Calling for safety on Walton Road, Wavendon Village centre
Updated July 2026 prior to public meeting
400 vehicles in an hour
The residents group have carefully audited the traffic going through the double-bend at peak school-run time. The figure has grown over the last three years from around 250 to 400. These figures have been regularly shared with the council (for which we have been thanked by the Council).
We are concerned that this will grow even further as more people move into the area. In the last two years there has been an increase in children walking and cycling to Glebe Farm school, as well as the steady traffic to Walton High. There are more general walkers passing through the village too. Again, as housing increases these numbers will increase. Unfortunately the Council’s consultation does not adequately comment on this let alone model the impact on safety.
In fact the push from residents to have safety considered started with a wider concern for the length of Walton Road in terms of numbers of vehicles, their speed and the aggressive nature of many of the drivers when quietly challenged on their speed. Residents spoke with the police as well as the council and as a consequence the Community Speed Watch was set up. However, the Council has quietly dropped their interest in the rest of Walton Road. Many of the issues still remain!
The public consultation by Highways – severe doubts about reliability of results
Highways conducted an online public consultation using the same mechanism as for other transport issues in the city. Almost 500 responses responses were returned. However, our residents group was alarmed at substantial shortcomings in this survey, we rapidly shared our concerns with Highways, City Councillors and Wavendon Parish Council. Some slight changes were made to the ongoing survey to address a few of the concerns, but by this time the damage had been done and the credibility of the survey largely undermined. Following a request from our residents group a paper version was created for certain very limited usage, but on inspection this had its own severe issues which undermined its value, plus it was overused by several organisation or individuals.
The headline is that only around 65% of the returns would be anything like the intended scope. This is because 19% returns were paper versions which asked just 1 of the 7 questions on the online version. 16% of the online versions used just partial postcodes instead of the intended full postcodes, thus hampering analysis.
In summary, the key shortcomings included:
- No coordination of launch – – there was no tie-up from Highways with ward councillors or Wavendon Parish Council which meant that there was no plan to handle the process in the community – it was just ‘pushed out into the wild’. This meant that informing the community was patchy and ad-hoc, plus there was no opportunity, for example, for having community-led briefing or discussion.
- Postcode mixups– only an incomplete postcode was requested, even with the suggested example of ‘MK17 8’ – this is a large area with 390 sectors. This would greatly reduce the ability to drill meaningfully into the survey responses. Note that Highways corrected this but this was after around 80 responses had been made (16%) – reducing the reliability of the survey.
- Unhelpful supporting data – only a two-year old report was included as guidance to readers. This was a confusing, technical report produced by traffic specialists intended for reading by highways specialists – not the general public. It was of very limited use in this regard.
- How big is the issue? – there was no attempt to depict the traffic volumes, or the growth over time (the years). Highways must have had lots of data available, but they did not choose to use any to help inform the reader.
- Misleading maps for closure/one-way options. Whilst maps were included, they showed a silly closure point on the apex of the bend which is not where a closure (or one-way restriction) would be, this may have dissuaded responders picking those options.
- Incomplete paper version of survey, at request by the residents group, Highways prepared a paper version of the survey, the intended use case was for a handful of local residents unable to respond online. Two issues arose from this. First, the paper version only asked one of the seven question (so just 15% coverage – i.e. 85% context missing) – not very useful, Second, rather than just being used by less than a dozen residents – somehow – and organisations were likely responsible for this – nearly 100 were completed (94#, 19%) further degrading the reliability of the survey.
- So, only around 65% of the survey returns would have been in the originally intended scope. There is no way that meaningful results can be reliably drawn from this.
Why increase safety?
Nobody would build such a road feature these days – it is literally hundreds of years old. Too narrow for modern vehicles to do other than inch past one another, no safe path for pedestrians. At peak time, buckling under an increasing amount of traffic. When residents first counted peak hour traffic (around 8am school days) in 2023 it was around 250 vehicles, subsequent counts over the next two years saw numbers rise to 400 in the peak hour. At the same time there are around 70 pedestrians and cyclists (a majority are children) using the route. In 2024 schoolchildren walking and cycling eastwards to Glebe Farm school added to the footfall.
