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.

  • UnverifiedAPK
    43·
    10 months ago

    Further, we have no salt/sand trucks, we have no plows, we have zero civic infrastructure to meant to deal with our very occasional ice storm or light snow. It happens so infrequently that there’s no way to justify spending taxpayers’ money to prepare in that way for those kinds of situations.

    I never understood the mentality of “it only happens every couple of years so we’ll never prepare for it” It’s not like Georgia is spending that money on other public services like railways

      • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 months ago

        Right! Also I would rather our state, counties, and municipalities spend their emergency prep dollars on things that actually hit us hard and often… like hurricanes. We might not be ready for what Wisconsin considers a laughably small amount of snow, but those cheese heads have no idea what even just a Cat 1 named storm can do in just six hours.