How parking law enforcement is dangerous to 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 :

@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.

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 :

your education of your child you have control over, where people park you do not.

once the child is educated on how to cross, other peoples parking preferences shouldn’t make a difference.

starry said :

Granny, you sound like my husband remembering that song.

It’s still how I remember how to cross the road!

*blush*

Hector the Cat

Aurelius said :

One contrast I noticed when moving between Brisbane and Canberra is that noone parks on the street here, not in the suburbs. I dunno why, but they just don’t.

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 :

I live on a straight, wide road next to a school and its 50 zone – I didn’t get a ticket but have seen kids come very close to being hit “Back…and to the left?” as Woody so eloquently put it. The stopping distances and line of sight show of the diagram are from the street. Perhaps a coroners report – for the skeptics – would be a little more scientific…

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.