But a spokesperson for the charity said the position articulated by its deputy chief operations officer at a council meeting recently is not its current policy. Francesco Pilla has lost track of how many times he has seen cars fly through red lights and over the pedestrian crossing at the junction near Harold’s Cross Educate Together National School, as he brings his children to and from the campus. “It’s something that happens every single morning,” he said by phone on Wednesday. Recently, he was frightened out of his skin, he said, when a van sped through the crossing, which had a green man, and narrowly missed his child on a scooter. “Sometimes, my little son, when he sees the green man, he flies straight on,” he says. Pilla speaks as both a concerned parent, and an academic. In his role as professor of smart and sustainable cities at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy in UCD, his work focuses on building better and safer communities, he said. Last year, Pilla organised a project that saw student’s scooters fitted with cameras, so they could document the chaotic traffic around the school and the nearby junction, as they navigated it. “We captured many vans, cars passing through the red light, skimming the kids passing through the red light with a full green man,” he says. Chaos at that junction of Harold’s Cross Road and Parkview Avenue is just one of several concerns members of the school’s parent staff association (PSA) have, they say. Concerns for the traffic around the campus, a former greyhound racing stadium, were flagged before the school welcomed its first tranche of students, junior infants, in 2019. At the time, it was a temporary set-up, with lessons run in makeshift classrooms. In March 2022, permission was granted