The Gap Community Association

At the August meeting concern was expressed by GCA members at the car parking arrangements (or lack thereof) in the car park on the corner of Glenaffric St. and Waterworks Rd.

Specifically, members of the GCA raised the following safety concerns:

1. Vehicles, particularly large/long vehicles such as four-wheel drives and delivery trucks have been observed narrowly missing pedestrians when parking at right angles to the tiled pedestrian walkway.

   These vehicles encroach up to 1.5 meters onto the walkway and drivers, particularly when reversing, are oblivious to pedestrians including older people, small children and mums with prams on the walkway behind their vehicles. It is just a matter of time before a vehicle runs into a pedestrian on the walkway.

2. Entry and egress arrangements into/from the car park are nothing short of chaotic, particularly the two access/exit driveways to and from Waterworks Rd.

   Cars entering the car park from Waterworks Rd are in such a hurry to enter the car park to avoid being hit in the rear that they pose an enormous hazard to those exiting the car park through the same single vehicle driveways exit/s.

   Additionally, near misses are regularly occurring between vehicles exiting the western most driveway into Waterworks Rd from other cars that have just exited the eastern most driveway whilst at the same time these drivers are challenged by cars trying to enter one or either of the entries from Waterworks Rd!

   To have two single vehicle access driveways that are used for both entry and access to/from a main road is grossly unsafe and requires urgent attention.

3. Car parking signage and line marking indicating traffic flows are inadequate or none existent – gridlock often occurs within the entire car park due to confusion as to who is arriving for a car park and who is trying to leave. This results in vehicles awaiting entry into the car park having to queue in Waterworks Rd and Glenaffric St until the chaos sorts itself out. The fact that Waterworks Road is a T2 lane during peak hours makes such queuing on this main road even more hazardous.

In summary, it is the view of the GCA that the entire car park is poorly planned and grossly unsafe.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 4:09 am and is filed under Gap Shopping Centre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.