A FATHER has taken drastic action in his campaign against “dangerous” parking by delivering a huge letter to Southend Council.

Joe Smith, 38, claims he has had five letters ignored by Southend Council after he complained about people parking on double yellow lines outside Thorpe Bay train station.

To try and ensure they would not ignore his latest, he bought a huge plank of wood and wrote the message “To head of parking Southend Council, you have ignored my last five letters, is this one big enough for you?” and handed it to the receptionist at the Civic Centre on Friday.

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Mr Smith, who lives on Barnstaple Road near the station entrance, said the evenings see multiple motorists pull up on the roundabout to drop off and collect train users with no regard for safety.

He said: “It happens during the evenings, between 5pm and 7.30pm. Lots of people come home from London and get collected. At the mini roundabout there’s taxis, bikes and others all stacking up on the side of the road waiting for people.

“It’s just ridiculous. I have a five-year-old daughter who sometimes I like to take out in the evenings but I end up feeling worried for her safety. It’s when you want to pop over the road for some fish and chips, it’s so manic.

“What we need is the council to come and visit the area and assess how we can improve it. There’s no parking meters there, so they can’t fine people.”

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The roundabout outside Thorpe Bay train station

Mr Smith said the problem has been almost constant in the 18 months that he’s lived in the road.

He added: “The thing that has wound me up is they’ve just ignored me. So I decided to find a way to give them a letter that they couldn’t ignore.

“We took it into the reception and I handed it to the man on duty, who said he wasn’t sure, and we just said ‘bye’ and walked off. I hope it can encourage them to actually do something.”

A Southend Council spokesman said: “We take highways safety very seriously and are concerned to hear of people stopping unsafely on a roundabout. We would like to thank this resident for alerting us to this issue. We will investigate and see if we can address this behaviour.”

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