Parking lots are often considered low-risk environments because people figure the speeds aren’t as crazy as on public roads. But the truth is that a lot of people including pedestrians and drivers are getting hurt in these parking lots every year. Especially in shopping centres, you’ve got a whole lot of variables that can lead to trouble.
The Typical Accident Scenario: Cars Reversing and Hitting Pedestrians
You’ve got this one common serious parking lot accident that happens when a driver reverses out of a space and collides with a pedestrian walking towards a shop. Now you might think it’s just the driver’s fault but and this is a pretty important thing – property design has a big role to play too. Australian safety data has shown that shopping centre car parks account for more than half of all reported cases of pedestrians getting injured in parking lots. And even crazily enough, in a lot of cases those injuries occurred during the day when you’d think visibility would be better. Data from a place called Victoria found that 76% of pedestrians got hurt in shopping centre car parks during daylight hours, which shows just how weak visibility can be. And in all of these cases, when lawyers like Stephen Young Lawyers are looking to see who’s to blame, they’re not just looking at what the driver did wrong, they’re also looking at whether the place was designed in a way that made accidents more likely to happen.
Why Property Owners May End Up Being Liable?
In Australia, businesses that have people coming into their premises have a duty to make sure they’re taking sensible steps to make sure people stay safe. But if those owners fail to do something about hazards they should know about – or could have reasonably discovered – then they may end up being liable if someone gets hurt. People who study commercial property safety have reported over and over again that we’re just not taking pedestrian safety seriously enough.
Design Blunders That Up The Risk of an Accident
As far as researchers are concerned, poor design in car parks has been a huge problem when it comes to pedestrian safety. One of the biggest issues is that people aren’t taking the time to clearly mark out pedestrian paths. When you’ve got pedestrians and cars mixed together in the same space, the risk of someone getting hurt goes way up. And other common design problems include corners that are blocked from view, landscaping or columns getting in the way of seeing other things – that sort of thing – not enough places for pedestrians to cross safely, and not enough measures to make drivers drive more slowly.
Maintenance Neglect and the Hazards That Can Develop
Not all parking lot injuries are the result of a car crash. A big number of claims actually come from slip-and-fall incidents brought about by unmaintained properties. In our commercial property safety audits, we’ve repeatedly come across moisture accumulation, oil slicks, pavement wear & tear, uneven pavement and pedestrian crossings that have not been looked after as common hazards. And the weird thing is these conditions usually just creep up on you over time, making them easy enough to spot through a regular walk around.
The Australian injury stats pretty much hammer home just how big a deal falls are in public health. Last year, for instance, we saw well over hundreds of thousands of hospitalisations resulting from falls alone, which all too frequently end up with the sufferer getting a nasty whack to the head, neck, hip, leg, shoulder or upper limb. Not all of those falls happen in car parks of course, but the numbers do show just what a big problem it is when hazards on your property are just left to fester.
The Financial Cost of Parking Lot Mishaps
Parking lot accidents hit businesses, insurers and injured individuals pretty hard in the wallet. The industry numbers are pretty stark – about AUD 3,000 on average for a single car park collision in insurance costs alone, not counting all the other costs like legal fees, medical treatment, lost work time and potential compensation payouts. And on top of that, it’s said that one in five insurance claims is linked to parking lot incidents, just to give you an idea of how often these things are happening.
