A road safety message from Sunshine 106.8.
It's twenty past eight on a weekday morning, and outside a primary school gate, dozens of children are arriving on foot, on bikes, and being dropped from cars in a hurry. It's one of the most predictable, and most avoidable, moments of risk on Irish roads every single day.
Children don't judge speed and distance the way adults do. A car that looks like it's plenty far away to an adult driver can look completely safe to cross in front of to a seven-year-old — because their sense of how fast a car is closing simply hasn't developed yet. That's not a flaw in the child. It's just how children's brains work, and it's exactly why the roads around schools need drivers to take on the extra care themselves.
The good news is that this is one of the easiest places to make a real difference. Slow down well before you reach a school, not just when you see the signage. Expect children to step out from between parked cars, because they will, and they won't always look first. And if you're dropping off yourself, take the extra thirty seconds to park properly rather than stopping on a footpath or a yellow box, because that forces other parents and children out onto the road to get around you.
None of this is about blaming parents, or children, or any one group. It's simply about recognising that for about twenty minutes, twice a day, term-time, the roads around a school carry a different kind of risk — and a driver who's aware of that, and adjusts for it, makes a real difference.
So this week, whether you've got children of your own or not, give yourself a little extra time on any road near a school. It costs you almost nothing. For a child stepping out from between two cars, it could cost everything. And that small adjustment, made consistently by every driver on that road, is what actually keeps a school run ordinary and uneventful, morning after morning, year after year.
A road safety message from Sunshine 106.8, funded by the news reporting scheme.