A question of perception

RESIDENTS have scored a decisive victory over hordes of anti-social youths playing football in their street. Householders at Middle Boy, in Abridge, got so fed up with damage by stray footballs to garden pot plants and parked cars that they complained to councillors and police. Councillor Ron Gunning raised the issue at the last parish council meeting and councillors lobbied the district council to tackle the problem. Now a sign, forbidding football in the street has been erected and the games have stopped.

Or to put it another way:

Streets were once places where children played. Then both the carriageway and often the pavement were taken over by hordes of anti-social car owners with no off street parking, and the roads became places where hordes of anti-social drivers belt along at criminally dangerous speeds, spewing toxic wastes from their exhausts, creating noise pollution, and terrorising cyclists and pedestrians.

For some local context on this subject, there’s this.