Photo: Danny Fulgencio/Advocate Magazine
Alison Harris has lived in Lakewood her whole life. She went to Long and Woodrow, and she knows the area well.
While living here, Harris has seen people driving golf carts on main streets — like Gaston, Mockingbird and Abrams — about four times. And each time, it upsets her.
Aside from the occasion about 1.5 years ago, she hasn’t made her frustration public. At that point, she saw a family driving into Hillside Village Shopping Center late one afternoon, and the little girls weren’t wearing any pants. She couldn’t believe it and shared a message with her friends on Facebook.
Another time, she saw a man driving a golf cart near the Gaston-Garland-Grand intersection. The cart had three rows, and kids were sitting in each of the rows.
Harris says she gets it when people drive golf carts around the lake, for example, but not on major city streets. She says she thinks that because Lakewood is such a tight-knit neighborhood, residents might forget about all the traffic coming from people driving through. People who don’t live in the area might not know to look for golf carts driving on main roads.
Just recently, Harris saw a woman driving a golf cart down Gaston. A little girl, Harris estimates her age to be 3 or 4 years, was riding in the back, her hands covering her eyes. She wasn’t holing on to anything.
That was the sight that caused Harris to post in the Lakewood, Dallas Facebook Group, asking everyone to stop driving golf carts on the roads.
Her ex-husband was playing in a golf tournament in September. He was driving a golf cart on the path, using it the way it was intended to be used, and he hit something. The cart flipped over onto him, and now he is confined to a wheelchair.
“Please put safety first over a trend,” Harris wrote in the post. “I never want anyone to have to experience what we have had to experience.”
