The Path of Travel: Where Car-Park Falls Happen
- PotholeExpert
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Most car-park repair lists are written by walking the lot and noting the worst-looking defects. It feels thorough. It is also the wrong order, because the biggest hole is rarely where the falls happen. Falls happen where people have no choice but to walk — the line from the bays to the door, the trolley route, the kerb ramp by the accessible parks. Fix the worst-looking defect in a dead corner and you have spent money where no foot lands. Fix a small lip on the main walking line and you have removed a real risk.
The fix is to stop ranking by size and start ranking by exposure. Accessible-design people have a name for the line that matters: the path of travel. Borrow it, and your repair list reorders itself around where the risk actually is.
Map the desire lines
People do not walk the way a site plan says they should. They walk the shortest sensible line to where they are going — the desire line. In a car park those lines are easy to predict once you look for them:
Bay to entrance, across the lot, often diagonally between parked cars.
Drop-off zone to the door.
Accessible (mobility) parks to the entrance — this one is non-negotiable; it must be continuous and step-free, and under NZS 4121 it is meant to be an accessible route, not an afterthought.
Trolley bay to the lot and back.
The route from the back of the lot, used most when the place is full.
Stand at the entrance at a busy time and watch for five minutes. The lines draw themselves. Those are the surfaces that carry your real pedestrian load — and your real fall exposure.
The pinch points
Within those lines, certain spots concentrate the risk. Kerb ramps, where people are already negotiating a level change and a small defect tips the balance. Doorways and thresholds, where attention is on the door, not the ground. Trolley returns, where people walk backwards or sideways steering a heavy trolley. Ticket and payment machines, where everyone stops, queues and shuffles in the same square metre. A defect at a pinch point is worth more attention than the same defect on open ground, because more feet cross it and more of them are distracted.
Why a path-of-travel defect outranks a bigger one
This is the core of it. Risk is the hazard multiplied by how many people meet it. A 40mm pothole in a corner that nobody walks across is a low-risk defect — it might damage a tyre if a car finds it, but it is not a fall hazard, because no foot goes near it. A 12mm sunken patch on the line everyone takes from the accessible bays to the door is a high-risk defect, because the most fall-vulnerable people in your lot cross it every single visit.
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, the duty is to manage risk so far as is reasonably practicable. Putting your repair budget on the high-exposure line first is exactly that — and it is a far easier position to defend than "we fixed the biggest hole" if a fall on the walked line is ever assessed.
Small lips and wheeled traffic
Feet step over a small lip without registering it. Wheels do not. A pram castor, a wheelchair, a mobility scooter or a loaded trolley stops dead on a lip a walking adult would never notice, and the person behind it lurches or has to wrench it free. The most exposed users in your lot are the ones on wheels, and they are concentrated on exactly the lines that matter most — the accessible route, the trolley route, the pram-friendly path to the door. A defect that is trivial underfoot can be a genuine hazard under a castor. Judge lips on the path of travel by the wheel, not the foot.
Build the map from one walk-through
You can produce a prioritised repair map in a single inspection.
Sketch the lot — rough is fine.
Draw the desire lines you observed: bays, drop-off, accessible parks, trolley bay, all to the entrance.
Walk each line and mark every defect on it. These are tier one.
Mark the pinch points and flag any defect sitting in one. These jump the queue.
Note remaining defects off the lines. These are tier two — real, but lower exposure.
You now have a map ranked by risk, not by appearance.
Turn the map into a staged programme
The map does two jobs. It tells you what to fix first, and it lets you stage the spend. Tier one — the walked lines and pinch points — gets done now. Tier two goes into a planned programme over the following months as budget allows. Each car park repair on the path of travel gets the permanent treatment: saw-cut back to sound asphalt, relayed and compacted flush, joints sealed, so the walked line stays level and does not throw up the same lip next winter. A pothole on a pedestrian line is treated as a fall hazard first and a tyre hazard second — cut back and sealed, not feathered over. Pricing the map as a staged programme means you control the urgent risk straight away and spread the rest, rather than firefighting whatever fails next.
How a fix gets booked
Send through the photos from your walk — a wide shot showing the desire line plus close-ups of each defect on it — and we turn it into a fixed quote within 24 hours, ranked the way your map is ranked, with the first stage booked inside 48 once you accept. For a live lot we work behind cones with a spotter, or after-hours, so the path of travel stays usable. Every repair carries a 12-month workmanship warranty and a dated before/after photo report.
Walk your busiest line this week, photograph what is on it, and get a fixed quote. Fix where people must walk first. The corners can wait.
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