Dealing with moron neighbors

[Quicksilvre]

Man, this is life-tilting people worse than the thread about the guy who got arrested without ID.

Okay, I've been thinking about this on and off overnight, and the more I do, the more that I think that this needs a two-step solution:

1. Talk to the mom of the high-schooler and have her talk to her kids' friends. I agree 100% that they have to obey the stop sign, for no other reason than their own sake (they get used to running them and eventually get nailed by a cop).

2. Get the pre-schoolers out of the road. They may return when they are older, but corral 'em in the lawn for now.

A lot of people are resistant toward the idea of #2 because they don't want to assign blame to the little kids or the parents of the said kids. (Well, not the kids, at least.) So let me hit you up with an analogy:

Businessman Bob is petrified of flying. BB is also good at his job, so eventually BB's boss sends him cross-country to a seminar. The company allows BB to get there any way he wants. Assume it's not some place like Hawaii where you have to fly. Naturally, he drives. Halfway there, he gets off the highway, pulls into a drive-thru for dinner, and gets T-boned by a drunk pulling back onto the road.

I would assign the blame for this to the drunk, but there was a point where BB could have made a better decision. (I realize now that NT! and youtalkfunny are pretty much saying the same thing.) It is not at all unreasonable to expect the older kid's friends to obey the stop sign--in fact, the speed bump that someone suggested earlier sounds like a very good idea indeed. I'd call them in if I caught them running it. But consider that the average pre-schooler (in my experience) has the reaction time and reasoning ability of a halibut. Once they get maybe four or five years older, they will be much better at avoiding cars and keeping a lookout.

Just about everyone agrees this is a situation that is potentially dangerous, and something has to be done. I think it is important for both parties to do something. I don't want to get all CNN here ("Oh, these guys have a point, but OTOH so do these guys") but we've stumbled upon an incident where both you and your neighbor are close enough to being right to apparently convince yourselves that there's no middle ground. If you guys only moved the kids out or only yelled at the older kid's friends, I don't see how that would lead to much more than resentment.

Just my two cents.