Great stuff Emer, thanks for doing this. Sorry for not making the meeting last week. If you are stuck for marshals on any day I'd be happy to step in - 0833157029, no whatsapp though, will have to be 20th Century SMS tech.

Why are we starting a Cyclebus?

We are hoping to facilitate more people to experience the joys of cycling to school.
Already a large proportion of our students cycle to school with their parents. In a survey we conducted a few months ago, however, issues of safety and lack of infrastructure came out as the top 2 barriers to people deciding to cycle. We hope that the solidarity and visibility of a cyclebus will enable more people to feel safer cycling to school together and hope that as our numbers grow DCC will respond by installing safe cycling infrastructure on Grace Park Road, where our school is located. We also hope that by making cycling to school more visible and clearly fun, that we can encourage other members of the local community to try biking to school/work.

Of our survey's respondents, 56% already cycle to school and almost 70% said they would ideally like to get to school by bike. GPETNS is a developing school with students up to 3rd class currently. As the school grows and we have more children in senior classes, we'd like that the cyclebus would enable more children to cycle to school without the need for parents to accompany them.

Our school serves Drumcondra, Marino, East Wall, North Strand, Ballybough and the north city. It is a large catchment and pupils approach from several directions. Some of the roads on the approach are very busy and narrow. We hope to expand to serve a larger proportion of the school population eventually but this year we are planning to do a trial on one route and learn from that before expanding to other routes.

We now have a small team of marshalls and are currently mapping the route.

Next steps:
Finalise trial route and do risk assessment.

Identify and map stops.

Write up the timetable.

Meet with school liaison to go over the plan, answer questions, agree on procedures and groundrules for participants.

Finalise a code of conduct for participants and marshalls.

Recruit more marshalls.

Finalise marshall rota.

Set up email and twitter account.

Send out sign-up email and advertise the cycle bus through Parent Teacher Association meetings and email as well as printing leaflets and posters to stick up on school noticeboard (ChangeX funding will be used to print posters/leaflets).

Make a list of FAQ

Purchase lights, first aid kits, spare tubes, high viz with ChangeX funding.

Print accident report forms for marshalls.

Begin trial.

Invite local councillors along to meet us.

Look into possibility of running cycling training and maintenance classes.

Covid precautions
Planning meetings will be held on zoom.
Marshalls will wear face masks if they need to speak to or assist a child and need to be closer than 2m.
Marshalls will have hand sanitiser with them and will use before and after contact with shared equipment/children’s bikes/masking up.
Masks will be worn on school campus by all adults, as per school policy.