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Recently my village has been a nightmare to get around. Despite having summer holidays and half terms in which to do it in, both the gas and water companies recently decided that they needed to update all the roads surrounding the local primary schools straight away. This meant driving for those further out became almost impossible as there was nowhere to park safely near the school due to all the works and then us that walked our children to school had to often walk in the road with our children to be able to get from a to b.
Do you know what was lacking most of the time? Correct signage. Whilst the ground that they were digging up was often closed off, they often had barely any signage available to let people know the situation. For health and safety reasons there should have been signs dotted around letting pedestrians and drivers know what was going on but nothing, nada. No signs to say the road was closed off so parents would drive down their usual route only to have to perform a dangerous u-turn to get back the other way and avoid hitting the other parents who were waiting behind them. No signs to warn of a bit of the path being closed off so you needed to walk yourself and your child in the road. I know many complaints were made and I am not surprised – what a stupid time to do such works that weren’t even urgent!
It is so important to have correct signage especially when it comes to health and safety issues such as these. Whilst sometimes the workers were on point with their signs, other days we seemingly had to take our lives in our hands whether in the car or on foot to get our children safely to school – this shouldn’t be happening. Perhaps these companies would benefit from some specialised health & safety signage from a brand such as Stock Signs who offer both bespoke and custom signs – it would surely have avoided such complaints and perhaps avoided the odd day of them being shut down by the council!
Taking our children to school can be enough of a drama as it is without stresses about how you are going to get both yourself and your child there safely. I often felt very uncomfortable having to walk in the road, heavily pregnant and holding Jack’s hand – and was even more annoyed on the days when there was nothing to tell me what parts of the road or path were closed and dangerous.
Have you ever had the same trouble? I’m so glad all the work has been finished for the year but I’m not holding my breath that there won’t be something new come 2017 getting in the way!