PARISH councillors in an East Yorkshire village are stepping up their campaign for a pedestrian crossing over a busy main road.

Shiptonthorpe Parish Council clerk Catherine Clark said the A1079 York-Hull road had always been an extremely busy road, with pedestrians sometimes waiting ten minutes or more to get across at peak times.

"A speed survey undertaken between April 12 and 18 in 2013showed that an average of 15,384 vehicles per day passed through our village," she said.

"Residents habitually struggle to get across to access the Spar shop, including newspapers and off-licence, at the BP filling station, Langlands Garden Centre, including the farm shop, restaurant and Edinburgh Woollen Mill, the Ve Raj, cemetery and bus stop."

But she claimed that since a new McDonalds restaurant opened on a roundabout in November 2013, the situation had become progressively worse.

"Many of the staff walk or cycle to work from Market Weighton and, combined with the visiting customers, the footfall has increased dramatically."

She said the village had been told that the numbers of people crossing did not justify a pedestrian crossing.

"More alarmingly though we are told that there have not been any fatalities involving pedestrians along this stretch of road. It is both incredulous and somewhat sinister to believe that someone has to be killed before we qualify for a crossing.

"Neighbouring villages such as Middleton on the Wolds and Canal Head, Pocklington, have been successful in obtaining either a zebra crossing or pedestrian refuge."

She said Shiptonthorpe was the only village on the route through to York without some sort of crossing. "This is ludicrous bearing in mind the amount of traffic passing through."

She added that East Riding of Yorkshire Council had been asked to carry out a traffic survey to give a true picture following the opening of McDonalds.

An East Riding spokesman said the authority's traffic and parking engineers would contact the parish council to discuss arrangements for a new survey to assess the level of pedestrians crossing the road in the village.