THE parking layout around the outlet village is fundamentally flawed and needs to be re-examined, says a rankled resident.

Reg Halsall, 62, has lived in Rodbourne for the past five years and is dreading the onslaught of traffic which he says will inevitably result from Christmas shoppers arriving at McArthurGlen Designer Outlet.

The main problem, according to Reg, is the layout of the Outlet’s car park.

If the two lanes going into the Kemble Drive car park could both be made into entrances, and two new exit lanes could be built elsewhere, it would, says Reg, greatly improve the traffic flow.

He said: “Cars are filtered into an area where there is only one in and out lane, and it just doesn’t work.

“It can sometimes take an hour just to get out of Sainsbury’s, which is ridiculous.

“Even the multi-storey car park in Swindon town centre allows for two lanes of traffic going in.”

Reg’s comments come just a few days after Labour councillors wrote to their Conservative counterparts urging the council to act to prevent constant traffic jams around Rodbourne and Bridgemead over the Christmas period.

The letter, penned by Mannington and Western ward councillors Jim Robbins, Stephanie Exell and Kevin Small, read: “Rodbourne residents have recently had to endure the over-running of the Bruce St Bridges Roundabout works and they are not happy about the gridlock every weekend at the moment caused by people accessing the Outlet Village.

“To have the same issues every Saturday and Sunday is causing real problems for them.”

Outlining the extent of the problem, Reg added: “The traffic from the car park queues back to the Bruce Street Bridges roundabout, causing chaos in both directions on Great Western Way, which results in tailbacks past Swindon College to Corporation Street and past Bridgemead back to John Lewis.

“All three access routes are completely blocked, and we will face this multiple times between now and the New Year Sales quite simply because access to these car parks is so poorly designed.”

To illustrate his concerns, he took a screenshot of Google Maps over the weekend, showing a ring of red along Swindon's main arterial roads illustrating backed-up traffic.

Reg thought bosses at the Outlet would be “more than willing” to contribute towards the costs of improving access to their car parks.

McArthurGlen Designer Outlet were given more than 24 hours to respond to Reg's claims that their car park designs were flawed, but failed to do so.