Is
the parental desire to protect children from harm having the opposite effect?
It's a long time since was the message hammered home to children.
Department for Transport figures show that the proportion of children who're not allowed to cross the road on their own is going up. Last year 49 per cent of parents of 7-10 year olds said they never allowed their offspring to cross the road unsupervised. Five years ago only 41 per cent of parents took that view.
Yet over the same period the number of 7-10 year olds killed on the road rose from 10 to 18.
This afternoon I'll be talking to Rob Gifford who works for the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, and you'll be able to hear the interview in the programme.
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Danger no longer starts in the road. Since mixing the bikes with the pedestrians and push-chairs, with no speed limit or protocol and a dearth of signs (certainly in Newbury) it is best not to venture out at all. If you mis-judge crossing the road and nip smartly to "safety" on the kerb, you can find yourself mown down by a hefty cyclist beacause you are, actually, on the cycle track and he is travelling too fast to stop. And the ramps that help the disabled access an underpass, serve as speed enhancers to "wild youth" especially when barriers are not fitted (Newbury again). It's hell out there.
Sorry to have to break the news, Eddie, but nobody will be responding to your Latin riddles until the comments button becomes accessible .....
As to child road safety, I was a co-researcher on a major piece of research done for the DfT a few years back. It focussed on teaching children between the ages of 4 and 6 to begin to recognise and understand dangerous situations and the role parents can take in 'scaffolding' their children into a greater appreciation of the problems. It went down extremely well in the schools where it was trialled.
One of the problems, both then (2000-2) and now is that budget restrictions for county councils, who have the responsibility for this work in schools, has been progressively trimmed back to the point where road safety officers have scarcely any resources. However, schemes like the one in which I was involved do not rely upon the county council, but do necessitate some funding from government in terms of materials, distribution, etc., and this would, with the current structure, probably have to be done through county road safety departments.
Recently I was looking into road safety training programme for another reason, and I was disappointed to see how little is out there at the moment, and how patchy the schemes appear to be (likewise with bicycle proficiency courses) and I hope that fists will pound on tables now so that funding is put up front for schemes to be promoted around the country.
Eddie - well, if the parents in my area of North London are anything to go by, I'm not surprised by those statistics.
Those parents who do not drive a vast SUV and abandon it at interesting angles across the path of traffic in order to take little Octavia or Theodore the five hundred yards to school... sorry I just need a bit of a towelling down after that... those that actually walk any distance seem to have no concept of road safety whatsoever. They ignore pedestrian crossings - often less than 10 yards away - and drag their children out into the middle of the road! They don't stop at the kerb and check that the road is clear of traffic and that it is safe for them to cross (as the Highway Code states you should), they just walk out in front of oncoming vehicles. What kind of example is that for their children?
As a result I have nearly run over older schoolchildren - secondary school age - twice, where they just ran out in front of me. On both occasions I was doing the speed limit, but they were so close to me I had no time to react. Fortunately I missed them both, but only fractions of an inch and more by luck than judgement.
For too long people have debated who is responsible for the behaviour of our children. The arguement has turned into buck passing and blaming "the other guy". No-one wants to take responsibility. The whole of society needs need to take that responsibility not just schools or parents or government or volunteers. We all have a part to play. Then, if we can get something simple like crossing the road safely right, who knows what else we can then do? It just requires that we turn off the "somebody else's problem field" and all pitch in.
At the kerb, halt.
Look right, left and right again.
If all clear, quick march.
(Hello, all, back from hols. Will visit the Beach later)
I've got to agree with Wonko on this. I live in a small village-cum-town, and I see people crossing the main roads in the most idiotic of places, even though there's a "proper" crossing maybe 20m further down the road. In the closest city (Oxford) it's even worse. I remember both the Green Cross Code man (aka Darth Vader!) and also the Alvin Stardust message being drummed into us. We need to have something that has the same effect on children today, along with stronger messages to the drivers regarding their part in road safety. Everyone is responsible for this, not just the driver/parent/child/school/etc.
As an aside, I'd be interested to know where Kelvin McKenzie (on AQ last week) stands on speed cameras. After the way he lambasted the girl taken to court for putting her feet on the seat on the train, what does he consider is the right penaly for those caught on camera?
There was some research reported a few years ago in which it was discovered that pedestrianisation has given us a false sense of security, so we step into the road without due care and attention. Sad, eh?
Back in the mists of time, my parents' *dachshund* taught me how to cross the road, before I ever went to school. He used to stop at the kerb, look left, look right and look left again again, then cross if the road was clear. If I tried to cross when there was a car coming he used to trip me up with his lead....
The only trouble was that he was a german dog and hardwired for continental traffic that drove on the right, so he had his lefts and rights confused. :-)
Seriously, though, if parents care about their children (and we ought to assume they mostly do) and don't want them knocked down by a car, shouldn't those parents teach their own children about crossing the road? It seems to me to be a fairly basic survival skill, a bit like not pulling saucepans of boiling water off the stove onto one's head or learning how to go up and down stairs without falling down and breaking one's arm, and so far nobody has said that those ought to be the business of the schools, the government or whoever else, rather than of the parents. If that sort of thing isn't the parents' business, *what is*?