Poor Kids Are More Likely To Be Hurt By Cars

[AteMoose]

The article said:

Campaigners say affluent children are less likely to spend time on the street as they have gardens to play in, and are driven around in safer cars.

All I'm saying is that it's got nothing to do with thinner wallets. I personally am horrified seeing kids hanging around in groups on bicycles totally disregarding traffic rules. If I saw my kid running around like that it would have been banned from cycling. However, other parents don't seem to care as they're more concerned with having a good time down the pub or in front of the telly.

+10

[northwestsmith2]

Hackney's average ward ranks made it the second most deprived local authority in England. In 2004, Hackney's average ranks (based on SOAs) made it the most deprived local authority in England.

http://www.hackney.gov.uk/xp-factsandfigures-deprivation.htm

Rank - Local Authority Rate - (one child in)

328 - Hackney London Borough - 567

End

408 - Isles of Scilly - 99,999,999

TVSRP gained Department for Transport funding under the Road Safety Partnership Grant Scheme to share the benefits with the whole road safety community. The initial development cycle ran from April 2008 until March 2010.

Road Safety Partnership Grant Scheme

To further support local highway authorities in delivering casualty reduction targets locally, an annual £4million Road Safety Partnership Grant Scheme was launched at the end of October 2006, inviting bids from all local highway authorities in England.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roadsafety/rspg/

Dont take our money away!

[Scunnered]

Incidentally, this is far from being new news. From a Scottish report from 2000:

• The risk of death for child pedestrians is highly class related. Children in the lowest socio-economic group are over 4 times more likely to be killed as pedestrians than their counterparts in the highest socio-economic group.
  
• The decline in child death rates from injury in road accidents over time has been less for children in the manual social classes than for children in the non-manual social classes, and as a consequence, the socio-economic mortality differentials have increased.
  
• Injuries to child pedestrian casualties from socio-economically disadvantaged families tend to be of greater severity. In addition, these children have a higher risk of physical injury in the first place.
  
• The risk of pedestrian injury is over 50% higher for the children of single mothers, compared with those in two parent families.
  
• Significant differences in child pedestrian injury rates based on ethnicity have been identified, particularly for younger 'non-white' children.
  
• On journeys to and from school deprived children are exposed to greater risk than more affluent children as they are less likely to travel to school by car or to be accompanied by an adult.
  
• Restricted access to play space and proximity of housing to busy roads, compounded by a lack of supervision in younger children appear to exacerbate road accident rates in disadvantaged areas.
  

[Executive Sadman]

The article said:

Campaigners say affluent children are less likely to spend time on the street as they have gardens to play in, and are driven around in safer cars.

All I'm saying is that it's got nothing to do with thinner wallets. I personally am horrified seeing kids hanging around in groups on bicycles totally disregarding traffic rules. If I saw my kid running around like that it would have been banned from cycling. However, other parents don't seem to care as they're more concerned with having a good time down the pub or in front of the telly.

Most the 'poor' kids around here have massive council house gardens, but their parents have filled them with cars on bricks, old fridges and shopping trolleys. Plus they prefer playing football on the roads. You dont have to mow tarmac like you do a lawn, and that would take effort.

[pl1]

I object to this quite strongly. It's clear that the reason for the higher death rate for 'poor' children is because they're outside mixing with the traffic more: they walk to school, and often the areas where they live have been built relatively recently and favour cars over people: in Edinburgh, for example, these areas are often on the outskirts of the city and often have wide, straight roads to facilitate speedy traffic movement in and out of the city centre. Pedestrians have much more trouble getting across these kinds of road than they do in the leafy back streets of Morningside. Children are outside dealing with this kind of thing, and that's why they get killed. We live in a society where the car is king, and instead of motorists having to take care it's seen as being entirely the pedestrian's own if they fail to defer to the motorist and end up being injured or killed.

But anyway, my main objection is that I don't think that allowing your children to walk the streets unsupervised is "not giving a damn". Many middle class children are ferried everywhere in cars and never go outside on their own. This really seems like being over-protective. People moan about the nanny state but then nanny their children in a way that would have been inconceivable in previous generations (and still would be in many parts of the world). I really don't think we should be aspiring to a society where that's the norm, and anything less is seen as parental neglect.

Scunnered I agree with this and might I add to it, something I've given some thought to for a while. It occured to me driving around seeing where speed bumps occur on our roads. They all appear to be on well-off estates, with detached housing and not a child in sight. Go to any council street and you see no speed bumps and lot's of children on the street as you would do on these kind of estates. It makes me wonder how many of the people in the streets with speed bumps are/were County Cllrs or have used influence to get speed bumps installed. Does anybody know the criteria for this? If it is to stop chav types speeding in council estates where lot's of young children are on the streets then every Council Estate should have speed bumps but they don't.

Have a look out for this, for the rest of the week and tell me if I'm imagining it or not. Where do you see the speed bumps?

Cheers,

[Scunnered]

Have a look out for this, for the rest of the week and tell me if I'm imagining it or not. Where do you see the speed bumps?

Cheers,

Good point. Most of the speed bumps I see are in middle-class areas, but then I don't spend a great deal of time in the back streets of the rougher council estates. Something else you allude to, which didn't occur to me in my zeal to abuse the middle class motorist, is that some of the drivers in the council estates may be more aggressive. There do seem to be plenty of young guys in beat-up cars who like thrashing about at high speed without much regard for anyone else.

[AteMoose]

Scunnered I agree with this and might I add to it, something I've given some thought to for a while. It occured to me driving around seeing where speed bumps occur on our roads. They all appear to be on well-off estates, with detached housing and not a child in sight. Go to any council street and you see no speed bumps and lot's of children on the street as you would do on these kind of estates. It makes me wonder how many of the people in the streets with speed bumps are/were County Cllrs or have used influence to get speed bumps installed. Does anybody know the criteria for this? If it is to stop chav types speeding in council estates where lot's of young children are on the streets then every Council Estate should have speed bumps but they don't.

Have a look out for this, for the rest of the week and tell me if I'm imagining it or not. Where do you see the speed bumps?

Cheers,

Not round here, most of the speed bumps/traffic calming are in the council estates in wu. Same with Felixstowe when I lived down there...

Unless you mean the very shallow ramps you find in modern estates, but they don't slow cars down, people go just as fast over them because they are so shallow. I guess one difference is council estate are more open so you can see further down the road/go faster, modern estate are more windy and you cant see more than 50m

[pl1]

Not round here, most of the speed bumps/traffic calming are in the council estates in wu. Same with Felixstowe when I lived down there...

I'm being a bit historical (not hysterical) as well I think. Recently more council estates appear to have some form of traffic calming measure, but this is a recent thing and the rollout in my area is certainly not complete.