A COUNCIL has been criticised for not preparing a safe route for children to travel to two new schools in Ruthin.

Llyr Gruffydd, AM for North Wales, has expressed his ‘disappointment’ that Denbighshire county council has ‘belatedly’ decided to ‘come up with a plan’ for road safety near Ysgol Pen Barras and Rhos Street School more than five months after their opening.

At a town council public meeting at Ruthin Town Hall on Monday, September 24, parents voiced their concerns over the safety of the Link Road and Denbigh Road leading to the schools, which opened at a new shared location on Glasdir Estate, on the outskirts of Ruthin in April.

Since the openening, the council has been carrying out a road safety trial period to understand the travel patterns of parents and pupils.

However, it was revealed at the public meeting that an accident had taken place during the trial period on the Link Road involving a pupil who was knocked off their bike in June.

Parents were shown plans by the Denbighshire highways department to improve the roads' safety, but the timing of the plans has been criticised by Ruthin-based AM Llyr Gruffydd.

He said: “These schools have been in the planning for a couple of years. Parents have been raising concerns about the safety of their children for some time before the schools were built. Yet those concerns have been ignored.

“Now, several months after opening the school, the council has belatedly asked its road safety officer to come up with an improvement plan.

“It’s disappointing that, despite representations from parents going back more than a year, the council has been very late in making improvements to ensure the safety of the children.

“This should have happened in the planning stages.”

The plans to mitigate some of the dangers of the road include increasing the visibility of crossing routes and widening traffic islands, but the AM said the council "needs to listen to parents and act on their concerns."

AM Gruffydd continued: “There are other areas that also need attention, such as Denbigh Road and past Glasdir, to reduce speeding.

“I would suggest that the lead member walk with the children to the school along the path from Erw Goch and see how fraught it is for himself with HGVs passing at 30 miles an hour.”