Council to consult on safety of road after campaign

The road near Milton Keynes is considered so bad that John Lewis uses it for its driver safety training.

A council is to consult on plans to make a village road safer after campaigners described it as an "accident waiting to happen".

Dubbed a "classic rat run", Walton Road in the village of Wavendon, Milton Keynes, has a S-bend with "two blind spots" which locals fear is unsafe.

Milton Keynes City Council has been presented with a 230-strong petition calling for safety measures, and is considering options including a one-way system, speed humps - and closure.

A spokesperson confirmed the authority would "install a bespoke device to alert motorists if there are pedestrians detected" despite "no incidents being reported to them since records began in 1980".

The device is due to be installed next month and the authority said it will consult on options once "they have some weeks of safety data from the device".

Conservative councillor David Hopkins said he didn't want to see a fatality before the council took action, while campaigner Trevor Hutton felt the authority had been pushed into consulting

Trevor and Myra Hutton from the Walton Road Safety Group were among 20 residents who took the petition to a council meeting, but Mr Hutton said they were disappointed with the response.

He felt "the council still did not really get it" and that "they have been pushed into pledging to start the consultation".

Mrs Hutton said the S-bend had "two blind spots and if you are on them and a car comes whizzing round, you don't stand a chance".

She added the road would only be safer if a footpath was added.

Conservative councillor David Hopkins said it was a "classic rat run" situation where drivers were seeking alternatives to the city's grid road system.

He said a lot of incidents on the road were "scrapes and bumps" but did not want "to see a child or adult lose their life to prompt the council into doing something".

A drone shot showing how tight Walton Road is when two cars negotiate the S-bend in Wavendon village

Wavendon is a village on the south-east edge of Milton Keynes that was featured in the Domesday Book.

It is home to just a couple of hundred people, but is only two miles away from the Glebe Meadows development of almost 3,000 homes, and one of the largest distribution parks in the UK at Magna Park, where Amazon, John Lewis and Waitrose have warehouses.

According to the Walton Road Residents Road Safety Group, between five and seven cars per minute drove through the S-bend on the morning school run, equating to more than 400 cars per hour.

Parish council records suggest road safety has been a concern there for more than 30 years and the bend itself was considered so challenging that it was used by John Lewis for its driver training programme.

Nadege Pierron said her eldest daughter had nearly been crushed between two vans.

Nadege Pierron told the BBC she had to wheel her pram up on to people's driveways to avoid cars on the bend.

She said it was "scary for my daughter to walk as I always have to grab her" and added that her "eldest daughter uses the road to go walk to school and has nearly been crushed between two vans".

Cliff Riley has lived on the road for four years and described the increase in traffic as "significant".

He said when he tries to pull out onto the road he "personally gets abuse on a weekly basis from people flying around the corner".

Amy Bicknell added she had "been nearly run over on the bend a few times because cars come flying around bend all the time".

She wanted the road closed and said it could happen "if enough people say yes, because there are other routes around here" they could use instead.