At about 10am on Thursday 17 June, an 18 ton truck owned by Holland Bazaar enters Woodside from Leopold Road in contravention of the weight restrictions which only permit vehicles up to 7.5 tons.
Within a few seconds, the vehicle is stuck.
There is only about 4m between parked cars in Woodside, despite cars being required to park on pavements, to the detriment of pedestrians. This truck is 2.44m wide and so blocks the available road space.
The driver manoeuvres his truck extremely close to parked cars on his offside. Fortunately several people were watching him. This is how our cars get damaged – something that happens all the time in Woodside.
The driver gets out and I ask him what does he think he is doing driving a vehicle this size in a residential street with a 7.5 ton weight restriction. He does not have good English, so its difficult to get a reply. He seems totally unaware of any weight restrictions.
I record the vehicle’s number plate.
Then an ambulance appears from behind the truck but, of course, is unable to pass. Fortunately it is not an emergency ambulance but that is not the point. This driver, who appears to have unlawfully entered our road, is now preventing an ambulance from undertaking its public service.
The ambulance, along with all other traffic now backed up behind it, is forced to reverse back up Woodside to Leopold Road. On previous occasions vehicles have made turns in the street, knocking over garden walls in the process.
The drivers’ mate got out to ‘help’, but spoke no English, and didn’t really pay attention to the danger of causing damage to parked cars.
Finally, the driver managed to reverse out of Woodside. By this time there was a substantial back-up of through-traffic rat-running through our road.
If the driver had kept to the distributor roads around our neighbourhood (Leopold Road, Church Road, High Street, Wimbledon Hill Road, Alexandra Road) this incident could not possibly have happened. Instead, the driver chose to cut through a Local Access Road, block all traffic, and delay an ambulance.
But the real problem is sat-navs, which send traffic through local streets when they should be on distributor roads. The only way to stop this behaviour is for there to be a ‘gate’ across the residential neighbourhood. We do not support blocking streets with planters. The answer is what we are proposing to Merton Council – a Traffic Congestion and Pollution Reduction scheme using ANPR cameras to enforce a block on traffic which has no business being here. This is the only effective defence against sat-navs.