Local residents (from left) Bec Clark, Jocelyn Hawker, Ben Conboy, 9. Luke Pole, 14, Rachel Pole, 11, and Zahli Clark, 6, want the Wellington Street bridge over the Merri River in Merrivale made safer for pedestrians.
BEC Clark encourages children to walk to school as part of Merrivale Primary School’s Healthy Moves program.
However, the Merrivale Primary School teacher is concerned the children have to endanger their lives by walking on the road across the Wellington Street bridge, which has no pedestrian footpath, to get to the Healthy Moves meeting point on the other side.
She is among parents in the Wellington and Younger streets area calling on Warrnambool City Council to erect a walkway across the bridge to improve safety for their children.
Mrs Clark said up to 30 children gathered during summer at the Healthy Moves meeting point adjacent to the Warrnambool-Port Fairy rail trail, with many of them taking their chances with traffic on the bridge to get there.
Parents in the neighbourhood who want a footpath across the bridge raised the issue in the lead-up to next month’s Warrnambool City Council elections, hoping candidates will back their cause.
Jocelyn Hawker said dozens of children walked across the bridge to school or to catch a bus from a bus stop at the corner of Wellington Street and Merrivale Drive.
She said traffic flow across the bridge could be heavy, especially after school and when golfers were leaving the nearby Warrnambool Golf Club.
“Even with mothers with prams, some of the motorists do not slow down.”
A city council spokeswoman said the shared use of bridges by motorists and pedestrians was an ongoing subject of review.
She said the council had recently assessed the bridge’s structural condition but that assessment had not included pedestrian access.