Don’t just allow sports gear on roads - make it mandatory

Hockey and basketball nets, with lines painted on the road, would actually make neighbourhood streets safer.

Thestar.com
June 14, 2016
By Edward Keenan

On the topic of hockey and basketball nets on the road, allow me to offer my own unsolicited recommendation to city council: they should be required.

On every residential side street in the city, I suggest mandatory installation of road hockey and basketball nets, with appropriate markings for each sport - free throw lines, faceoff circles, and so on - painted onto the road in bright colours. Perhaps throw some hopscotch markings in, too.

I offer this plan because I think it is better for the city, and would make the our roads safer and more fun, and be plain old more honest, than the killjoy recommendations offered by the city’s bureaucrats for the public works and infrastructure committee to consider at its meeting June 20.

The official city recommendations say the opposite, of course.

Asked a specific, narrow question on allowing nets to be stored on streets without sidewalks, the city’s transportation staff and lawyers offered, in some ways, a broader consideration of playing in the road in general.

Surprise, surprise, they are against it. They recommend continuing to ban allowing nets on the road, and playing on the road. And then, in case council decides to disagree, they recommend as an alternative a permit system with fees and regulations that would effectively continue banning it anyway.

If you want to see a bit of why people come to think bureaucrats and lawyers are intolerable weasels, this report will give you an introduction. Let’s run down a bit of its bullcrappery:

First, it argues that allowing people to place nets at the side of the roadway will be a “safety hazard for motorists,” and also will “obstruct traffic.” It does this in the very same sentence as it suggests such nets could also obstruct “parking of vehicles,” which implies that the authors are aware that current regulation and widespread practice on almost all these roads includes the routine intentional obstruction of the roadway by people using the curb area to store their cars and trucks.

Whatever obstruction a hockey net may be - whatever obstacle it presents to visibility or mobility - it is still far smaller and less obtrusive than the line of Ford F150s and Chevy Suburbans you’ll regularly find legally parked in the same spaces on the road.

Second, on the topic of playing games in the street in general, the report emphasizes that the status-quo prohibition is rarely enforced, and that the widespread playing of road hockey and basketball causes no real problems. But they like that the law against it allows the city to selectively enforce the rule “where deemed necessary.”

Arbitrary enforcement of a widely disregarded, mostly unneeded rule is the worst kind of policy: it means the fines or punishments are only foisted on people the enforcers - for whatever reason - decide they don’t like. Our laws should be equally applied, and should mean what they say.

Third, the reason the report goes to such lengths to stress that the current ban is hardly ever enforced is that the ban is mostly a transparent ass-covering charade. If we allow playing in the street, their logic says, then someone who gets hit by a car while doing it might sue us for allowing them to do such a dangerous thing. So instead, they seem to say, if we - nudge, nudge, wink, wink - “ban” playing in the road even while openly advertising the fact that we never-ever-hardly-ever enforce that rule, we’re absolving ourselves of responsibility.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that this document, this very report, would be “exhibit A” in a liability case, demonstrating clearly that the stated prohibition is not an honest one: the city’s own staff stress - as a virtue - the fact that they expect and tolerate widespread playing in the street.

The city’s logic, in part, seems to be that in practice they will mostly allow this, but will put up signs and adopt laws allowing them to claim they have prohibited it, just in case they are ever sued - which makes our city government a bunch of conscious liars, and could fail as a legal strategy, too.

But that points to the biggest bit of crap, here, which is there’s really no particularly huge safety risk to playing on side streets that almost exclusively carry local neighbourhood traffic, and where the speed limits are already low. Moreover, the fear of city staff that sports equipment will “obstruct traffic” is exactly wrong-headed because obstructing traffic is a key way to make the streets safer.

Expert after expert tells us that more than any signs you can post or laws you can enact or speed limits you can set, the design of a road dictates how people use it. Narrower streets with lots of obstructions force drivers to slow down. The transportation staff - authors of this report - seem to understand this already in other contexts: on many residential streets, city officials “calm traffic” by putting planter boxes and other obstacles in the road.

In the Netherlands, woonerfs are roads designed specifically to be shared by moving cars, parked cars, people on foot, and bicycles - crowded all together and negotiating for space at slow speeds. Drivers expect to see people wandering in the road, so they watch for them, and travel slow enough to avoid them. Most laneways in Toronto work the same way - allowing two-way traffic on a road wide enough for only one car at a time, with garage doors and backyard gates opening directly into the same small space, where people also wander. (Or play road hockey!)

In Kensington Market today, you can see roads that already function a lot like that - ones much busier than laneways. Parked cars block almost half the roadway, pedestrians wander to and fro haphazardly across and along the rest of it, cyclists peddle lazily in both directions on one-way streets, frisbees fly into the road from the park. Cars drive slowly, conscious of all the others in the way. The design and use tells the drivers to do that - you don’t need special signs or rules. And it works.

A recent Globe and Mailanalysis of all traffic fatalities since 2011 shows none inside the small streets of Kensington (although there was one out on busy Dundas St. nearby).

It may sound like hell to a lot of drivers, but that would also be the point. Small residential side streets are neighbourhood places; they are not meant as thoroughfares. People who live there, or those visiting, should be able to get to and from their own driveways or houses in cars, but those trying to get through the area to a faraway destination should use the main streets nearby instead. These roads are neighbourhood spaces, and they shouldn’t be reserved for the movement and storage of cars. They should be for the use of the neighbourhood.

As much as any speed bumps or other traffic-calming gear, allowing and even encouraging playing and walking on the road serves as a clear sign to any motorists that this is a cautionary zone. Installing infrastructure like hockey nets and basketball courts on the road would make it clear that not only should drivers slow down and be careful, but they might want to park and join a game.