Windsor Road Residents Driven to Despair by Car Park Traffic
Say visitors to the Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre making life unbearable
2818 cars broke the speed limit when entering or leaving the car park in a week
June 26, 2023
A war is being fought on what would normally be a Ealing quiet street. It is waged between residents who are fed up with congestion, speeding cars, pedestrian crossings which they say are unsafe and a flow of cars that block the street on a daily basis.
The stream of motorists that clog Windsor Road in Ealing Broadway has spawned a group of neighbourhood activists who are aiming to tackle the dangerous conditions and disruption. The road would be just any other leafy green residential area if it wasn’t for the addition of an entrance/exit way to one of the area’s major shopping centre’s car parks at one end.
Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre sees thousands of customers passing through every day which is creating an uncomfortable environment for the people of Windsor Road. In 2021, an Ealing Council monitoring study found that in just seven days, 2818 cars broke the street’s 20mph speed limit when they in and out of the car park entrance.
The car park entrance is open until midnight and reopens at 6am, meaning that the residents of Windsor Road are subjected to speeding cars, engine noise and vehicle gridlock until late into the evening and early in the morning. For some living near the entrance, this constant activity has pushed them to breaking point with squads of angry residents armed with phone cameras often greeting rule breakers with their own loosely configured surveillance system.
While some are happy to keep going with such measures, Margaret McColl says the constant stress of hearing drivers bickering over right of way, the threat of being knocked down every time she has to cross the mouth of the car park to get to the high street and the constant speeding traffic which has been recorded going up to three times the speed limit, has taken its toll.
Standing in front of the problem car park entrance alongside other homegrown activists, she tells local democracy services, “I’m 100% leaving. I’m leaving in August. I need to get my daughter somewhere safer and quieter, for her and me. Cause here it’s just crazy. I really love it here but it’s too much to cope. I’ve been here for six years but I‘ve had enough. If it weren’t for all this carry on I might have stayed but it’s just too much and it’s getting worse.
“Speeding is really getting horrendous down this road, it’s getting bad and then they are getting into arguments.”
Residents feel they are being forced out by speeding motorists
Most of the arguments between motorists stem from the fact that the two-way car park gateway leads into single-lane Windsor Road, which is flanked on either side by parked cars.
Margaret says that the small area in front of the car park exit has become a place where cars idle because they don’t want to pay for a space. This in turn blocks even more traffic. “So it becomes a fighting issue, they are all fighting because they want to come up and they want to go down and everybody’s just fighting with each other. It’s crazy.
“The noises are horrendous, I can’t take them anymore because I have had brain surgery twice. I was on a Zimmer frame and a walking stick when I came out of intensive care until I learnt to walk again and I was nearly knocked down, it came inches from my legs and if he’d hit me I could have died.”
Windsor Road should be a quiet residential street
On top of her own medical issues, Margaret has an autistic 14-year-old daughter that she says requires constant supervision to avoid her falling victim to cars rushing up and down the road. The noises from conflicts on the road are a trigger for her making Margaret’s position untenable.
“I have to move, I can’t take it here, I have to move. I can’t take it anymore. I’m doing a house swap to go to Yorkshire because I can’t cope anymore. It’s just getting too much.”
The mother says that despite the best efforts of residents to have their voices heard the council hasn’t done anything proactive to help them since she moved to the area. “They [the council] don’t care, they don’t care. We are absolutely not being listened to. We have been fighting for change for a long time.”
Out of all the factors that have driven Margaret to take a house swap in Yorkshire, she says the issue of speeding cars is her biggest concern. “I’ve seen a car hitting the street at 70mph,” she said. Council figures show thousands of cars speeding with one car recorded going 50mph – more than double the speed limit.
Even though she is leaving Margaret says she wishes that speeding cameras would be installed on the road. “So if they [motorists] speed they know they are going to get caught, so they know they will get a fine because at the moment they know there is nothing that is going to stop them.”
The pressure of having the shopping centre entrance on their small road has been felt by the whole community. Another is Stefan, who suffers from mobility issues due to degenerative bone disease. He says he is scared to travel down his own road due to the dangers posed by traffic.
The state of the pavements on Windsor Road has forced people with disabilities to start using the road. “I cannot travel on my machine, because of my condition, on the pavements. Wheelchairs, we have seen people being pushed on the road which is hugely dangerous.”
Stefan Chojnacki, who uses a mobility scooter, says he is lucky compared to some people. “Even me, I’ve got a better chance [on the roads] than someone in a wheelchair who has no chance.”
Traffic is making roads 'hugely dangerous' for mobility scooter users
The resident says that he struggles to take his mother to church, which sits across the way and beyond the road traffic a barrier which cuts off Windsor Road from Ealing Broadway’s main high street. Stefan describes life on the street as like in “a madhouse”.
As if to exemplify this point, a battle erupts between the gathered group and an occupying idling car, which sat in the small turning space in front of the car park exit. Drawing their phones, almost by instinct after so many years of having to police the street, several snapped the licence plate.
