Most of the incidents on this blog involve someone setting out to do harm. This one didn't. It was a crash on a busy road that ended up in someone's bedroom.
What was reported
According to ABC Radio Melbourne, just after 6am on Tuesday 21 July an SUV collided with another car on Bell Street near Cumberland Road in Pascoe Vale South. The SUV then crashed into a house and went through the wall of a bedroom where a couple were sleeping.
Debris landed on their bed. The ABC reported that the couple narrowly avoided serious injury. Speaking on the program, local councillor Oscar Yildiz said Bell Street needs to be made safer.
Arterial roads and the homes beside them
Bell Street is one of the main east-west routes across Melbourne's north: several lanes, heavy traffic for most of the day, and homes sitting close to the road along long stretches of it. That combination exists across Melbourne, on roads like Sydney Road, Springvale Road, Ballarat Road and dozens more.
When two vehicles collide on a road like that, the energy has to go somewhere. Often one car is pushed sideways or spun off the road. If the road is lined with homes set only a few metres back behind a low fence, those homes are what's in the way.
Many older houses along arterials were built when traffic was a fraction of what it is now. Front bedrooms facing the street were the norm. Nobody planned for a vehicle arriving through the wall.
Whose job is road safety?
The councillor's point goes to something many residents find confusing. Arterial roads in Victoria are generally managed by the state's Department of Transport and Planning, not the local council. Councils can advocate, and they manage local streets and footpaths, but changes to an arterial such as speed limits, barriers, signals and lane layouts are usually a state decision.
For residents, that means two separate conversations:
- The road itself. Report crashes and near misses, and raise them with your council and local state MP. Repeated reports about the same spot help build the case for change.
- Your own property. What sits between the road and your home, on your side of the boundary, is generally your decision.
What protects a house from a run-off vehicle
We haven't seen this property and aren't suggesting anything about it. In general, though, homes close to a busy road have a few options if they're worried about a vehicle leaving the road:
- Fixed steel bollards just inside the front boundary, positioned in front of the most exposed rooms. A car pushed off the road in a collision is often moving at speed and at an angle, so the bollards need deep footings and close enough spacing that a car can't pass between them.
- A removable bollard at the driveway, if the driveway is the open path from the road to the house. It lifts out when you need to drive in.
- Substantial, anchored landscape features, such as large rocks set into the ground or reinforced garden walls. They can help, but they need to be engineered to take a hit, not just look solid.
It's important to be realistic. No residential bollard is designed to stop a heavy vehicle at full arterial-road speed in every case, and a barrier can't eliminate every risk. What well-footed steel can do is stop or slow a car before it reaches the building, in the most common case of a car that has already lost some speed in a collision or by braking.
A note on choosing where to sleep
It's a less technical point, but worth making. If your home is on an arterial road and the bedrooms face it, it's reasonable to think about which rooms are used for sleeping, especially by children. That costs nothing and doesn't depend on anyone else.
The short version
The Pascoe Vale South couple were lucky. Their story is a reminder that for homes on busy roads, the risk isn't only someone setting out to cause harm. Sometimes it's two drivers, a bad moment, and a house that happens to be in the way. The road is the state's to fix. The few metres between the road and your bedroom are yours.