End of the road for parking problems along Northamptonshire roads near village train station?

People living in Watson Road in Long Buckby have faced an almost daily battle with cars parked along their road from users of the nearby train station.

Jeannette Ryan is one of the residents who has been leading the calls for action. She said: “Before they started work on the new car park at the station, we might have the odd problem every so often, but you could live with it.

“Since January when the number of free spaces was reduced and they closed the layby to parked cars, it’s been terrible for us.

“A neighbour raised the problem back in January but got nowhere. This time Cllr Chris Millar has helped us.

“We’ve had cars parked from 6.30am through to late in the evening. They park across the pavement, block driveways, or they park on both sides of the road and you can’t drive down.

“It would stop emergency services, and we’re a farm access road as well.

“We’ve even had people come and park their cars in the road for two weeks while they’ve gone on holiday.

“The occasional day there won’t be any problems, but on average there’s eight to 10 station-users’ cars parked in the road every day. That might not sound like a lot, but we are a small road, and if you park on both sides the road isn’t wide enough for a car to drive between them.”

Mrs Ryan drew up a petition that was signed by every resident she has met over the recent weeks – all bar a couple of addresses.

She said: “I presented it to the parish council on Monday night.

“They’re looking at our road and Station Road which also has problems because the brow of the hill makes it dangerous for cars to park and not be seen, or for cars to have to pass parked cars.

“There were three options on the table – double yellow lines on both sides of the road which we didn’t think was best. For some reason you can’t just have them on one side of the road, and apparently there’s an allocation system which we’ve already used up this year.

“The second option was Residents’ permits, but that would cost residents and the parish too much. Plus it could take a long time to put in place.

“Or the third option of putting parking restrictions in place – parking would be for a maximum of two hours between 9am and 6pm Monday to Friday.

“The parish council backed that third option, and we’ve now got to wait to see if the county council’s highways department approves of it.

“Hopefully it can be put in place fairly quickly. Of course it’ll need patrolling so the district parking wardens will be calling in I hope.”