School takes action in bid to improve safety on Shrewsbury road
Teachers and civic leaders are trying to set the wheels in motion to improve safety at a notorious road outside schools where children have been knocked down by cars.
Longden Road in Shrewsbury, which runs past The Priory School and Meole Brace School, has been a major concern for parents and teachers for many years due to how busy it gets at the start and end of a school day.
Children have been hit by vehicles several times, including a couple of recent occasions when pupils were knocked off their bikes. Ambulances are regularly up and down the road at speed as they head from the nearby depot to emergency incidents. And there are also concerns over Roman Road and other surrounding roads regarding the safety for lots of children coming and going at the same time.
This week, The Priory School is holding an Active Travel Week to encourage pupils to walk, cycle or scoot to school and help get cars off the road. And a cross-party team of Shrewsbury councillors have joined forces to get behind the school as it aims to lobby for new safety measures in the long run.
Jeremy Tudor, head of maths at The Priory School, said: "We've had incidents with students, two quite recently, where they've been knocked off their bikes by cars.
"We've got a Catch 22 situation where some parents don't want their children walking or cycling to school because they feel its too dangerous, so they get in their car to take their child to school, which then adds to the problem.
"We're trying to get our own house in order in terms of getting more people walking and cycling, so we can then put a bit of pressure on to try and make the road safer.
"The roads around our school are clogged with traffic at the start and end of the school day and our hope is that initiatives like this will go some way to reducing that congestion as well as helping to improve air quality, reduce carbon consumption and make everybody’s lives safer, healthier and more pleasant. We also hope that it will show town planners that road space needs to be better prioritised to help facilitate these habit changes and that the health, safety and education of the children within our community needs to be given higher priority than it has done previously."
He added: "Our aim is simple, we want to encourage and support all our students to walk, cycle or scoot to and from school every day that week.
"Our hope is that this week will result in a number of our students continuing to travel to and from school via their preferred mode of active travel and therefore change their travel habits for the better. The long term positive impacts of developing more sustainable travel habits are huge for both them and the community our school serves. We obviously want our students leaving our school well qualified but we also want them to be good, happy and healthy people who make good choices that are selfless and sustainable."
Earlier this year, before being elected as Meole councillor, Bernie Bentick submitted a petition over safety concerns outside the school and elsewhere in the area.
He said: "I'm delighted to be supporting The Priory School's Active Travel Week, and I'm looking forward to Shropshire Council adopting my petition on the Meole traffic agenda.
"There has been an increase recently in children being injured on Longden Road. I want Longden Road to be safe for all its users."
Elsewhere in Shrewsbury, traffic has been banned from a road outside Coleham Primary School in the morning and afternoon for short windows when the children arrive and leave, and the move has been considered a success.
