Parking on nature strips (between your property and the roadside) is far safer to the public with improved visibility for the driver and pedestrians.
However despite the obvious safety concerns, parking on the nature strip is not permitted under our parking laws and you can be fined by parking inspectors or the City Rangers.
The diagram with this article attempts to illustrate the danger posed by forcing vehicles off the nature strip onto the road. Most suburban roads don’t even have line markings making even more obstactles for pedestrians and drivers to negotiate.
There seems to be no public safety reason to force vehicles to park on the road instead of safely off the road. In the countryside its normal to park off the road as far as possible for everyone’s safety, but on suburban street this logic is not applied for some reason.
Plus, homeowners must take care of this area of nature strip and especially with drought conditions it is probably better to improve this area with a hard standing.
Forcing vehicles of the road onto property also poses a significant risk of death or injury particularly to infants and children from reversing vehicles.
I wonder what Pedestrian Council of Australia has to say about this?
Whats more important? Blank green squares of nothingness in front of our homes and apartments or dead children?
Parking on the street should be banned in and around civic period. Many roads in these areas are now single lane roads more often them not. I find it most annoying.
They always travelled by car, I wasn’t about to risk walking on the road with them.
How does your sheep cope with that?
My street is too poor for a footpath on either side, so anyone parking on the nature strip blocks me from being able to move off the road as cars approach. Besides, the nature strips can be crap as a walking surface so I tend to walk on the road instead.
Jonathon Reynolds said :
Finally a sensible contribution to this issue.
@ruhappynow
Have you seen this article:
http://www.citynews.com.au/index.php/content/article/bolters_between_a_fence_and_hard_place/
Obviously the problem is more than just allowing parking on nature strips.
How many kids in Canberra have been killed in this way over the last 5 years?
I’ve heard from a source that the figure is actually in the millions.
Not sure how reliable this source is though.
Another thing your diagram shows is how conditioned we are to speed limits. Was I the only one who upon seeing that diagram immediately thought the car was traveling far to fast for the conditions? Driving through a suburban street lined with cars, I’d be sitting at 20-30km/h. Kids, adults, dogs/cats , other cars, anything could slip out from in between any cars at any time.
toriness said :
once the child is educated on how to cross, other peoples parking preferences shouldn’t make a difference.
starry said :
It’s still how I remember how to cross the road!
*blush*
Hector the Cat
Aurelius said :
I’ve noticed this too, and at first I thought it was because the residential streets in Canberra are often really narrow and twisty – the chances of being hit from behind are too great.
That theory was dashed when I moved closer to the city in Brisbane – the streets there are just as narrow and twisty and even the presence of a yellow line on the road doesn’t seem to deter most.
L
I notice that in the “alive child” picture, the car has an extra 50m or so of reaction-time too.
Nitpicking aside – kids are going to dart out from between cars, signs, other pedestrians, rubbish bins, school buses, and whatever else they can find regardless of what rules are made to prevent it happening. The answer is to teach your kids road safety and pay attention to the road when you’re driving, not to move the cars. There’s plenty of valid reasons why cars should not park on nature strips, and there’s plenty of valid reasons why cars should not park on the road. There’s also plenty of situations where parking your car elsewhere isn’t going to make a jot of difference.
L
ruhappynow said :
Come live in Gungahlin where a large number of the roads barely meet the AusRoad standards which specify a minimum 5000mm paved width, Often in these narrow streets have cars parked on the nature strip by necessity. The streets are absolutely no safer and the nature strips end up looking like barren deserts (either de-vegetated bare dirt or expanses of red scoria).
Road safety is about designing roads that have appropriate traffic volumes/flow, good visibility for both the pedestrian and the motorist, appropriate traffic calming techniques (and they don’t all have to be speed humps), teaching children about road safety and how to behave when crossing or near roads.
I agree there may be some stretches of road that may be problematic (or potentially unsafe), however it is far more effective to solve those localised problems than attempt a one size fits all solution which itself would create many other road safety issues.
ruhappynow – teach your child to look left and right and left again before safely crossing the road, or alternatively use a marked pedestrian crossing.
your education of your child you have control over, where people park you do not.
Of course, if the commodore in the second diagram was on the left side of the road – which it will be because drivers are stupid (I include myself in that generalisation) – the kid is just as dead.
Sorry, this post is a troll…
Granny, you sound like my husband remembering that song.
I love Hector the Cat. I have been known to embarrass my kids by singing the Hector song when we stop at the kerb …
*heh heh heh*
The nature strip is for plants, and grass, and nature, not cars. Here’s a radical idea, how about parents teach their kids about how to co-exist with roads safely? When I was a kid, I remember being drilled endlessly about this stuff. Hector bloody cat and the rest of them.
If it is so very important to make roads safe for kids, just make all cars go at 40 or 30 km/hr. You know, like everyone does past schools, especially parents. Yeah. Not.
You can tell when people feel strong for an issue when they have the time to draw pretty drawings, I especially like the dead child part hehe
Parking on the nature strip doesn’t only kill the grass, but it also damages and kills the trees. In the block of units I live in the strata has had to put giant boulders around the driveway to stop people parking on the nature strip. It also causes visibility problems for people coming out of driveways.