OLDS — There’s little that can realistically be done to prevent vehicles from running into businesses, short of installing bollards or jacking up curbs, protective services director Justin Andrew says.
Bollards are metal or wooden posts – often decorative – that are installed in the ground.
Andrew made his comment during town council’s Dec. 2 committee of the whole meeting in response to a question from Coun. Darren Wilson.
Andrew said it’s an occasional problem across the province and the country. And in some rare cases, injuries and even deaths have occurred.
Wilson noted that over the past year -- the most recent case occurred a few weeks ago -- a couple of vehicles have been driven into businesses in Uptowne Olds.
Wilson asked if those accidents are cause for the Town to re-examine angle parking and whether it’s the safest way for vehicles to be parked in Uptowne to ensure the safety of pedestrians and store owners.
“Or do we just accept that as a natural hazard of road safety,” he asked.
Andrew said he, Olds RCMP commanding officer Staff Sgt. Warren Wright and Senior Peace Officer Sgt. Paul Wright have all “spoken about this at length.”
“In the circumstance of the angle parking downtown, yeah, there is certainly a threat there for sure and there’s a circumstance there that hopefully could be avoided,” Andrew said.
But he warned that switching to parallel parking in Uptowne could actually be more dangerous.
“It’s likely that you would increase incidents of traffic accidents if you switched to parallel parking, just simply because parallel parking can be more hazardous for people that don’t do it all the time,” Andrew said.
“You could see more accidents because now you’re backing vehicles into a sidewalk area and so on and so forth.”
He said if necessary, perhaps curbs could be made higher or business people could install bollards in front of their buildings to prevent vehicles from driving in there.
Andrew said administrative staff could discuss the matter with Uptowne business people and perhaps some sort of communication campaign about the problem could be launched.
