Increased traffic on a busy Alfredton thoroughfare is causing parents and principals to grow concerned about the safety of children walking and riding to school.
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Cuthberts Road is home to two schools, St Thomas More Catholic Primary School and Alfredton Primary School, with an estimated 700 families between them.
While the road has two manned school crossings, other sections of the road are just as busy but have no safe place for primary school children to cross.
Concerned parent and clinical psychologist Mandy, who asked for her surname to not be published, said the busy road was dangerous for children aged 12 or younger to navigate.
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"It's a very dangerous stretch of road for them to navigate with a lot of cars, which has been worsened by the Ballymanus extension and also Lucas, and the difficulty is there are more cars there because parents just aren't feeling secure with their kids navigating the school journey on their bikes or walking from home," she said.
"I don't understand why we're leaving vulnerable children, who don't have the capacity for consequential thinking, to be able to predict when a driver is going to stop and let them through and whether or not they should proceed across the road... It's just way too much to expect that of the children."
Mandy said the problem was exacerbated by more parents driving their children to school because they did not feel safe in letting them walk.
"A lot of us parents that live within blocks of the school drive our children to school because it's not safe for them to walk or ride bikes or scooters to get there," she said.
"Kids will be healthier, kids will be safer, which is the predominant message, kids need to be safe to go to school, but there'll be less cars. As parents, we will not need to drive our children safely to school because they can't get there safely by foot.
"We're not asking for school crossings, we're just asking for zebra stripes, it's not a big request."
St Thomas More Catholic Primary School principal Simon Duffy said while the school was fortunate to have one manned crossing nearby, the other is closer to Alfredton Primary School, it did not cater to students travelling in the other direction.
"For the students, we really encourage the kids to get their way to school on scooters or bikes or walk, which is fantastic when you have a large proportion of students, sometimes up to 20, 25 per cent of kids that do that," he said.
"That's really positive because there's less cars and less congestion, but the flip side of that is the safety for crossing the roads that are not patrolled.
"At the end of every day, we have eight staff that help dismiss all the kids and make sure they get into cars safely or cross the first road safely, but after that, they then travel on their own which creates the challenges in a busy pickup time."
A City of Ballarat statement said both schools benefited from the two supervised crossings and other pedestrian safety measures.
"Council is currently investigating a wide range of safety concerns relating to the area following a number of requests received from residents/parents recently," the statement said.
"Other pedestrian safety measures are a roundabout on the corner of Elaine Avenue and Cuthberts Road, which is deemed to be a traffic-calming device, with splitter islands in the middle, giving a safe refuge for pedestrians so they are only crossing one lane of traffic at a time."
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