After a crash, parents in Clontarf push for a safer crossing from school to afterschool

On Thursday about 2pm children started pouring out the doors of the Howth Road National School, into the schoolyard. 

And then out the gates from the primary school to where their parents were waiting, on the footpath along Clontarf Road, near the railway bridge.  

Soon, the crowd of parents and children started to jumble west along the footpath towards the nearest pedestrian crossing on Clontarf Road.

Trailing along behind Florence Magee was her six-year-old daughter Juliet Magee and her friend Ruby Chesney. 

They were showing off colourful drawings of Easter eggs. “Look, a chick!” says Juliet, swinging the top of her egg open to reveal a drawing of a little yellow bird.

When they got to the crossing, Ruby went up and pressed the button, while Juliet hung back a few steps with her mum. 

Florence, Juliet, Ruby and loads of other parents and kids from the school stand on this spot each day just after 2pm, waiting to cross to West Wood Club on the other side of the road – where their afterschool programme is.

It was here, on 14 March, that a driver slammed into this temporary traffic signal pole, knocking it back onto the spot where parents and children normally wait to cross, Florence Magee and other parents said last week. 

“The fact that nobody was there that day waiting to cross is a minor miracle,” Magee said Thursday. “We got delayed by a bit of dog patting” and were about 20 metres away, she says. 

The incident was not just down to a bad driver, Magee and other parents at the school say, but also the current layout of the junction of Clontarf Road and Howth Road. 

“We always thought it would create an accident and it did,” she said.

Although Dublin City Council has not responded to queries sent 20 March about the safety of the junction, and whether there are any plans to improve it, there was a crew of people in high-vis vests on site Thursday talking to the school principal about it.

The crossing

When the light changes, Magee gathers Juliet and Ruby close to her and starts to cross the under-construction bike lane, five lanes of vehicle traffic, and another bike lane to get to the footpath on the other side. 

The green man lasts for just six seconds – not nearly enough time to get a distracted child’s attention and get them moving, or convince a reluctant child to begin walking, should those situations arise. 

The orange man, though, lasts much longer: 26 seconds. When the trio reach the other side, they walk through the West Wood car park and up to the door of the afterschool. 

As they walk, the girls brag about how they know the secret code to get in and negotiate about which of them will get to punch it into the keypad at the afterschool to open the door. In the end, Ruby gets to do it. 

It’s a long crossing to make each day, says Howth Road National School principal Martha Woolmington, a little later, standing near the school gate on Clontarf Road. 

“It’s seven ways they have to check that someone’s not breaking a red light and it’s safe to cross,” Woolmington says. “It’s a lot for anyone, let alone kids after school.”

The school is too small to offer an afterschool programme on-site, though, says Woolmington. “We’re far too small, and we don’t have the catering facilities.”

So for now, at least, they have to keep making the crossing each day. The question, then, is how to make it safer, she says. 

Dangers

The school has just about 100 students, says Lindsay O’Connell, who has three kids who go there. 

The crossing “has been a huge concern for so long for the parents”, she says on Thursday, standing with her girls at the school gate. 

Carlos Bruen, another school parent, said by email that the 14 March incident has “mobilised us as parents, as this perceived risk for quite a while has now materialised as a crash at a critical junction and at a time when our children are there”. 

“This was a case of seconds,” Bruen said. “It is a miracle that no injuries were sustained in this accident.”

There are a few things about the Clontarf Road/Howth Road junction that make it more dangerous, says Magee, on Thursday, standing on the north-east corner of it. 

At the moment, as part of the construction works, Howth Road is narrowed from two lanes to one just before it reaches Clontarf Road. That means only half as many vehicles can get through each green light before it changes, Magee says. 

So drivers get frustrated and will go right through the light for a few seconds even after it changes to red – as is common across the city. This happens at each light change as she stands there talking about it on Thursday. 

If they are turning left onto Clontarf Road, these drivers cannot see if anyone is in the crossing the children use, until after their car has rounded the corner and they are in the junction and nearly on top of the pedestrian crossing. 

And vice versa: people in the pedestrian crossing cannot see well around the corner, through the construction fences, around a stone wall that surrounds the church there, to anticipate cars that might be coming through a red light. 

Also, until after the crash, there was no indication on the Clontarf Road side of the school that it is there and people should be careful, Magee said. On Thursday, there was a mobile electronic sign on wheels that had been parked up warning of the school.

Clontarf Road is a major route, where the limit is 50kph, the parents say. And the traffic light with the button Ruby pressed to get a green man is – because of the construction – a temporary one with a concrete block as a base, sitting on the roadway itself.

Finally, there’s no school traffic warden holding a sign to remind the cars and bicycles in the seven lanes the children have to cross to stop and let them by, Magee says.  

Parents’ asks

So the parents at Howth Road National School have a few asks to make the crossing safer for their children each day, says O’Connell. 

They’d like some kind of permanent warning signs or lights or pencil bollards or street markings – anything really – to warn drivers and cyclists there’s a school that opens up onto Clontarf Road here and they should be careful, she says. 

They’d like it if the speed limit could be reduced through this stretch of Clontarf Road, maybe down to 30kph, she says. They’d like a school traffic warden there each day to help the parents and kids with the crossing, she says. 

And they’d like some kind of ramps or markings or both on the under-construction cycle path that runs past the school gates – when it’s completed and opened for use.  

The council did not reply to a query sent last Wednesday on whether it had any plans to change the junction to make it safer. 

But O’Connell said Thursday when she arrived at the school to pick up her kids that on the way she’d just run into a person who’d said they were inspecting the junction to see if it warranted a school crossing warden.

And Woolmington said the group of people in high-vis vests she was talking to Thursday at the intersection were there to figure out ways to make the junction safer. 

They’re thinking about putting in warning lights to signal to drivers that there’s a school there, and they too mentioned an inspection to see if a crossing warden would be appropriate, she said. 

“Everyone’s checking everything,” she said.