As parents of school children around the country prepare for the start of a new school year, one set of parents will not be doing the same. Last month, just a week before Christmas, six-year-old Akshay Balan was killed while walking with his cousin to school. He was struck by a woman driving an SUV who was doing a three point turn down the street. His death came exactly a year after another boy was killed on his way to school by a four-wheel-drive. Kevin Qunital was also run over – his death deemed an accident by a coroner who determined that Kevin was in the driver’s blind spot and that she wasn’t aware of his presence.
SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) and 4WDs (Four Wheel Drives) are a common sight around our schools. Their increasing popularity can be linked to the fact that they are now most commonly marketed to families. And parents have been buying into the marketing push big time, with sales of SUVs going up every year – for example, there were nine percent more SUVs sold in 2013 than in 2012.
It’s easy to feel safe when driving a big beast of a vehicle around city roads. It gives you greater height in the car seat and perhaps more confidence that if you were involved in an accident you would be better off than the other guy. It is perhaps this feeling of confidence that makes people who drive SUVs drive more dangerously – a finding by a Queensland University of Technology study. As the lead researcher in the study, Dr Andry Rakotonirainy, mentions – “Driving children to school in a four-wheel drive requires different skills to driving a sedan or smaller car. You have to take into consideration that you are driving a vehicle that is two to three times the weight of a normal car - and higher - and will therefore handle differently.”
Most people who get behind the wheel of a 4WD don’t know that they have to drive the car differently. They don’t learn the unique set of driving skills you need to operate these vehicles.
Back in 2005, after a 4WD ran over and killed a five year-old on school grounds, the NSW Deputy State Coroner, Jacqueline Milledge, recommended that 4WDs should be banned from stopping within 200 metres of schoolyards with primary and infant students. She also called on the RTA to introduce special licences for 4WDs over two tonnes. In the years since the inquest, neither recommendation has been implemented - the economic needs of the ailing car industry having being deemed far more important than road and child safety.
It’s not just Ms Milledge who saw the need for an SUV ban around schools. In 2009 almost 20,000 Queenslanders signed a petition to ban SUVs from school pick-up zones and shopping areas. It seems quite a lot of people are worried about the safety of such big vehicles around areas where small children are about.
Many of us perceive these cars as getting in the way of driver safety – their large wide bodies obstruct the view of other drivers on the road; they have poor side and rear-view vision which is why many of these types of cars now come with rearward cameras – however these cameras themselves don’t give a full view of what’s going on behind and around the car; they have a greater rollover risk; and they have more blind–spots – meaning it’s easy to not see small children and animals from the vehicle. And as for the feeling of security drivers of SUVs may feel – recent crash tests in the United States have revealed your average car may be safer to drive than an SUV.
All of this shows that we need to rethink our use of these vehicles, especially around school areas. If we drive SUVs we should educate ourselves in the downsides of the vehicle we drive as well as learning the differences in handling this type of vehicle in comparison to an average car.
I live near a very busy public school and have seen for myself the sort of manoeuvres parents undertake because they are so caught up in getting to and from school in time. They lose themselves in the momentum and forget that their seemingly time-saving act could also be a life threatening one. No one ever thinks it’s going to happen to them – that one careless act could take the life of a child. But it happened to the motorist involved in the accident that took Kevin Quintal’s life - and all it took was two seconds.
Two seconds that anyone would wish they could take back – but sadly life doesn’t work that way. Instead we can make it so that another senseless death of a child doesn’t have to take place – and if that means a ban on SUVs around schools, then so be it.
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