It is the view of residents that in the coming years, as local housing increases, there will be more traffic, pedestrians and cyclists.
Residents want to be able to safely walk to the village facilities, such as the nursery, the pub and the church, safely walk their dog around the corner, and have confidence when their children walk into the village to use the recreation ground for example
In the next few years around 1200 people will move into the new Church Farm development, they will have only two ways to reach the facilities of Wavendon village bith by foot/cycle (or horse!) – a muddy bridleway and Walton Road via the double-bend – does that seem like reasonable grounds for MKCC to continue to ignore road safety?
What is the safe ceiling in the view of the Council – 400 – 500 – 600 vehicles in that key hour? The Council has not even attempted to answer this.
Public meetings & media
The next public meeting is 7:00pm, 29th July, at The Hub, Dankwort Way, Wavendon, where HIghways team will discuss the consultation.
See this account of the last public meeting on the topic – almost two years ago! Milton Keynes residents press for action on Walton Road due to road safety concerns in Wavendon – MKFM 106.3FM – Radio Made in Milton Keynes
See this BBC News article on the campaign – 9 months ago! Milton Keynes council to consult on safety of road after campaign – BBC News
City Council’s £4.7M award for walking and cycling
Did you know that in December 2025 MKCC secured £4.7M funding for walking and cycling? It will be used to enable safe active travel in the area. In the Council’s own words – to encourage more walking, wheeling and cycling.
We say – use some of this to improve the safety of pedestrians and cyclists passing through this part of Wavendon village.
Current status – public consultation now open [July 2026]
We are pleased that the new MKCC ‘Cabinet Member’ with responsibility for this aspect has actually visited the area guided by the Parish Council. We hope this is a step forward, as we had no visit from the previous CM.
The next step is that Highways are going to present their findings at a public meeting. We have no idea what they are going to say or present, and we have no idea how they are going to draw sensible conclusions from the very poorly executed consultation process. It promises to be an interesting event.
The meeting is at 7:00pm, July 29th, at The Hub (community hall), Dankworth Lane, Wavendon.
Currently the ‘active traffic warning signs’ either side of the bend, are not properly working. They sometimes ‘stick’ on one message, and they do not reliably detect people or vehicles leaving the driveways along the bend. Highways is aware of the issues and we believe there is the possibility of installing additional detection sensors to make them work. We await progress, but the upshot is, if you drive into the bend believing you have been reliably warned – you might get a shock just around the corner!
April-May 2026 – Public consultation launched
Highways launched an online consultation survey which was open to anyone to answer. By close there were nearly 500 responses. However the quality and method of the survey left a lot to be desired, and was in fact very poorly executed. The shortcomings have been pointed out, in detail, to Highways, City Councillors and Wavendon Parish Council by the residents’ group. Please see the summary of the shortcomings of the consultation nearer the top of this website here.
March 2026 – Still waiting
The long-awaited public consultation was launched by Milton Keynes City Council in mid march 2026. This has been requested for a considerable time. Back in July 2025 the Chair of Wavendon Parish Council delivered a petition signed by hundreds of village residents requesting that a long-promised consultation was held. This was alongside good exposure of the issue in the local media (live radio, tv and local paper) to ‘encourage’ the Council!
In late autumn 2025 MKCC implemented, as a temporary measure, an intelligent traffic sign system. The operation of this was not perfect and residents provided a lot of detail (mainly through testing logs and video) of the shortcomings. The Parish Council also complained. Although the system has been tweaked a couple of times it is still not fully functional because it does not protect the residents on the bend (when leaving their driveways), there are other issues too. Currently the council is investigating whether it can be upgraded with more sensors to improve its coverage. Whether this will happen or not is unknown because the signs were intended as a temporary measure.
Traffic videos
Take a look at these videos, OK they are not the most exciting vids – but they show the road as it often is at school-run time. All of these have been shared with the Council.
