School Zones Outside Child Care Services

School Zones outside Child Care Services
Are You In Favour?

Recently a bus careering into a child care centre in Sydney (during the night, so no one was hurt) resulted in 2UE's talk back morning show hosting a discussion on whether child care centres and pre-schools should be given 40km / h speed restrictions in the same way that schools are.

Many respondents to the snap poll were not in favour, believing that there are many irrelevant school zones as it is (examples being Parramatta Road in an area with a pedestrian overpass) which only serves to slow down the already busy traffic.

With the number of pre schools and child care centres dotted all over built-up areas it would seem that it would be pretty impossible to maintain flow of traffic if there was a school zone around every one of them. Would this also have to include family day care centres, playgroups and playgrounds? The list could go on.

Generally speaking you would expect small children and toddlers to be tightly held onto on the roads outside their pre-school and child care centres, though it's not always the case, whereas free-roaming school kids tend to weave about the road unaware of surrounding traffic and therefore present more of a danger to themselves and motorists.

The madness of school zones and their boundaries already bemuses many parents. A case in point being the 40km school zone in Clovelly NSW that stops abruptly before a children's park and crossing about 100m from the local primary school. Many more similar cases littered across our busy cities and towns.

However with some suburban residential streets often used as cut throughs to avoid school zones and race tracks for general hooning around day and night, perhaps the entire inner city area should be a 40km zone during the day?

Let us know what you think at CareforKids Social.