Residents in the Cowley area of Oxford claim their lives are being plagued by drivers using their road as a rat-run.

While speed humps have been put in along Crescent Road, residents claim that motorists still speed up and down the road - and when large vehicles go over the humps, houses shake.

Audrey Smith, 86, said it was the speed vehicles drove along the road that worried her.

"These huge HGVs come hurtling down and it's terrible.

"It bothers me for the children and very often in the night, you hear one or two of these big heavy vans going down and it wakes you up.

"It definitely needs a lower speed limit and HGVs need to be stopped going down there. There's all this building going on round here and there will be more traffic. It can be quite dangerous."

Residents claim people use the road as a short-cut between Cowley Road and Hollow Way.

Stephen Cooper, who lives in the road and runs Honest Stationery in Cowley Road, said: "It always has been used as a rat-run to some extent.

"There are idiots who go up and down the road too fast but there's not much you can do to stop people like that."

Ben Mumby-Croft, 32, who has a five-week-old daughter called Lily, said it was a big problem.

He added: "You get lots of taxis bobbing up and down too fast. They should look at putting in higher speed bumps or making it a 20mph zone or putting in chicanes."

And Arthur Davis said: "We have got humps but they bump down on either side of them so it has made the problem much worse.

"We get a lot of disturbance from lorries bumping over it.

"We would like something done, ideally we would like the road gated to stop it being used as a rat-run.

"I would say 90 per cent of the people going along this road are using it as a rat-run."

Trevor Williams, chairman of Old Temple Cowley Residents' Association, said the issue came up repeatedly at meetings.

He said: "I think we need to sit down with planners and highways people."

Ian Hudspeth, Oxfordshire County Council cabinet member for transport implementation, said: "If there is a problem it needs to be sorted out. We would be more than happy to look at it because we want to dissuade people from rat-running."