I was waiting to turn right at a red light onto a busy road with two lanes in each direction and a centre median. The light turned green and it looked clear (there were pedestrians approaching the crosswalk on the other side) so I started to turn. I had to slam on my brakes mid-turn because two boys, who looked maybe six years old, on kick scooters raced across my path from the opposite direction. When the parents finally caught up, I rolled down the window and said it was hard to see smaller kids coming so fast on scooters. They angrily said it was my responsibility to watch for pedestrians because they had the walk sign. I don’t disagree. But is there a rule on how old kids should be to cross the road without their parents – and should they ever be doing it on scooters? – Jay, St. Albert, Alta.
It’s up to parents to decide when their kids are ready to cross the road alone, but that may not be as soon as some parents think, traffic safety experts said.
“I’m not a helicopter dad by any stretch … but my children, who are eight and 10, hold my hand when we cross the road,” said Sean Shapiro, a traffic safety consultant and former Toronto police officer. He said he’s cautious because he sees too many drivers not paying attention to the rules.
There’s no law saying how old kids need to be to cross the street without an adult. But kids should be old enough to remember, understand and apply the rules of the road, said Lewis Smith, manager of national projects with the Canada Safety Council (CSC), an Ottawa-based not-for-profit.
“There’s a generally accepted range of somewhere around 10 years old,” Smith said in an e-mail. “Individual children can vary here. Maturity, sense of direction and general [awareness of their surroundings] are all factors that need to be taken into consideration, too.”
Valerie Smith, the director of road safety programs with Parachute, a Toronto-based not-for-profit that focuses on injury prevention, said there’s “no fast rule on age” but many kids tend to ready somewhere between the ages of nine and 11.
That’s when they have the brain development to understand where it’s safe to cross, be able to assess the speed of oncoming cars and decide when there’s a big enough gap in traffic to cross safely, she said.
“Even I have a hard time doing that as a pedestrian,” Parachute’s Smith said.
Parents should teach kids to stop at the curb, look both ways and then wait until either there’s no oncoming traffic or all the cars have stopped for them. Kids should be crossing at a corner or marked crosswalk and not in the middle of the street, she said.
“I tell my [teenaged] daughter to make eye contact with every driver before she crosses the road,” she said. “Some would say that’s over the top, but I know that if she makes eye contact, then the driver has seen her.”
Scooters unpredictable
While all drivers should be paying attention to the road and be ready to stop in case kids dart out, kids can be hard for drivers to see, Shapiro said.
“One of the benefits of being an adult is that you’re tall,” he said. “Little children tend to get hit when they run across the street because nobody can see them.”
Even for kids crossing with parents, a driver may see the parent but not expect kids to dart ahead.
“You see a parent walking at a normal pace and that is what you’re focused on,” he said.
If you’re crossing the street, make sure that drivers can predict what you’ll do next – that means not running across or darting across on a bike, kick scooter or anything else with wheels, Shapiro said.
“Drivers anticipate that you’ll move at a pace that pedestrians would normally walk at,” he said.
While some provinces, including Ontario, say that you must get off your bike before crossing the street, the law generally doesn’t apply to kick scooters, skateboards or other wheeled devices.
In Alberta, for example, the provincial rules don’t specifically ban riding a bike – or any other device – in a crosswalk.
While some Alberta cities, including Edmonton and Calgary, have bylaws banning riding bikes in crosswalks, St. Albert, a suburb of Edmonton, doesn’t.
However a pedestrian is crossing a crosswalk, avoiding them is, legally, “100 per cent the driver’s responsibility,” Alberta RCMP said.
“We recommend children and adults dismount from things like scooters before crossing because it is safer. However, there is no legal responsibility to do so,” Corporal Troy Savinkoff, an Alberta RCMP spokesman, said in an e-mail. “We ask that drivers take that extra second or two to ensure that the intersection is clear before proceeding.”
But pedestrians of all ages should understand that drivers may not always see them in time to stop, Parachute’s Smith said.
“At the end of the day, pedestrians – especially children crossing alone or ahead of their parents – need to be vigilant because we just don’t know what the driver is going to do,” she said. “I’m not saying the driver of the vehicle doesn’t have to be 10 times more careful than the pedestrian, but the pedestrian still has a responsibility.”
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