Kids loved jumping things back then, but typically the jumps were sad, not that high, and no one was going to lie down in front of them unless they were idiots.

I can believe some kids potentially could have jumped high in the 70s, but more often a high jump would’ve been off a dirt ramp.

Somehow there were more undeveloped areas (up until maybe the mid-80s) where kids would dig foxholes, have BB gun fights, etc. Shoveling dirt was our version of Minecraft. Kids got hurt regularly. Digging was fine if things held together, but I later heard in some places where it didn’t, some died from cave-ins.

By early/mid 80s, there would be dirt biker racers with helmet and other protective gear on constructed dirt tracks. There was that in the 70s, but less organized in more natural less confined areas and more for motorcycles where you just had jeans and a fat helmet.

Skateboarding became a bigger thing by roughly mid-1980s than biking; the 1970s skateboards were skinny flat banana boards with trucks that couldn’t turn, so they weren’t very maneuverable- the scene from the original BTTF where Marty makes a skateboard out of a scooter was funny, but how he used it seemed unrealistic- it would’ve been a pita to get around on that.

Back to 70s bike ramps...

The ramps were usually just a piece of wood with anything you could find under it, and the Napoleon Dynamite bike ramp scene was close to the normal result.

Jumping as high as in these pictures was not normal. A nice curved plywood ramp would take work, time, tools, and money, kids wouldn’t expect parents to help them out, so you’d more often have shitty ramps and minor jumps.

Some of these pictures look physically impossible given the orientation of the ramp or non-existence of a ramp. I wonder if AI generated those.

80s kid here. We definitely had fathers help build us some ramps. With curve. It’s how skateboarding got so popular - vert ramps and half pipes.

So you’re right on most things but we definitely had some quality wood ramps in the 80s. Sending us up and over fences, fathers, cars, and friends.

>Somehow there were more undeveloped areas

Everyone lived in suburbs that still had all the B/C/D rate lots undeveloped because it wasn't worth it. The country was still sprawling out, had mostly yet to pass zoning and other asinine regulation, etc, etc.

The incentive to cram industrial parks and office parks and housing into every nook and cranny of our towns and cities came later over the course of the 80s because regulation speculatively front-loaded compliance costs into construction and when that happens it makes more sense to develop a bunch of D rate lots already on roads and bulldoze starter homes and mobile homes already on road and utilities than incur all the "you'll need an engineered site plan for that, that'll be $50k" cost to proactively prevent problems that previously would have been addressed on an as needed basis after the fact where pertinent.

It's basically the same incentive structure you see with zoning wherein grandfathered in stuff goes up in value. Unless you've got some monstrously profitable project to justify the expense the numbers work better to buy out something that exists than to blow untold thousands fighting for permission or jumping through hoops to do greenfield development.