School Zone Anomalies

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12. Selection Criteria for Flashing Lights Ignored

When schools ask the RTA for flashing lights to be installed they are given a canned spiel about how schools are selected based on a range of criteria such as crash history and risk, traffic and pedestrian volumes, speed limits, road environment and visibility, etc.

The photo below shows the suburb of Bonnet Bay in southern Sydney. The indicated school on Tudar Rd only has 121 students. Tudar Rd only carries local traffic and virtually no heavy vehicles, yet the school has flashing lights.

The school certainly should have flashing lights, along with every other school in NSW, but how could it possibly have qualified for flashing lights ahead of numerous other schools that are on major roads carrying tens of thousands of light and heavy vehicles per day?


Small school at Bonnet Bay with lights


Another example is Lugarno Public School. It is also on a small street that only carries local traffic.


Small school at Lugarno with lights

For four years from 2006-2010 it had my lights installed. In 2010 the RTA replaced my lights with lights of its own. In doing so it completely ignored its own selection criteria.

Why did it not leave my perfectly adequate lights in place and install the lights at any of the hundreds of other schools that had no lights at all?

Once again the RTA simply ignored the safety of children at those schools in order to kill off the trial of my lights that it had resisted and tried to sabotage from day 1.