Like, it's kind of ridiculous that I live in a house with 15 families and barely know anyone here.
But how should I know anyone? There's no place to sit down and have a chat in the hallway. There's no bench outside, because why would anyone want to stare at a street, in particular also because of what the article points out.
The only guy I've kind of formed the mildest resemblance of a connection to, is a guy who occasionally takes the same bus and so we see each other at the fucking bus station. The guy sleeps less than 10 meters from me, but we have to walk 200 meters to meet each other by pure chance.
Use archive.ph or archive.today to get past most paywall. I believe the only recent one it hasn't worked with is Washington Post unless the article is a bit older.
Honestly I think more roads, and more cars are a large part of this. Cars go faster now ( legal speed limits increased in many areas several times in last several decades ) and it's literally more dangerous to play in the road now.
Yeah, and more phones. But really the pandemic also seemed to shift a lot of people into feeling that their time is wasted in cars. Which I think may be contributing to speeding and road rage which anecdotally seems far more common in my area at least.
Digital content (social media / video games). And parents supplying their children, even from a very young age, with tablets/phones to keep their kids pre-occupied on said digital content.