Guess the traffic volumes on Walton Road
Analysis of the logs of the S bend active traffic signs has shown that a staggering 42 thousand vehicles in a month traverse that double bend!
Source: Walton Road S bend active traffic sign logs for January 2026
How much speeding on Walton Road?
Analysis of the logs of the SIDs on St.Mary’s green reveals that 55% of westbound traffic (i.e. having turned in from Newport Road) is going over 20MPH.
Traffic volume has grown
The SIDs on St. Mary’s green are regularly monitored for stats, and recent analysis has shown how traffic volume has increased over the years. Here is the graph for 2022 to 2026. It shows the size of the peak hour traffic (8-9am). The green line is ‘combined’ i.e. east and west traffic, the rest is westbound ‘uphill’ and the blue is eastbound ‘downhill’. The big dips are the school holidays. The dotted lines are the trends.
A simple village road – the highway to nowhere!
These two drone shots say it all! The layout of the narrow road – no pavement and houses forming the absolute boundary at key points. The road is so narrow that cars have to edge past one another or stop to let one pass by.
Walton Road in Wavendon is a simple village road constructed long before the area was a great centre of population. It is narrow and has a notorious blind double-bend and of course such a road layout would never be designed or built in modern times. Over the past few years the explosion of new housing surrounding Wavendon, the increase in general east-west traffic and occasional problems on the main roads and major roundabouts have added to the pressure on Walton Road. With more housing still being built and planned for the area far into the future, the pressure of over-use will just grow and grow. At the same time increasing numbers of pedestrians, leisure walkers, cyclists and schoolchildren are using Walton Road – a trend that is to be encouraged and which is of course wholly compatible with general life in the rest of Milton Keynes (redways, leisure paths etc). However, the safety of these people is threatened on a daily basis by the increasing number (and behaviour) of cars, delivery vehicles and trucks. The pinch-point of all of this is of course the blind double-bend at the west end of Walton Road – a bend so notorious that major company John Lewis recently filmed a driver training video on it! Because Milton Keynes is so well structured and planned, it is well-known where and when major developments such as housing will take place and 3,000 houses are likely to appear ‘east of Wavendon’ as part of the Council’s expansion plan. This means the increase in pressure on Walton Road can be clearly foreseen and there is absolutely no reason why it cannot be strategically dealt with now.
Daily experiences
Many road users such as cyclists, Many road users such as cyclists, pedestrians, parents walking children to school and nursery have told us about their experiences with near misses or unsafe or inconsiderate or even dangerous behaviour from car and truck drivers (e-scooters too!) on Walton Road and especially the blind double-bend. In fact we have kept a log over the last year or so and shared this with the Council. Here are just a few of the comments.
All this adds up to a daily very unpleasant and hazardous experience for walkers and cyclists. No parent would let their young child walk around that corner by themselves and many schoolchildren simply run around it to get past quickly. The traffic, associated noise, fumes and vibration also make the immediate area less pleasant for village residents. It is our view that as more people move into the area there will be more of everything on the road – cycles, pedestrians, leisure and dog walkers, cars, delivery vans and trucks. This will make the issue even worse and more hazardous.
Initial ideas from the Council
Following the residents meeting in June 2024, Highways issued an ‘options’ document. Six potential options were given. These are assessed by the Council against their ability to be delivered and the impact they would make to the recognised problems.
By the time the actual public consultation was launched (March2026), the options had been tweaked to include a do nothing option and also the active traffic signs..
What next? – if you have a view please participate in the public consultation
MKCC promised to conduct a local public consultation exercise. We expected this stage to be around mid 2025 but we are still waiting for it as summer came along. This is why we presented a residents’ petition (over 200 signatories) to MKCC in July 2025 asking them to make it a priority. This was alongside good exposure in the local news (live radio, tv and local paper). The consultation is now live as of mid March 2026. Quite the wait!
This website is published by Trevor Hutton, Wavendon resident, on behalf of the residents road safety group. If you have any feedback on this website or the campaign calling for road safety please email on tjmailme@duck.com
Walton Road - road safety campaign 