Foreign Perspectives

When the school that our little guys go to was built it had a street running alongside the school wall so when the number of cars bringing kids increased, it was easy for the kids to get dropped off at the school gate and then go down that street.

Times have moved on somewhat since then though. That street and the one parallel to it where my granny lived have been demolished and replaced with a new housing development. Unfortunately, one of the aspects of the new development is that it’s built more in a courtyard style so neither of those two streets exist and instead there remains only the original street leading down to the school entrance which now is effectively a cul-de-sac.

Net effect? You’d have thought that it would have been obvious to the designers of the new development that creating a cul-de-sac where there previously was a way out was going to create problems and so it has. Every morning and afternoon that street is jammed with traffic going down to the end and attempting to turn.

What’s now happened is that the police have been called in to ensure that the school entrance isn’t blocked with cars and that nobody is parking over the new driveways. What should have happened is that the original exit street should have been preserved.

It’s about to get worse though as there are a couple of new housing developments just adjacent to that cul-de-sac and they’re all coming with little lay-bys for the residents. Naturally, they consider the lay-bys as theirs and don’t want the parents parking in them. The snag is that by the time those developments are complete that will leave nowhere to park at all for anyone but the residents. Somehow I suspect that’s going to cause major friction in the years to come.