Is It Dangerous to Let Kids Be Free?

Illustration by Anson Chan

This story was originally published on thewalrus.ca

By Simon Lewsen

Adrian Crook, a father of five from Vancouver, has always known what danger looks like: it’s a boxy stamped-metal contraption, with four wheels, a transmission, and a hood. When Crook was a teenager in the ’90s, his high school friend Sheri was killed in a car crash. She was coming back from a party with three friends when the driver lost his bearings and wrapped the vehicle around a pole. Over a decade later, in 2006, Crook’s grandmother was walking home from a shopping mall in Burnaby, British Columbia, when a truck ran her over at a crosswalk. She went into a coma and died in hospital.

Crook’s first son was born two months after that accident. From that moment, Crook carried the certainty that if the boy met an early death, it would almost certainly involve a car. This was a simple matter of statistical probability. In Canada, vehicular accidents are, by far, the leading killer of children and teens.

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Crook and his wife had four more kids, before separating in 2013. She found a house in North Vancouver, and Crook, who hated suburbia, rented a three-bedroom condo across the inlet in downtown Vancouver. As a freelance video-game designer, he made his own hours and, in his spare time, threw himself into projects for his children. He commissioned a custom dining table large enough to seat all five kids plus their friends, and he converted his condo storage room into an art space. Often, he’d dress his kids in matching pinnies so he could see them easily, then take them out for a downtown adventure—a play session at a jungle gym, a walk by False Creek, or, on special occasions, a trip to a local diner, which served deep fried Mars bars.

Crook owned a car but avoided driving: he views it as expensive, dirty, and dangerous. To get around, he and his children relied on transit, which worked fine for summers and weekends. The problem was weekdays, when his four oldest kids went to school near their mother’s home. For the first two years, he drove them. Then he stopped—unwilling to keep relying on a car—and