'We shouldn't need to lose a life': Lawson residents say it's time to fix their dangerous road

Cathy Wood arrived home from work on Wednesday night this week to find a man on the road “literally covered in blood”.

“It must have just happened about five minutes before I got to the scene because there were about five other people there, too,” she says.

“I pulled into my driveway and ran to help.”

The man was on the edge of consciousness and mumbling incoherently, but to Cathy, there was no great mystery as to what had happened.

He had been preparing to open the driver’s door of his car – with his friend on the passenger side – when another car had veered around the corner on the wrong side of the road and “slammed him against his car, pushed him along the side of it … and flung him several metres to the side of the road, where he’d hit his head”.

The driver had stopped further up the road and appeared to be in shock, “just standing there and looking”.

Paramedics and police attended the scene, and the man was taken to hospital in an ambulance.

“The poor guy has facial fractures now and is lucky to be alive,” Cathy says.

Residents say it was going to happen sooner or later.

For years, the residents of the townhouse complex at 33 Wanderlight Avenue in Lawson have filed ‘Fix-My-Street’ reports with Access Canberra and written to local government representatives about what they describe as a major danger.

Wanderlight Avenue connects Ginninderra Drive with Stockman Avenue, near the northern edge of the University of Canberra (UC) campus.

The side of the road closest to the townhouses includes several indented parallel parking bays, but there’s no such luxury on the other side, where, especially during the uni semester, the length of the road fills up with cars parked kerbside, taking up almost the entire lane.

Cathy has lived there for seven years, and in that time, seen “heaps” of parked cars with dented bumpers or ripped-off wing mirrors from cars that have hit them on the way past.

“This was just the first time a person was there when that happened,” she says.

Another resident, James (last name omitted by request), says, “Everyone has to give way to oncoming traffic … like it’s a one-way bridge”.

“And it’s meant to be 50 km/h, but cars come pretty quick up there, and as a pedestrian, you have to take your life in your hands every time you cross the road,” he adds.

“There just shouldn’t be any parking there at all.”

“Basically, there are not enough spots for students to park affordably, and we’re the ones who have to deal with it, and now someone’s in hospital,” James says.

Cathy, who runs a specialist clinic on the Kingston Foreshore, says it’s unfortunate enough that in medicine, “we don’t have changes unless people die”.

“And we shouldn’t need to lose a life to get no parking.”

In August, the ACT Government gave some ground by changing that side of the road from unrestricted parking to two-hour parking only. But residents argue this still doesn’t address the issue. They want it either designated a no-parking zone or for indented parking spots to be built.

In response to Region, the ACT Government said a survey of Lawson residents in October 2023 came back with “majority support” for restricting that side of Wanderlight Avenue to two-hour parking.

“In response to ongoing concerns about parking capacity in Lawson, Transport Canberra and City Services recently consulted on several options to encourage parking turnover and provide parking availability for visitors, removalists, deliveries, tradespeople, etc,” a spokesperson said.

“The intention was to not implement any changes to parking unless there was majority support from residents.”

The changes in August “appeared to have addressed these concerns”.

The spokesperson noted that “having on-street parking helps to lower the speeds of vehicles travelling on a road”, but that “this section of Wanderlight Avenue has a down-hill slop which has the potential to encourage speeding”.