Councillor Gayle Cooke used this month's full council meeting to ask what Swindon Borough Council plans to do about HGVs parking illegally on grass verges, pavements and residential streets, often overnight, sometimes leaving oil stains and churned up grass behind them.
Councillor Nick Gardiner, cabinet member for highways and transport, replied that the council is taking a measured and evidence led approach, pointing to an Experimental Traffic Regulation Order being trialled in North Swindon until October. He confirmed there is no blanket ban on HGVs parking overnight in residential streets, that enforcement depends on the circumstances, and that residents on Wanborough Road near the White Hart roundabout, where lorries have reportedly turned a narrow stretch into an impromptu car park, should keep reporting the problem.
It is understood the evidence being gathered includes the verges themselves, several of which now resemble documentary evidence more than lawns. Officers are said to be monitoring the situation closely, in the sense that the situation is monitoring itself by simply continuing to happen outside people's front windows.
A council spokesperson confirmed that establishing who owns a given patch of land remains the crucial first step, a process that can take considerably longer than it takes an articulated lorry to flatten whatever was growing on it.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had started keeping a little notebook by the kettle, logging the arrival and departure times of a refrigerated lorry that parks two doors down most Tuesdays. 'Nine hours and forty minutes last week,' she said. 'Ron used to say if a man can't reverse his own vehicle into a proper depot by home time, he's got no business driving one in the first place. I've sent my notes to the council. I'm not one to gossip, but their bins go out a day early as well.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the debate had given him a new way of describing his firm's own delivery arrangements, in which the company van is required to park entirely within a marked bay that is nine inches too short for it. 'We call it the Westlea Interface Challenge,' he said. 'It's about understanding your footprint. Julie understands her footprint. I'm still working on mine.'
Meanwhile, the Experimental Traffic Regulation Order continues to gather data in North Swindon, and will itself expire in October, at which point the council is expected to measure the evidence it has evidence led its way towards.
The verge on Wanborough Road was unavailable for comment, largely because there is currently a lorry parked on it.