Keeping children safe is a top priority for parents.

In today’s story, one dad finds a way to keep the neighborhood children safe by preventing drivers from speeding down the road.

Let’s see what the dad decided to do…

Break our speed gates? Challenge accepted.

When I was a kid, my family lived on a private dead-end road with many families also raising school aged children.

The street was peaceful and safe for kids to play, but every now & then driving age teens and young adults would speed down our road, concerning the parents about their children’s safety.

The neighbors took safety into their own hands.

After some time the homeowners on the road agreed to put up two staggered barriers to act like speed gates, forcing motorists to reduce their speed as they weaved to entered & exited the road.

My dad is a frugal DIY kinda guy and volunteered to build the barricades himself and be reimbursed by the road association rather than buying pre-built, lower quality, barriers.

My dads barricades were constructed using hollow plastics beams with a 2D plastic picket fence attached to the front and a weighted bottom to prevent blowing over in windy conditions.

The DIY barricades worked fine…at first.

All was good in the hood until one day the light barricades were found mangled to the point of being a total loss.

No one on the street knew what happened, and the street asked my dad to rebuild his barricades, so he did.

A few weeks later, the barricades were again destroyed and it became clear that it wasn’t an accident, but likely caused by one of the speeding teens.

This time the dad built the barricades differently.

Well my dad being an engineer understood the assignment and doubled down, building two new picketed barricade, but this time reinforced every structural part with hardy 4×4 wooden beams hidden inside the plastic beams.

As predicted, a few days later we found one of the barricades tipped over with a few broken picket prongs, but all-in-all still intact.

We don’t know who it was, or how much damage they caused to their vehicle by ramming the reinforced gates, but that was the last time they ever tried destroying our barricades.

I’d really love to see what the car looked like that smashed into the barricades.

Hopefully nobody got hurt, but it definitely sounds like the driver learned a lesson.

Let’s see what Reddit thought of the story.

This reader had a suggestion…

Concrete might be too dangerous…

But sometimes concrete is the answer.

Another reader prefers 2x4s.

Good for the dad finding a way to keep the kids in his neighborhood safe that really seemed to work!

When will people learn?

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.