It's a thought experiment worth sitting with. Not a child with a parent alongside them, not a teenager - an eight-year-old, on a bike, navigating their own route to school independently.
If that image makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is exactly the point.
And here's the idea that should sit underneath all of our thinking about streets and transport: child-friendly streets are also adult-friendly streets - but the same is not true in reverse. Design for a driver and you get streets that work for drivers. Design for an eight-year-old on a bike and you get streets that work for almost everyone.
That's the central argument of a new report from Playing Out - Streets for Play, Streets for Freedom, written by Alice Ferguson and Tim Gill - are which calls for children to become the lens through which we evaluate all transport and street planning decisions. Not because it's a nice idea, but because children are arguably the group most impacted by these decisions, now and in the future - yet they remain the group least considered by decision-makers.
The report makes for uncomfortable reading. Child pedestrian fatalities in the UK have fallen since the 1980s - but alongside a dramatic decline in children's outdoor freedom. We haven't made streets safer. We've just removed children from the danger, at huge cost to their wellbeing.
Is that progress? It's certainly a trade-off we've quietly accepted without ever really deciding to.
The Streets Ahead podcast put it well
Alice Ferguson and Tim Gill joined the Streets Ahead podcast to discuss the report, and one point in particular stands out. Between 53% and 80% of children fail to get the minimum one hour of daily physical activity - and the answer isn't structured exercise or PE lessons. It's the incidental, everyday movement that comes from actually getting around: walking, scooting, cycling. The kind of movement that used to be built into childhood as standard.
What Love to Ride is doing about it
This is where it gets practical.
Love to Ride's schools platform helps schools and regions inspire more active travel and make change visible and measurable over time. Schools run challenges, track how children travel, and build a clearer picture of what's shifting. Sometimes that's a handful of new cyclists in September. Sometimes it's a whole-school shift by the following summer.
On the adult side, Love to Ride's community-powered planning tools are already capturing something that traffic counts alone never can: how streets actually feel to the people using them. Through Rate My Routes and safety maps, everyday riders rate streets based on how safe and comfortable they feel - generating lived-experience data that feeds directly into planning tools used by local authorities. 48% of Love to Ride users are female, and our mission is to actively seek out less-athletic riders - so the data reflects everyday travel, not just sport.
Get the Love to Ride app
Have fun, track your rides and rate your routes.
Parents riding the school route and rating it are already doing something valuable. Every flagged junction, every marked stretch of uncomfortable road, is evidence that planners can act on. Short trip data and crowd-sourced comfort data is evidence gathered by real people on real routes, exactly what's been missing from transport planning for decades.
Now imagine we got this right for children too
That's the vision the Playing Out report points towards. A world where children's lived experience of streets - not just their parents' - is captured, taken seriously, and used to shape decisions. Where the question guiding transport planning isn't "does this work for a driver?" but, as the report puts it, "will this work for a two-year-old on a scooter, or a nine-year-old travelling independently?"
We're not there yet. But the vision is a logical one - and every ride logged, every route rated by a parent today, makes the case a little stronger.
The practical thing you can do today
If your child's school is part of Love to Ride, ride the route to school yourself and rate it. Note where you feel exposed. Flag the junction where cars don't slow down. Mark the cut-through that actually works.
The eight-year-old cycling alone isn't a picture of most streets today. But it's a useful north star. Children should not be an edge case in transport planning - they're the clearest test of whether a street truly works.
Read the full report: Streets for Play, Streets for Freedom — Playing Out, 2026 Listen to the podcast: Streets Ahead — Streets for Play, Streets for Freedom Rate your routes: lovetoride.net