THE timing for parents protesting about the A40 being sanctioned as a safe route for children to walk to school couldn’t have been better, if that is the right word.

An hour after they left the area there was a crash in which a woman driver had to be cut out of her car.

Without being overly-dramatic, if this doesn’t make Oxfordshire County Council revise its opinion about children going to school along this busy main route then nothing will.

The parents who protested there yesterday are complaining they will have to pay for a previously free school bus service, drive their youngsters to school themselves, or send them out alone to face the A40 after the council said it met national criteria as a ‘safe route’.

Those must be very relaxed criteria.

To anyone with a modicum of common sense, sending children out along that route appears to be madness.

The council officials who were happy to sign off the A40 as an officially-approved route to school should pause and think again.

Because that is what the parents are arguing against, and it’s hard not to see their point.

Our children are too precious to be left at the mercy of one of the county’s busiest roads.

It’s time to listen to the parents and have a rethink.