think it must have been a teenage-cultural blind spot.

[ksumnersmith.livejournal.com]

My very articulate comment may be summed up as: Yaaaay for Donnie Darko! I win, etc.