This led to an argument between the residents and the driver who was unhappy they had been recorded. It was a dispute that lasted some time and was demonstrable of the deep frustration the residents of Windsor Road feel.
Some motorists have objected to being filmed by local residents
Chris Stuart, who has only lived on the road for a matter of months says he was almost hit because of the practically blind turn. The problem with the road became evident to him after the incident and he now campaigns alongside his fellow neighbours to protect the community.
“Walking along towards the entrance there is a blind spot. Because I didn’t see the vehicle coming around. I was looking up the ramp to see if any vehicles are coming down and at what speed. But at the same time, there are cars coming just as fast in the opposite direction.
“Thankfully he managed to stop, but I was saying to myself what if he couldn’t stop and what if I was disabled or something, that would have been a collision straight away. From then I noticed that the planning layout is ridiculous, it’s not right.”
Chris has joined forces with perhaps the most active of the local crusaders. Over the past three years, Mark Uddin has lobbied the council for change on the road.
It is a cause close to his heart, producing videos, images and information which he posts on his Twitter account 20means20. “The residents are doing the job of the council and the police and the shopping centre. We are being left to try and protect ourselves,” the exasperated resident said.
Mark recently caught a van speeding on video which he thinks was going about 40mph. “If you have a child running out into the road they’ve got no chance,” he said. The resident says his primary concern is for children’s safety citing the nearby Christ the Saviour Primary School’s proximity to speeding cars as one of his key motivations to seek change.
Mr Uddin says he has floated several ideas with the council in order to fix the issue of speeding cars. From putting in speeding cameras, something the council doesn’t have the power to do, to traffic calming measures such as giveaway islands or speed bumps, the resident has been pushing for some kind of action to be taken.
The one thing that Mr Uddin is not convinced will work is the council’s actual proposed plan. Its solution is to change the giveaway from the Grove, a road that intersects Windsor Road, to the street itself.
According to the council, this will help calm traffic, forcing them to slow down before they reach the junction and meaning that cars will not speed on the stretch of road before it, where he and his fellow neighbours live.
Mr Uddin says, “My house is a third of the way from the junction. The time it should take for a car at the correct speed at 20, would be 36 seconds for them to get from the entrance of the car park to the junction. It took the van [in the video] 9 seconds. So, he was doing 40-50mph, 40 mph at my house. My house is 240 metres away and they are trying to say, their great plan, ‘oh it’s going to slow cars down if you put a giveaway here’.”
He makes the point that cars have enough road to speed up and slow down in the bit of road between the car park entrance and the junction, meaning that most people who speed won’t be affected by the change.
“There is another major issue with their plan. Not all cars are travelling the length of the road. Many of the cars coming down the road are going to be turning off because the [intersecting] road [the Grove] leads to Ealing Common so they will have to slow down anyway. It only going to affect people who are travelling down the whole length of the road. So you’ve only got half a solution.”
The council have also beaten back suggestions that the car park itself could be closed after 6pm in order to prevent disruption and late night speeding from taking place. Residents say the move wouldn’t affect the shopping centre because there is a second, much larger entranceway on the other side of the car park. The council says it has no power over the owners of the shopping centre British Land which choose opening and closing times.
A spokesperson from British Land commented, “We continue to work closely with the council and are fully supportive of the traffic calming measures they are looking to implement for the Windsor Road exit.
“Over the past few years, we have implemented a number of measures including removing this entrance from our website and redirecting visitors to the main entrance, along with installing signage asking all customers to reduce their speed and be mindful of residents. We continue to look at further measures to ensure this destination is safe and welcoming for everyone.”
The council have said that fixing the one lane of Windsor Road would require removing on street parking which would be more of a hindrance than a help to residents. It also says that it regularly checks footpaths and cycleways to ensure they are up to scratch with the width of the footways are approximately 1.8m wide enough for prams, pushchairs and mobility scooters, even where narrowed in various locations by trees and other street furniture.
Councillor Deirdre Costigan, deputy leader and cabinet member for climate action said, “The council have no powers to enforce speeding as this is a criminal matter for the police. I recently wrote to the government asking for local councils’ to be given the powers to fine speeding cars but this was refused and we are legally prohibited from using council cameras or staff to do this.
“However, we know residents on Windsor Road are concerned about reckless motorists who think it’s ok to speed through a residential area and this is why we have worked with local people to design changes that should help discourage this unacceptable behaviour.
“Our comprehensive consultation with local residents found that a clear majority backed plans to slow down traffic coming into and out of Windsor Road by giving traffic on Grove Road the right of way. These resident-backed plans also include measures to reduce congestion around the entrance to the carpark and improve cycle safety. The plans have passed all safety tests and are expected to be put in place in July. We have also brought in a new School Street to tackle congestion at school drop-off times, underlining our commitment to delivering safer streets for Ealing residents of all ages.”
Rory Bennett - Local Democracy Reporter