Trip Hazard or Liability? Car-Park Defect Risk Scale

You have a defect in your car park. The real question is not whether it looks bad. It is whether it is the kind of thing someone trips on, and whether it sits where people actually walk. A trip-and-fall on a car park you control is a public-liability and health-and-safety exposure, and the difference between a manageable risk and a claim often comes down to two numbers: how high the lip is, and how many feet cross it.

This is a triage tool, not a lecture on who is liable. Use it to decide what to make safe this week and what can wait for the quarter.

The lip heights people actually trip on

Trips happen at vertical level changes. Slope is forgiving; an abrupt step is not. Three rough thresholds are worth knowing.

• Under 5mm. Most people clear this without registering it. On its own, low risk.

• 5mm to 10mm. The grey zone. Fine for a confident adult in daylight, a genuine catch point for someone older, distracted, carrying boxes, or pushing a pram. This is where "minor" defects start producing real falls.

• Over 10mm, and especially past 20mm. A reliable toe-catcher. At 20mm-plus you are not asking whether someone will trip, only when and who.

Height is necessary but not sufficient, which brings us to the more important factor.

Why location beats size

A 25mm lip in a back corner that no one walks past is a lower live risk than a 7mm lip square on the path from the accessible bays to the front door. People follow desire lines: the shortest, most habitual route between car and entrance. Map those lines in your head, then rank defects by how close they sit to them.

A defect on a desire line, near a door, in a spot that is shaded or poorly lit at night, deserves to jump the queue regardless of how it measures. A bigger defect off everyone's path can hold until the next planned repair. Risk is height multiplied by traffic, weighted by lighting and the people using the space.

The green/amber/red triage table

Put every defect into one of three buckets.

| Band | Looks like | Action | Timeframe | |---|---|---|---| | Green | Under 5mm, hairline cracking, surface only, off the main path | Log it, photograph it, monitor at the next inspection | This quarter or next planned repair | | Amber | 5–10mm lip, sunken patch, ravelled edge near a walked route | Make safe if on a desire line, then book a permanent repair | Within a few weeks | | Red | Over 10–20mm lip, open pothole, level change on a main desire line or near a door or accessible bay | Make safe today (cone or cold-mix), book a saw-cut repair now | This week |

The point of the table is to convert "I should probably look at that" into a decision with a date attached. A dated decision is also exactly what a court or insurer wants to see if a claim ever lands.

Photographing a defect so you can rank it remotely

You do not need to be on site to triage if you photograph it properly. Three shots do the job.

1. A wide shot showing where the defect sits relative to doors, bays, and the path people walk.

2. A close shot with a scale reference laid beside the lip: a coin, a phone, or the toe of a shoe against the step. A 50c coin against a lip tells the height story instantly.

3. A low-angle shot along the surface so the vertical level change is visible against the light.

Those three photos let anyone, including us, rank the risk and price the fix without a site visit. That is the whole idea behind a fixed price from a photo.

What a temporary make-safe actually buys you

Make-safe measures are not the repair. They are the bridge between spotting a red defect and getting it permanently fixed.

• A cone or A-frame alerts people and shows you responded the moment you knew.

• Hazard taping marks the edge of a level change.

• A cold-mix patch removes the lip for now and stops the immediate trip risk.

Legally, a documented make-safe shows you acted promptly on a known hazard, which is the heart of doing what is reasonably practicable. What it does not do is fix the cause. Cold-mix in a wet Auckland winter is temporary by nature. Leaving a make-safe in place for months reads as neglect, not diligence. Treat it as a countdown to the real repair.

When to escalate to a same-week saw-cut

Escalate any red-band defect, anything on a desire line that has already produced a stumble, and any defect right at an accessible bay or kerb ramp where the user is least able to recover from a catch. For those, a temporary fill is a stopgap, not an answer.

Here is the process from there. You send a photo. We return a fixed quote within 24 hours and typically book the job within 48. We saw-cut back to sound asphalt and seal the joints, so the repair does not reopen at its edges next winter the way a smeared patch does. For live car parks we run cones and a spotter and can work after-hours around your trading. The job carries a 12-month workmanship warranty and ends with a dated before/after photo report you keep as a maintenance and liability record.

For the duty-of-care detail behind this scale, read our car park repair guide, and for the permanent method on open holes see pothole repair.

Found a red-band defect on a walked route? Photograph it now and get a fixed quote. You will have a price in 24 hours and a booking inside 48, with a dated record that you acted the day you knew.

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