The colloquial American-English phrase to kick the can down the road, also down the street, means: to delay dealing with a difficult situation.
—British-English synonym: to kick something into the long grass.

Apparently, the phrase to kick the can down the road, also down the street, does not refer to the children’s game called kick-the-can, but may refer to toying idly with a discarded can while walking down a road or street—as mentioned, for example, in the caption to the following photograph published in the Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California, USA) of Thursday 10^th November 1966:

LAZY AUTUMN DAY—Didi Lawrence and David Thompson indulge in the age-old pastime of kicking cans down the road as they walk home from school on a lazy autumn day. This picture was taken near Webster School on Serra Road, Malibu.

However, why the practice of kicking a can down a road or street has become a metaphor for procrastination is unclear.
—For a discussion on the origin of this phrase, cf. Kicking It with ‘Kick the Can Down the Road’ .

An isolated early use of the phrase to kick the can down the street—evoking the prospect of becoming jobless and unoccupied—occurred in the following from the Waterloo Daily Courier (Waterloo, Iowa, USA) of Tuesday 9^th December 1969:

Water Works Accused
Hearing Thursday On Job Injunction

A hearing has been set for 10 a.m. Thursday on Black Hawk County Attorney David Dutton’s request for a temporary injunction against the Waterloo Water Works.
In Dutton’s petition, filed in district court here Monday afternoon he accuses the water works of firing five men on Nov. 20 in violation of the Iowa right-to-work law which prohibits the discharge of employes for the organizing of labor unions.
[…]
In a signed affidavit submitted with the petition, Gerald Holdiman, one of the men dismissed, states that after water works employes met to discuss union membership [superintendent] Joe Adair called all water works employes into his office and said he would not tolerate mass meetings behind his back.
Holdiman states Adair also said if any employe did not like the way he was running the water works the employe could quit, and he did not want to be bothered with petty grievances.
Holdiman also charges he and four others of the 17 that signed affiliation cards with teamsters local 844 were fired on Nov. 20.
On Nov. 21, Holdiman claims, Adair called another meeting of employes in which he said the water works would always work on a family basis and those dissatisfied would have to “kick the can down the street.”

The earliest occurrences that I have found of the phrase to kick the can down the road, also down the street, are as follows, in chronological order:

1-: From the statement made by the U.S. Air Force General David C. Jones (1921-2013), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Budget, on Thursday 3^rd February 1983—published in First Concurrent Resolution on the Budget—Fiscal Year 1984 Hearings before the Committee on the Budget United States Senate Ninety-Eighth Congress First Session (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983):

There is no way to fund the program on the books even if we got all the money that is in the budget now.
The key question is whether we are going to face up to that problem today, or kick the can down the street. If we do as we have done before, and not face up to the problems, the result will have a greater impact on national security and on the pocketbook of our taxpayers.

2-: From Will MX succeed this time?, a UPI report from Washington, District of Columbia, published in the Bennington Banner (Bennington, Vermont USA) of Tuesday 5^th April 1983:

Ronald Lehman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, said the United States was satisfied with its land-based deterrent for many years and “there was a tendency to kick the can down the road” and not pay enough attention to its problems.

3-: From Reagan to receive MX basing proposal this week, by Jeff Nesmith and Andrew Alexander, from Washington, District of Columbia, published in The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) of Sunday 10^th April 1983:

The Reagan administration view was expressed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Ronald Lehman in a meeting with reporters.
“The name of the game is how do you maintain the strategic balance over a period of time, when you’ve got increasing threats and aging systems,” Lehman said. “It’s not a matter of somebody going to (Soviet leader Yuri) Andropov tomorrow with a computer print-out and saying, ‘Hey, we can do it today.’
“It’s how do you maintain a stable balance over a long period of time. . . .”
To continue haggling over points on which a consensus seems impossible, Lehman said, is to “just keep kicking the can down the road.”